> looked for ways to “exploit Hayes’ faults/problems.”
> “If TH involved in scandal, enviros will drop him,”
Heh, I thought corporations being this unethical and immoral was only a movies thing, not something that actually happens.
> She wrote, “What’s motivating Hayes?—basic question.”
Wow. So, it's not malice, it's genuine curiosity? This company literally did not understand basic ethics?
It's quite similar to the Milgram experiment, in a way.
If a human bit the head off a live baby seal, we'd probably call that evil. But when a polar bear does it, it's just the nature of the polar bear. It operates on instinct.
Most corporations only care about their bottom line. Even if the individuals within them are moral, the structure tends to cancel that out.
They are built to seek profit. If they obey the law, it is only because obeying the law maximizes profit. If they are moral, it is only because morality maximizes profit. On the other hand, if breaking the law maximizes profit (e.g. because enforcement is lax or penalties are low) then that's what they'll do. Likewise, if immoral acts make the most money, that's what they'll do.
What Hollywood gets wrong is that corporations aren't intentionally evil. There's no CEO sitting in his office laughing maniacally about how his new project is going to kill widows and orphans. Hollywood always wants a villain, but in this case there isn't one. Villainy falls out of the corporate structure and lots of employees just doing their jobs to keep bread on the table.
This is far from an isolated example, of course. Discrediting or destroying whistleblowers is what just about any corporation will do and has done, as long as they think the positives outweigh the negatives on next quarter's earnings statement.
>Most corporations only care about their bottom line. Even if the individuals within them are moral, the structure tends to cancel that out.
It's ridiculous (and disastrous) that we grant this idea of corporate personhood, bestowing to companies the rights of people, but not the responsibility. It is a dangerous mindset which cooly accepts that corporations are amoral vs. immoral.
At the end of the day, there are people who are making these decisions and people who are benefitting from them. If the decisions are immoral, then the corporation is immoral. If the corporation is engaged in immoral behavior, then the people are immoral.
>What Hollywood gets wrong is that corporations aren't intentionally evil. There's no CEO sitting in his office laughing maniacally about how his new project is going to kill widows and orphans.
I don't think I've ever seen a Hollywood movie wherein the CEO of a corporation laughed maniacally about doing something evil for its own sake. Instead, corporations and their leadership are always characterized as being driven by greed.
>Hollywood always wants a villain, but in this case there isn't one.
Sure, there is a villain. Those people who do evil things for the sake of greed, whether in Hollywood or IRL, are still villains and are rightly portrayed as such.
To imply that evil deeds are not villainous if a person is driven by greed vs. sadism/insanity plays into the culture of corporate absolution and tacitly endorses the behavior.
This is why we need strong regulations. I never liked them before, but now I've come to understand that they are required to allow the honest people to behave honestly.
I've made a similar point here before: the same situation is occurring in the US' national intelligence groups right now. There is no 'evil' person trying to 'take away our rights.' There are just people who are responsible for protecting us who have been granted the authority to read our emails.
What are they going to do? Not look? Suppose it was you? And tragedy happened and you later learned that had you looked you would have saved 2000 lives? You would have a hard time getting over it. So you look- trying to uphold the principles you believe in as you do so, but you look.
However, as an organized system, with good people trying to do the right thing in each of their own small part, it's evil. That's why we need laws to prevent it.
We need the laws to prevent evil results of good intentions.
I don't believe that's all your GP was saying. But, I disagree nonetheless. My primary point is that there are actual people who benefit from the corporation's actions. So, we need to stop this nonsensical notion that corporations are "amoral". And, we need to stop slipping in and out of corporate personhood when granting rights vs. assigning responsibility. Actually, the whole idea of corporate personhood just needs to die.
>Each is responsible for making a small contribution to 'protecting the bottom line,' but as an organized system it makes the organization greedy.
Sure, in any organization there are people who just toe the line and, in many cases, don't even know that their efforts may contribute to something immoral. But, that's irelevant here. The point is that there are certainly people within the company who are making these decisions and who are well-aware of their immorality and consequences. They do this for personal gain (perhaps among other reasons).
So, putting this off on the corporation or organization is ill-considered. There is a tendency to let these individual decisions just sort of dissolve into the morass of the organization. It's especially bad because then we say, "Oh the corporation is amoral. It was just doing what it was supposed to do".
I believe your analogy with U.S. intelligence overlays roughly but differs significantly enough that it's a different discussion. The short though, is that I don't believe that we can just conclude that it was all good intentions with coincidentally evil results.
The danger of ignoring it is that if we blame really bad outcomes (like the banking crisis) on a malicious plot by a bad player, it's too easy to dismiss as a one-off event when the problem may be systemic.
Technically, what the law says is that a person doesn't give up his or her rights when forming a corporation. Corporations are formed to give a liability shield of a limited extent. The extent of the shield is much, much less than a government official gets[1].
1) ask anyone who has dealt with a criminally corrupt prosecutor
In this instance, it's just splitting hairs. The net effect is still the same: they're doing damage to a person and probably the environment for the sake of money, and are aware of this but it doesn't stop them.
This has been demonstrated to not be true. Decision makers at corporations are not rational actors, they may choose to pursuit business plans and take courses of action that actually harm profit. We have seen in the banking and housing collapse that there are those that knowingly seek their own personal profit at the expense of others, including the very businesses they work for.
> What Hollywood gets wrong is that corporations aren't intentionally evil. There's no CEO sitting in his office laughing maniacally about how his new project is going to kill widows and orphans. Hollywood always wants a villain, but in this case there isn't one. Villainy falls out of the corporate structure and lots of employees just doing their jobs to keep bread on the table.
This is has also been demonstrated to be false. While certainly the very nature of corporations creates negative externalities, we have had plenty of examples of high level executives that pursue a course of profit that knowingly endangers and harms others and may ultimately even be ruinous to the business itself.
Ok since corporation is considered a person, why can't a person just claim to be amoral? A corporation is a person and thus a person should be a corporation. No?
The film Erin Brockovich is one example.