[munificent]

I hate this attitude that treats corporations as having zero responsibility beyond what they are legally mandated to do. Yes, it is an observable fact that corporatism and market economics incentivize corporations to behave that way. But it is an unjustified leap to turn that into a moral claim that it is ethically acceptable for that to be true.

People are incentivized to commit package theft in the US today. The odds of being caught and prosecuted are very slim, and the upside is you get free stuff. As an economic action, it is very market efficient: low barrier of entry, large number of "sellers", few cabals or controls over prices. There definitely isn't perfect information on products, but given that the cost is near-zero, that doesn't matter much. As a business, "package theft" is a great one to get into, and the market highly rewards you for doing so.

However, we correctly consider people who do so as despicable shitwads who rightfully earn our scorn and condemnation. We publicly shame them, and certainly don't want to hang out with them and count them as friends.

We should do the same with businesses that do morally harmful acts, regardless of whether the act is technically illegal or incentivized by market forces. It is certainly the business's fault when they do a shitty thing. They have fully agency in the choice of whether or not do so.

[dragonwriter]

Corporations aren't natural persons and have no ethics. They are abstract creations of law and the only legitimate expectations of corporations as corporations are their responses to structural incentives including enforced legal obligations.

We can talk about the ethics of the actions of corporate decision-makers, but only while keeping in mind that structural incentives mean that decision-makers who sacrifice the narrow interests of corporate investors for ethical reasons beyond the constraints forcibly externally imposed on corporations are likely to, over time, be replaced by those who do not.

If you want corporations to act consistently with some view of ethics, you aren't going to do it sustainably by moral persuasion directed at decision-makers, but only by shifting the structural incentives.

[mattmanser]

You're confusing their LEGAL status with their MORAL obligations.

Just because there's an easy way for a collective of people to absolve their moral responsibilities by getting a little certificate that says "We're a corporation" doesn't make it right. It's just a legal accident, a mummers farce, and you defending it is morally reprehensible too.

Worse still, it didn't used to be this way till some prat of an economist (probably American) starting saying so, and a bunch of people smelling easy money piled on. Companies used to care about their image, now their "care" about their shareholders (but actually their contractual bonuses and severance packages).

[dragonwriter]

> You're confusing their LEGAL status with their MORAL obligations.

No, I'm saying that considering corporations to be subjects of morality at all is pointless, and that one ought to consider what they want corporations to do to acheive moral ends, and then work to establish structures to at least incentivize that, if not actually constrain them to it.

> Just because there's an easy way for a collective of people to absolve their moral responsibilities by getting a little certificate that says "We're a corporation" doesn't make it right.

I think you start from a false premise here; that it is of no value to analyze corporations as if they were moral actors does not in any way absolve any natural persons for the immorality of any actions they undertake in or around a corporate structure.

It just removes the ability to pass blame for immorality off on to an abstraction, and focuses it on the people responsible for the abstraction (which, for creatures of law, in addition to any others includes those responsible for the law, either as lawmakers or as electors thereof.)

[mattmanser]

Why is it pointless? Corporations are simply a collective of people, working together.

There was a story on here today about the dilemma a roman consul faced because the laws were contradictory. It was fine to murder for revenge, in fact Roman law didn't get involved in revenge or murders really, but patricide was viewed as an absolute wrong, a no-no. The woman had murder her Mum in revenge as the Mum had killed her grand-children to spite her Daughter. It was a real dilemma, revenge is fine, and it was a good reason for revenge, but parricide is an absolute wrong.

Does that sound normal?

Of course not TO US.

I think that in the future, today's corporate law will be viewed just as asinine and bizarre. Corporations poisoning people by flooding chemicals into rivers or releasing gasses or toxins, murdering people with product defects they decided not recall or destroying society's common goods, but all the people involved were let free rather than incarcerated for 20 years as accessories to murder? Thousands of people colluding to murder people with cigarettes when they knew how lethal they were? Fine. Because they were "employees" and the "person" doing it was a legal figment called a corporation?

A bunch of black people in America get incarcerated for simply being friends/near the murderer, but a bunch of white people who all spent years or even decades covering up systematic mass-murder get to walk away? Man, when you actually think about it it's mind-blowing. White collar crime is so easy to get away with.

It's a convenient fabrication that makes sense only when you're inside the system.

I'm a pragmatist, it's not going to change, it's the way it is, but otoh you simply can't see the wood for the trees. You think, somehow, it's right.

[dragonwriter]

> Why is it pointless? Corporations are simply a collective of people, working together.

They really are not, and the entire corporate form is structured and governed by law differently than partnerships to make them not like that.

I mean, unless you count the chartering government, it's constituents, and all the investors as part of the group, as well as all the managers and other employees. But its completely useless to talk about the collectively morality of the aggregate of such a heterogenous group of individual actors with different knowledge and constraints with regard to the actions of the corporations. It makes sense to talk about, in any given value framework, the desirability of corporate action, and the morality of any of the individual actors.

> Corporations poisoning people by flooding chemicals into rivers or releasing gasses or toxins, murdering people with product defects they decided not recall or destroying society's common goods, but all the people involved were let free rather than incarcerated for 20 years as accessories to murder?

That's the consequence of viewing the corporation as an independent moral actor, since that allows viewing the corporation as the responsible party.

> I'm a pragmatist, it's not going to change

I'm a pragmatist, and recognize that it needs to change, and that change starts with not viewing corporations as moral agents, but as tools.

[munificent]

> No, I'm saying that considering corporations to be subjects of morality at all is pointless

Is it pointless to consider political parties to be subjects of morality? Is it meaningless to say "The Nazi Party is bad."? If so, what is meaningfully different between a political party, a corporation, or any other kind of organized collective activity?

> It just removes the ability to pass blame for immorality off on to an abstraction, and focuses it on the people responsible for the abstraction (which, for creatures of law, in addition to any others includes those responsible for the law, either as lawmakers or as electors thereof.)

I think I get what you're saying. We should focus on the people, not the group, because the people can be punished. But I think that's an ineffective mindset.

The entire reason individuals organize into groups is because they can do more as a group than they could have accomplished as individuals.

If we don't allow our moral code to also operate at the group level, then it will always be at a disadvantage compared to the people whose organized behavior has moral outcomes with strong economies of scale.

We should treat individuals and groups as moral actors. We should be willing to say, "this corporation as an emergent behavior of its otherwise moral individuals did a bad thing, so should thus be dissolved."

[dragonwriter]

> Is it pointless to consider political parties to be subjects of morality?

Yes, though perhaps somewhat less so (I'll address the “perhaps somewhat less so” part later.) What I said further down a sibling thread about corporations applies exactly to political parties as well: “It makes sense to talk about, in any given value framework, the desirability of corporate action, and the morality of any of the individual actors.”

> Is it meaningless to say "The Nazi Party is bad."?

No, if by “is bad” you mean “tends to produce bad outcomes”. In the general sense this is distinct from though correlated with the morality of the persons comprising the party.

> The entire reason individuals organize into groups is because they can do more as a group than they could have accomplished as individuals.

Yes, groups are tools of individuals, not moral actors. It is no more sensible to talk about their morality than it is to talk about the morality of other tools. You can talk about the morality of the people who are using the tool. In some types of groups, many actions of the group are a fairly direct reflection of a moral consensus of the members, and in the case of those actions of those groups one can refer to the morality of the group as a useful shorthand for the morality of the shared position of the membership that is behind the action. This is true of political parties generally in a simplified, idealized view, and frequently enough in a realistic view that it's not always completely pointless to talk about the morality of political parties.

It's almost never true of the complex set of stakeholders with different structural roles that are behind business corporations, especially large and/or broadly held corporations. For any given action of a particular corporation, there might be some group of it's constituents whose morality it fairly directly reflects, but even for actions for which this is the case it won't necessarily be the same group (or even a similarly situated group) from action to action.