Do corporations have any moral responsibility?

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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?

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oh yeah, but their version of morality sucks!

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tinygiraffe wrote:

oh yeah, but their version of morality sucks!

Can you expand on this remark? What is their version? Why does this version "suck"? Is their version a matter of law?

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the one time i don't post a thesis for a reply and you ask me to elaborate?

nevermind, go corporate morality, yay...

theists answer to god, agnostics and atheists answer to themselves, but they answer to someone. sociopaths don't, i guess that's a problem.

corporations answer only to investors, and the less greedy investors get bought out by the more greedy investors sooner or later. corporations are designed to be rather sociopathic, i don't mean intentionally. any chance for morality to enter the equation is eventually abstracted into commas and zeroes. they don't call it "cold, hard" cash for nothing, although it isn't the fault of the cash.

if greed = morality, then corporations are about as moral as you can get. if i need to elaborate on that, i'll instead leave the task to someone more interested in posting about it. i thought it was a funny question actually- and i don't really mind you asking me to elaborate, but i thought that pretty much said it.

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It seems to me that when a corporation does its business only within a nation the citizens will keep them from egregious foul behavior but when they become international all bets are off. Globalization sets corporations free like they never have been.

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frankenstein's monster... why did they have to make him 6-7 feet tall?

osama was a corporate investement, the u.s. trained him to do our bidding, he turns around and the rest is history. we do the same thing with corporations every day, except that we make them much bigger than al-qaeda with far more resources and political power here and everywhere. the issue is plain old-fashioned balance of power. the amount of it is "none."

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First you ought to define your idea of "moral responsibility" because morals and ethics are different and ethics is what people do between each other and morality is what happens between you and your god.

But switching "moral responsibility" with "ethical responsibility," yes, "corporations" are chartered by the State. The purpose of the State is to secure the welfare of the citizens by its actions. Chartering an organization is an action of the State so a priori corporations are supposed to benefit the general welfare. In this way they are held as entities responsible to society no different than living citizens. After all corporations are treated as "persons" under the law.

The Devil is in the details, of regulating the corporation to act in a responsible way. The tools are there. It is manning government with the people who would use the tools of government to insist corporations act responsibly.

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it doesn't mean very much that corporations are chartered by the state, if the corporations become powerful enough to pay the state to do its bidding.

for instance, the state says things enter the public domain after x decades, the corporation says "no no no, add two decades to that." the state complies. corporations can write their own rules, charters are more like birth certificates than any type of control at that point. and i hate to say the theft of countless years of material from the public is on the smaller side of what corporations accomplish in broad daylight and the public eye. then they pay people to put a spin on it on corporate owned news, however they see fit.

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Morality as rules differs from ethics in that the former are conventional absolute and fixed and the latter creative, fluid, situational and contingent. One might say that morals are frozen ethics (i.e., ethical decisions that have been codified as law).

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tinygiraffe wrote:

it doesn't mean very much that corporations are chartered by the state, if the corporations become powerful enough to pay the state to do its bidding.

for instance, the state says things enter the public domain after x decades, the corporation says "no no no, add two decades to that." the state complies. corporations can write their own rules, charters are more like birth certificates than any type of control at that point. and i hate to say the theft of countless years of material from the public is on the smaller side of what corporations accomplish in broad daylight and the public eye. then they pay people to put a spin on it on corporate owned news, however they see fit.

the question posed was

Quote:

Do corporations have any moral responsibility?

your problem is how the political process is manipulated and has nothing to do with the question.

they are not the same thing nor have you connected them in an adequate manner, or proposed any solution, anticdotes don't count.

what do you propose? double-secret probation for companies who aren't morally responsible?

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Property is not the sacred right. When a rich man becomes poor it is a misfortune, it is not a moral evil. When a poor man becomes destitute, it is a moral evil, teeming with consequences and injurious to society and morality.
Lord Acton

Organizations endure, however, in proportion to the breadth of the morality by which they are governed. Thus the endurance of organization depends upon the quality of leadership; and that quality derives from the breadth of the morality upon which it rests.
Chester Irving Barnard

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Politics is what determines how far corporations can go. Milton Friedman espoused small government, deregulation, minimum taxes, privatization which has led to the current Bush Administration.

Small Government means less oversight of safety, fraud, health issues such as bridges collapsing; cities being flooded like New Orleans; Enron, Worldcom, Hollinger International, Tyco and Arthur Anderson being looted by executives; drugs and medicines sold that kill patients; no Universal Healthcare; etc.

Deregulations mean allowing dangerous processes and procedures to proceed. Regulations that were written after some horrendous accident in which there were huge damage, lots of injuries and many lives were lost, would now be written off the books. Some of the regulations that were obsolete should have been removed.

Minimum taxes means there will be a widening gulf between the rich and the poor. Government services will be cut and the government gets into a war overseas the deficit will balloon.

Privatization means government property which all the citizens own will be sold off at bargain prices to favored corporations like the the Texas Stadium sold off to Texas Rangers that made Darth war_dodger rich by $15 million.

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kuvasz wrote:

the question posed was

Quote:
Do corporations have any moral responsibility?

your problem is how the political process is manipulated and has nothing to do with the question.

they are not the same thing nor have you connected them in an adequate manner, or proposed any solution, anticdotes don't count.

what do you propose? double-secret probation for companies who aren't morally responsible?

but it wasn't intended as a response to the question. it was a response to your remark:

you wrote:

Chartering an organization is an action of the State so a priori corporations are supposed to benefit the general welfare. In this way they are held as entities responsible to society no different than living citizens.

i simply didn't realize that in order to respond to a theoretical problem with your remark that i would have to find a solution to it as well. i'll let you know if i think of one, but it would probably go something like:

stop letting them grow larger than our own government.

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kuvasz.

You correct in your analysis of of the "individual status" of corporations under "the law". The question is then whether "the law" embodies "moral responsibility". I am not familiar with the philosophical nuances of that debate but it seems to me that the existence of legislation per se implies the paucity of concepts like "moral imperatives" at the level of individuals. In that respect your comments on difficulty of implementation in corporations may reflect similar problems regarding the concept of "the committee nature of self" (with which we two are familiar).

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the law in no way whatsoever has anything to do with morals. the law is about keeping society functioning.

morals and law do not have anything in common.

morals say if the woman you pulled over has 6 kids and is in debt and barely keeps her bills paid you shouldnt write her a ticket for a broken taillight.

the law does.

And now the grand finale. corporations exist to make money.

morals and money do not mix either, it is ALWAYS more profitable to steal or scam someone than offer a genuine quality product or service.

should corporations have morals? yes, do they? no.

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tinygiraffe wrote:

kuvasz wrote:
the question posed was

Quote:
Do corporations have any moral responsibility?

your problem is how the political process is manipulated and has nothing to do with the question.

they are not the same thing nor have you connected them in an adequate manner, or proposed any solution, anticdotes don't count.

what do you propose? double-secret probation for companies who aren't morally responsible?

but it wasn't intended as a response to the question. it was a response to your remark:

you wrote:
Chartering an organization is an action of the State so a priori corporations are supposed to benefit the general welfare. In this way they are held as entities responsible to society no different than living citizens.

i simply didn't realize that in order to respond to a theoretical problem with your remark that i would have to find a solution to it as well. i'll let you know if i think of one, but it would probably go something like:

stop letting them grow larger than our own government.

Oh dear got your panties all bunched up on you, didn't you?

I met your realization of corporations becoming so big and acting like social kudzu with fact that they do so of their own nature and it is the requirement of the citizen to prune them back.

You might as well shake your fist like King Canute at the North Sea at corporate growth into the social sector, viz., it is the nature of things.

The issue at hand from your perspective is that...

Quote:

stop letting them (corporations) grow larger than our own government.

I think I can speak for most, if not all of us that... "Doh, we know that already, so you are belaboring the point," so your comments enter the linguistic realm of tautology not discussion. Move on to the solution; "how to reduce them or their negative affects on human beings" and the way to do so to understand the terrain of the intellectual discussion on what function they serve and their social utility.

Fresco saw clearly that in my attempt to solve a problem you have to look at its first cause instead of relying on the feel-good pop psychology that insists that mere recognition of a problem presents its solution.

Btw, yeap, Fresco the debate does center on the moral imperatives, thus if humans had them there would be no demands for social laws themselves, but humans are individuals with innate rights and those rights and properties are antecedent to the restrictive nature of the State and the human being is not "created" by the consent of the State. But here, the case of incorporation of state sanctioned social entities lies the point of my earlier remark, viz., that which flows from the actions of the State has imbedded in it the purpose of the State.

The same cannot be said of the relationship of the human being to society, viz., that the human being has imbedded within himself the purpose of the State.

Its opposite is actually true, that the State has imbedded within it the purpose of the human being.

So the relationship a human being has with the State is comparable to that the State has with a corporation, and it is up to the citizen not to have the tail wag the dog in either case.

The paradox of corporations acting without moral responsibility could be summed up as John Donne might have offered; how can the Devil rebel against God if the Devil has within himself "God-stuff?"

Only if God is not paying attention?

Our friend should be railing not against the corporations but the members of that Divine Democracy who are inattentive and lets them do it.

But surely, Fresco, and with a smile, few of us could ever throw Gurdjieff into the mixture of Marx and Adam Smith, and not miss a step.

Nicely done.

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kuvasz,

On recent threads I have been advocating the concept of "the social self" following Dennett's proposal that "self consciousness" coincides with the acquisition of (social) language. In this respect there may be an argument that psyche of "individuals" embody the purposes of "society" (if not the "state"). The biological analogy is that the behaviour of blood cells can only be fully"understood" by reference to total body maintenance. Of course such a view would relegate "morality" to an aspect of "social functionality".

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fresco wrote:

kuvasz,

On recent threads I have been advocating the concept of "the social self" following Dennett's proposal that "self consciousness" coincides with the acquisition of (social) language.

The recognition of the boundaries of "Self" versus the "Other,"or simply cognition itself.. our old "What is the Original Idea."

In this respect there may be an argument that psyche of "individuals" embody the purposes of "society" (if not the "state"). The biological analogy is that the behaviour of blood cells can only be fully"understood" by reference to total body maintenance. Of course such a view would relegate "morality" to an aspect of "social functionality".

This is simply the paradox of language and its inadequecy as a substitute for pure thought........there is no way around the language of equating acquisition of (social) language without defining it as cognition

Otherwise, we are left with the Mobius strip of an argument "are we social because we are human or are we human because we are social"

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We like to think that laws reflect morals--or at least that they should not contradict social morals--but the reality is that to a large, and unfortunate, extent laws reflect power*. Let me qualify that: when the law favors the interests of an elite minority because it enjoys the greatest power, that is "bad". When the law favors the interests of the majority because it enjoys the greatest power, that is "good." The latter is the goal of democracies; the former the goal of oligarchies.

* According to Nietzsche morals are also shaped by power.