CORPORATION AS HUMAN

Being in business school is hard (and I can do a whole post on that) because instead of being taught to look at the way our society is constructed and learn to criticize, we instead are given the structures "as-is" and taught how to best function within those structures. One of the things that we are told to accept is that corporations' primary function is to maximize profits for its owners, the shareholders. Besides the obvious problem of the environmental and social destruction this mentality can cause, in the form of destroyed forests, polluted waste dumps, and suppressed wages, I also believe there is a schism between the ideals we hold when it comes to the way we treat each other and our "ideal" when it comes to corporations and how we're treated by them.

For starters, I would like to direct you to the website of a movie called The Corporation:

http://www.thecorporation.com/

It's also available on youtube (legally; the producers put it there, and it's in 23 parts):

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=FA50FBC214A6CE87

I learned quite a few things from that movie. However, the thing that always stuck out at me was the use of civil rights legislation to claim that the corporation is a "person" and deserves rights under law as such. Prior to that happening, corporations were created to do a specific, usually public-works-related, task and disbanded on completion of that task. Once given person-hood, though, they became the looming monstrosities they are today, dominating the political, social, and especially commercial landscape. Yet, despite the fact the government treats them as a person, we don't. We still treat the corporation as if it were an entity distinctly different from those friends and family who surround us, as if our interactions with these entities should be fundamentally different because the desires and, most importantly, the morals, of the corporation are fundamentally different than our own.

Why should this be? I don't believe a corporations primary function is merely to make the most money at the expense of all else. Think about it: people whose desires align with that of corporation are unhappy people, constantly striving for an increased satisfaction from something that really won't satisfy them. If people's desires are more complex than that, why shouldn't the corporation, who the government considers a person, to be more complex? Basically, my question is this: why do we give the corporation more leeway and lower moral standard than we give random individuals, or even individuals we know and interact with?

It's surprising to me that, given many individuals' moral standards regarding how we interact with each other, that we rarely apply the same standards to corporations, nor do we work forcefully for legislation to enforce at least some of those standards. Think about it: if you and a neighbor lived along a river, and your neighbor started dumping his trash into the river, you'd be pissed. You'd complain to you local government, who would fine him or arrest him. If you heard about this from a neighboring town, you'd probably consider that person an asshole, or some other four-letter-word. You would gladly support regulations for that type of thing, and you'd probably be more that outraged that he could get away with that.

However, you hear about something similar being done by a large company, most people, even if they agree that it should be stopped, just kind of sigh and move on. Especially in the business world, where personal relationships are king, and the only way to move up is by knowing the right people, the corporations relationship to their customers and their general environment tend to more often reflect the initial philosophy I mentioned, that of maximizing profits. Businessmen use the fact that the corporation is its own person to their own benefit without choosing to take on the responsibilities being a "person" really means. When they chose to elevate the legal status of the corporation to a person, they must develop their own level of moral responsibility for the corporation as a person.

Basically, my proposition is this: when considering your personal morality, compare it to the morality of the corporation. It seems completely unfathomable to me that an individual would say to themselves "I'm going to recycle" or "I need to treat my friends with respect" or "I should make sure my trash is disposed of properly" and would then choose to do things like cut the health care benefits of their employees while making a $million+ bonuses or spewing toxic chemicals into the air or lacing their products with all sorts of toxic chemicals. If you, as a business person, would not do something personally, why are you willing to allow your company to do so? At what point did making money supersede your morals?