Companies can't really be expected to police themselves.
I remember reading that oil companies were aware of global warming in internal literature even back in the 80's
I remember reading that oil companies were aware of global warming in internal literature even back in the 80's
Not so long as we don't punish them for failure to. We need a corporate death penalty for an organization that, say, knowingly conspires to destroy the planet's habitability. Then the bean counters might calculate the risk of doing so as unacceptable. We're so ready and willing to punish individuals for harm they do to other individuals, but if you get together in a group then suddenly you can plot the downfall of civilization and get a light fine and carry on.
Why not the actual death penalty? Or put another way, why not sanctions on the individuals these entities are made up of? It strikes me that qualified immunity for police/government officials and the protections of hiding behind incorporation serve the same purpose - little to no individual accountability when these entities do wrong. Piercing the corporate veil and pursuing a loss of qualified immunity are both difficult - in some cases, often impossible - to accomplish in court, thus incentivizing bad behavior for individuals with those protections.
Maybe a reform of those ideas or protocols would be useful and address the tension you highlight between how we treat "individuals" vs individuals acting in the name of particular entities.
As an aside, both protections have interesting nuances and commonalities. I believe they also highlight another tension (on the flip-side of punishment) between the ability of regular people to hold individuals at these entities accountable in civil suits vs the government maintaining a monopoly on going after individuals. This monopoly can easily lead to corruption (obvious in the qualified immunity case, less obvious but still blatant in the corporate case, where these entities and their officers give politicians and prosecutors millions and millions of dollars).
As George Carlin said, it's a big club. And you ain't in it.
It strikes me that if you also appreciate this distinction, then your remedy to corporations that have too much power is to give the government even more power?
Personally, I would like to see more creative solutions that weaken both government and corporations and empower individuals to hold either accountable. I think the current gap between individuals and the other two is too severe, I'm not sure how making the government even more powerful actually helps the individual. Do you want the current American government to be more powerful? Would your answer have been different last year?
Of course, our current government has a lot of problems, but that doesn't mean I don't want the government to have power. I just want it to have power to do what the population actually wants it to do (or, perhaps, what the population will actually be happiest with).
What would be your proposed mechanism for empowering individuals? How would such a mechanism not ultimately rely on the individual leveraging some larger external power structure (like a government)? I think if we want to empower all individuals roughly equally (i.e., not in proportion to their wealth or the like), then what we wind up with is something I'd call a government. Definitely not the one we have, but government nonetheless.
I think however when we acknowledge that men are not angels, and that therefore government itself is dangerous merely as a centralization of power, then no, you cannot simply say well government is supposed to be of a different type of power than corporations. Because again, in reality this is often not the case. This is why several of the American founders and many of those who fought in that revolution also became anti federalists or argued against constitutional ratification.
I don't know what the answer is, but I don't think there has ever been a situation where it is accurate to say the population as a whole controls the government. In practice it doesn't work that way, and is about as useful as saying well the market controls corporations. I think something more like anti federalism could use a renaissance... the government should be weak in more cases. Individuals should be empowered. A government power to hold a corporation accountable could then rest on simply its strict duty to enforce a civil remedy. That is of a different nature than the government deciding on its own who (and more importantly - who not) to prosecute.
But I appreciate your push back, there are indeed no easy answers.
Corporal punishment exists for individuals too.
Perhaps it should be on the table for executives (etc) whose companies knowingly caused the deaths or other horrific outcomes for many, many people?
You can't do any of this without a strong, independent, judiciary, strongly resistant to corruption. Making that happen is harder than it sounds.
And it still won't help, because the perps are sociopaths and they can't process consequences. So it's not a deterrent.
The only effective way to deal with this is to bar certain personality types from positions of power.
You might think that sounds outrageous, but we effectively have that today, only in reverse. People with strong moral codes are actively excluded from senior management.
It's a covert farming process that excludes those who would use corporate power constructively rather than abusing it for short-term gain.
Doctors selling you fentanyl so you can be sedated for surgery is a good thing.
Drug Dealers selling you fentanyl so you can get high is a bad thing
Of course they care about you getting high, that's their sales pitch
Even if it is as simple as "do you want to get high?" drug dealers absolutely do care what your intent is before selling to you
And they certainly care if your intent is to get them arrested and put them in jail
(In the case of a corporation, also many people might be involved, some of whom might not know what it is, therefore increasing the possibility of error.)
However, terminating the corporation might help (combined with fines if they had earned any profit from it so far), if there is not an effective and practical lesser punishment which would prevent this harm.
However, your other ideas seem to be valid points; one thing that you mention is, government monopoly can (and does) lead to corruption (although not only this specific kind).
This question of course currently has a very real real world parallel.
But, yes people do find all sorts of justifications, whether or not they are any good (although sometimes it is not immediately clear if it is any good, unfortunately).
Wait, why? You can have morals that don't treat all living things as equal.
Surely "plot the downfall of civilization" is an exaggeration. Knowing that certain actions have harmful consequences to the environment or the humanity, and nevertheless persisting in them, is what many individuals lawfully do without getting together.
The 1980s is when the issue was finally brought into the political conversation. Shell internal documents go back as far as 1962: https://www.desmog.com/2023/03/31/lost-decade-how-shell-down...
As for science itself: the first scientific theories on greenhouse effects were published in the 1850s -- and the first climate model was published in 1896: https://daily.jstor.org/how-19th-century-scientists-predicte...
Companies, non-profits, regulators, legislative branches of government, courts, presidential administrations, corporate bureaucrats, government bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, regular citizens. They cannot self-police.
That's the motivation for having a system of _checks and balances_[a]: We want power, including the power to police, to be distributed in a society.
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1. "The Tobacco Institute was founded in 1958 as a trade association by cigarette manufacturers, who funded it proportionally to each company's sales. It was initially to supplement the work of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC), which later became the Council for Tobacco Research. The TIRC work had been limited to attacking scientific studies that put tobacco in a bad light, and the Tobacco Institute had a broader mission to put out good news about tobacco, especially economic news." [0]
2. "[Lewis Powell] worked for Hunton & Williams, a large law firm in Richmond, Virginia, focusing on corporate law and representing clients such as the Tobacco Institute. His 1971 Powell Memorandum became the blueprint for the rise of the American conservative movement and the formation of a network of influential right-wing think tanks and lobbying organizations, such as The Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council."
Companies can't. Employees can. If someone's still working at Meta, they are ok with it.
so does government
Government in functioning democratic societies is policed by voters, journalists, and many independent watchdog groups.
Take a look at France, where a former president went to prison. Okay, it got commuted to house arrest (same sentence as a former PM candidate for president), but that's still a pretty serious punishment, especially for a such a high level politician.
There is no house arrest, he appealed and is innocent until proven guilty. People stay in prison after appealing in case there is a serious risk of them fleeing the country or in case they present a danger to society, both of these have been deemed low enough
Maybe there is a reference country, at some period in living memory hopefully, we could use as a reference?
The public is supposed to police the government, and replace it if it acts against the public interest.
But now that you mention it, perhaps we should also give everyone an equal vote on replacing the boards of too-big-to-fail corporations
The US-ians voted twice for Trump so far. I have difficulty seeing the good it did for the world , let alone the USA and the US-ians.
Specifically for corporations, giving everyone in the world the power to vote for dismantling Meta (a world mega-corp) might be interesting to see , though.
The problem is that they wants have been steered in that direction by decades of cynical media manipulation, but that's just the nature of democracy.