Do corporations have any moral responsibility?

Do corporations have any moral responsibility?

The Chinese police state is a great investment says US hedge funds.

The US economy may be on decline but US hedge funds investors considers the Chinese police state to be a good investment for our global economy.

“China’s Hot Stock: Orwell Inc” is the headlines over an article in the NYTimes published September 19, 2007.

“In a stunning report in the New York Times last week, correspondent Keith Bradsher documented the rise of China’s electronic surveillance industry, whose leading companies have incorporated themselves in the United States and obtained the lion’s share of their capital from U.S. hedge funds. Though ostensibly private, these companies are a for-profit adjunct of the Chinese government.”

Do US corporations have any moral responsibility to the citizens of the US?

Do US corporations have any moral responsibility to the people living on this planet?

no.

-Imp

Wrong. Corporations are social maintanence centers, they exist only because society allows them to. The Big corporations are basically nationless states, that are almost complete dictatorships.

There are two ways to rule people:

-By resource access control (economically)
-By force (usually called government)

Maybe you need to study the history of market capitalism and business, we had an unregulated freemarket with corporations, etc, before and it was a nightmare.

As I understand it corporations are a legal entity and legally they have no such responsibility. Do you think that citizens of all nations should demand that the legal characterization of corporations should be changed?

WTF Chuck? In your years of being an “autodidact” you’ve collected a lot of dots; but it seems you’ve never learned to connect them. Corporations do not have a morality that is separate from the morality of the “people living on this planet”. Anyone who thinks differently also believes the pollution produced in China as they race to catch up to our conspicuous consumption, will not be in the air we breath. Put on your glasses Chuck. Perhaps then you can see corporations are not run by aliens. Your question should be “Do we each have a moral responsibility to each other?”, as in, “Are we our brother’s keeper?” Imp’s answer will still be “no” but at least he will be responding to the right question.

Yes.

It’s called buisness ethics. In a philosophical argument, one would distinguish between ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’, but I’m too lazy to get technical.

Through the govt., corporation’s should be regulated to protect the rights of individual members of a given society; hence, our society has laws. (A corporation, oddly enough, is a legal individual within American society. Which means, it can be sued and held legally acountable. Unfortunatly, it is a “special” individual, and the law gets very tricky.)

Take the automobile industry as an example. Are automaker’s ethically obligated to build safer cars? Yes. Any entity taking part in society is bound by the social contract. It’s that simple.

If one wants higher ethical responsibility in the private sector, then individual’s must come together in the public sector to legisitlate and enforce the collective will. Some would call that, Democracy.

On the other hand, if the majority of the people in a society share Imp’s opinion, then he is correct. Thankfully, he is in the minority.

[size=59](edit: spelling)[/size]

Doug

You ask questions on your OP and I ask questions on mine.

undergroundman

I agree. I am thankful for the minority status also.

Sadly Chuck, you are not in the “minority”. Most of humanity has the same view as you and the underground man.

Yes
Yes
and
Yes.

Owning a fund that has assets in China could be a very moral thing to do. Same with Iran.

Think of it like a wealthy man buying rental property in the poor part of town. True, he may end up renting to some thugs, but he may also hold his tenants to standards. That in turn could help the area in time.

Some better cases would be those involved in WW2. Names like IBM, GM, BMW, GE, and so on.

In those cases it is like the wealthy man renting the house so it can be used for a brothel. The question here is about ‘use’ of the product.

I’m confused. What view do you think is in the minority?

Majority view: Corporations have, or have not depending on your point of view, a moral responsibility “to the people on this planet”.

Minority view: We, the people, are the Corporations

So why did you write “sadly”?

As and add on-

Lets suppose Google has opened a new China office and has 5000 or so workers. The Chinese gov comes to them and says we want to monitor all traffic so our citizens may not access CNN or FOX or anything critical of us, because we know them knowing could cause us problems.

Google might say “F-you, we don’t play that way. Plus we like making fun of O’reilly on his blog- you should try it.”

But the Chinese gov doesn’t laugh. They get stern and tell google do as we say or your office space here will be rezoned for fast food.

Now what? Take a stand and be moral or don’t rock the boat and keep people employed.

My personal take is business leaders have opted to not rock the boat. I assume their reasoning is they are not a Government, but exist to create wealth. When in rome, don’t try to speak German.

However the trend of late has been people starting companies not only to create wealth but also to promote change. Perhaps this is a better model, we will see…

The only moral obligation a corporation has is to not fuck up society for it’s personal interests and not cheat the people who work for them.

Corporations are entities created on paper (or now on computers) that have quasi-human legal status. They don’t have ‘morals’, although the people who run them may or may not have morals. The legal entitity known as a corporation or a business has one goal, which is survival. If it doesn’t sell its product for a price greater than it cost to make that product (and that product can be either a gas-guzzling Hummer or building low-cost housing for poor people, btw), then it will cease to exist. In a competitive environment, survival for the corporation means to remain financially viable. When necessary, financial viability means destroying competitors.

So on the one side, you have the corporations which are producing goods/services and jobs for people, but which are also capable of monopolizing and destroying jobs and producing crappy or unsafe goods. That’s why we need the other side: independent agents (government) to impose (well, it used to impose) anti-trust laws and product safety and fair labor practices. Corporations cannot self-regulate in a complex economy; to understand what’s good for the economy is only necessary for them in terms of their own survival. It’s unrealistic to expect them to choose a ‘greater’ good, when that could interfere with their bottom line. So for them to self-regulate would inevitably and inherently conflict with their survival.

I am not sure why I am saddened by the consequence of the majority view that humanity is divided into us and them, specifically, corporations against “the people”, corporations against corporations, religions against religions, people against people,… me against you. For a reason that is beyond me, conflict makes me sad. Perhaps I am overly sensitive to the biological fact that we cannot survive alone and at the end of the conflict there will be only one.

Well, and this is just a guess, perhaps you’re saddened because you hold an unrealistic view of the purpose of corporations and how a capitalistic economy works. You perhaps conceive of business as choosing between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in its workings; I would offer that this is anthropomorphizing it. Certainly those who run corporations are faced with trying to find balance, but to expect them to have alliegiance to ‘society’s good’ over their allegiance to ‘profit’ is to put them in an untenable position. That’s why we have to regulate them as a society, to essentially force them to behave in a manner that goes against their best interests (which are also our best interests in terms of jobs and variety), occasionally doling out punishment like fines or jail when they cross the line. That way, we (meaning society or its representative governing entities as enforcers) leave them free to pursue those interests, but we watch and control when they infringe upon society’s interests.

I don’t find this as something to be saddened by, it’s reality. However, I’m outraged when government fails in its role as watchdog. But that’s our fault as citizens, ultimately. If we allow the oversight agencies to be run by people whose allegiance is conflicted, the fox watching the henhouse, then we deserve what we get. You get the government you deserve, as they say. Although it’s hard to imagine how it could be possible to deserve one as bad as what we have now…

Just pointing out that regulated companies seem to have the worst track records for what we call ‘morality’.

Regulation can be a greater evil. Regulation is certainly Win/lose.

This view is as myopic as the original post.