> Many posters in this group take as a given that corporations are evil.
>
> In almost any thread concerned with politics, economics, or any other
> social issue, we'll find these contributors weighing in with comments on
> the wickedness of corporations --- that they are "greedy," "exploitive,"
> bullying," "manipulative," "coercive," "destructive," and so on. In a
> word,
> that they are the bad guys responsible for almost every human ill.
>
> Now of course corporations are simply groups of humans who have agreed
> among themselves to cooperate to produce some product or deliver some
> service. And of course, as such they are capable of, and guilty of, all
> the
> evils of which any group of humans is capable. Also like all other humans
> and groups of them, they are vulnerable to mistakes, misadventures, and
> accidents.
>
> All other human institutions, from labor unions and religious
> organizations
> to street gangs and drug cartels, have also demonstrated their capacity
> for
> evil, as do thousands of individuals on a daily basis. But by comparison
> with the evils committed by other groups --- using the ordinary criteria
> for measuring "evil" (and this is important) --- the evils committed by
> corporations are relatively infrequent and mild.
>
> But we need to define these "ordinary criteria." I take those to be
> related
> to the severity and extent of loss and suffering inflicted on one person
> by
> another. To be sure, there are also evils which are not human-caused, such
> as disease, natural disasters, and so on. But the evils which elicit the
> most outrage in us are those inflicted by humans on other humans, such as
> the evil of Mr. Cho.
>
> It is by this measure that corporations rank fairly well on the "evil
> scale." Corporations, on an annual basis, are responsible for relatively
> few deaths and injuries to other persons, in proportion to the number of
> persons involved with them, and almost none of those result from a
> deliberate intent to kill or injure on the part of the corporations'
> owners
> or managers. You'd have to look back many decades to accumulate as many
> murders or assaults at the hands of Western corporations as Mr. Cho
> committed in a single morning, or as many as street gangs or religious
> organizations commit in a typical year.
>
> Corporations are more often culpable for deaths and injuries due to
> negligence --- deaths and injuries which, though not intentional, were
> foreseeable and preventable. But even here corporations compare favorably
> with other institutions. About 5000 people in the US die annually from
> workplace injuries, and about half of those result from auto accidents.
> Most of the rest occur in non-corporate environments, such as
> construction.
> Only about 100 per year appear to be due to criminal negligence, and most
> of those do not occur in corporate environments. By comparison, about 3800
> people per year drown.
>
> Corporations are also responsible for some deaths and injuries outside the
> workplace --- cases of contaminated foods, defective appliances, and other
> product-related fatalities. But almost all of the 4,500 annual product-
> related deaths are due to consumer misuse of the product, or to non-
> foreseeable, non-preventable accidents, not to corporate negligence.
>
> So if corporations, using ordinary measures, do not rank particularly high
> on the "evil" scale, why do they attract so much invective?
>
> Well, because when judging the "evils" of corporations, the ordinary
> criteria are not applied. They are deemed "evil," not because they
> deliberately murder and injure others, but because they fail to live up to
> certain expectations their critics demand of them. They fail to play the
> role those critics think they should be playing. Hence there is an obvious
> mismatch, or "disconnect" between the critics' expectations and actual
> corporate behavior, and that engenders disappointment and outrage.
>
> What are those expectations? What are corporations actually doing which
> their critics condemn, and which fuels their outrage?
>
> What corporations do, or rather, fail to do, is to act like dutiful organs
> in the social organism. A common charge against them is that they are
> "socially irresponsible." That means that they act in pursuit of their own
> interests --- the interests of their owners, managers, and employees ---
> instead of in the "public interest;" that they are interested only in
> making money for those investors, managers, and employees, rather than in
> meeting the "needs of the public" or serving the "good of society."
>
> And of course those charges are perfectly true. Corporations are indeed
> devoted to making money for the persons comprising them. That is why they
> are organized; that is why anyone invests in them or goes to work for
> them.
>
> The problem here is not the behavior of the corporations, but the
> expectations of their critics. The latter labor under the burden of the
> "organic fallacy" --- the bizarre but widely-held belief that societies
> are
> organisms in which individuals are cells and institutions (such as
> corporations) are organs, all of whom must work synchronously to meet the
> needs of "society as a whole." That belief, in turn, gives rise to the
> aforementioned expectations --- corporations which are seen to be merely
> pursuing their own interests, rather than the "interests of the whole,"
> are
> rogue. They are malignant, threatening, destructive, like cancers. Hence
> they need to be strictly regulated to "keep them on the farm;" to make
> sure
> they serve the purposes they are supposed to be serving.
>
> If the critics were to look carefully they'd discover that no other human
> institution lives up to those expectations, either. Labor organizations,
> professional organizations, religious organizations all act in the
> interests of their members or other constituents. None of them act in
> pursuit of any alleged "public interest." Why are corporations
> particularly
> singled out for condemnation on this score?
>
> Well, because the critics perceive the "social role" they impute to
> corporations to be uniquely important to their own welfare. Corporations
> are the institutions which produce virtually all of the products,
> services,
> and employment opportunities everyone needs to survive and prosper. So
> everyone has a personal, vested interest in making sure corporations play
> their prescribed roles.
>
> Critics of corporations are especially offended by the inequalities they
> find rampant in the corporate world. Some investors and managers are paid
> millions of dollars annually, while workers (with whom the critic can
> often
> identify) are paid much less. And to pay these "outrageous" salaries and
> dividends, of course, the corporations charge consumers "outrageous"
> prices
> for the necessities they produce, upon which we all depend and which the
> corporations have a "social obligation" to provide. Some critics even
> believe corporations behave arrogantly and self-servingly by demanding
> payment at all for their goods and services. After all, doesn't every cell
> in the "social organism" have an equal right to nourishment? Why must one
> pay for what is already one's right?
>
> Corporations are condemned for other reasons also, but the criticisms all
> derive from the perceived failure of those organizations to play the roles
> the critics are convinced they have. They lambaste them for moving
> operations overseas, or for mechanizing operations, thus avoiding their
> "duty" to provide employment to cells in the organism. They attack them
> for
> producing "unhealthy" or dangerous products, even though those products
> are
> exactly what their customers want. They howl that corporations "exploit"
> third-world people by buying their products and giving them jobs --- the
> best-paying jobs they have ever had.
>
> All these complaints and criticisms derive from the aforementioned failure
> of expectations. Those expectations derive, in turn, from the organic
> fallacy. Critics are disappointed because they impute to corporations a
> "role" which they don't have in the first place. There is no such thing as
> a social organism, and neither corporations nor anyone else has a "role"
> in
> it. Corporations, like all other organizations in society, are nothing but
> voluntary associations of individuals, who have joined to pursue certain
> goals of their own. They have no duties to pursue any "social goals"
> because there are no such things; the only goals within any society are
> the
> diverse goals of particular individuals. And individuals have no duties to
> pursue the goals of other individuals unless they have freely contracted
> to
> do so.
>
> Corporations --- and that means the individuals comprising them --- have
> no
> duties to provide anyone with jobs or with any kinds of products. They
> have
> no duties to supply whatever products they elect to produce (if any) at
> any
> particular price, to any particular customers, or under any particular
> conditions. They have no duties to meet anyone's needs. They have no such
> duties because no one in society has them; everyone has duties only to
> avoid injuring others and to fulfill any contracts they have made.
>
> The people who manage and invest in corporations, or work for them, have
> no
> more interest in the welfare of those outside the corporation than those
> outside do for those inside. They, like their customers and even their
> critics, are interested in their own welfare and the welfare of certain
> others close to them. Corporations are also interested in the welfare of
> their customers, but only to the extent that those customers are
> interested
> in their products --- they will seek to deliver a product the customer
> will
> freely buy and with which he'll be satisfied, so that he will buy again.
> To
> those customers they have a duty to deliver the product as promised. To
> all
> others they own nothing, beyond tolerance and non-interference.
>
> Subscribers to the organic fallacy suffer from a badly mistaken
> understanding of the structure of modern societies. Societies are not
> organisms; they are complex adaptive systems. They have no preordained
> designs and no global goals or purposes. There is nothing equivalent to
> DNA
> to specify the relationships among their component parts. They are merely
> collections of autonomous individuals, thrown together by accident of
> birth
> upon a common territory. Those individuals then find ways to cooperate
> with
> particular other individuals in pursuit of their own individual purposes.
> Whatever structure emerges from that dynamic will be unpredictable, *ad
> hoc*, and only metastable.
>
> Unfortunately, the organic fallacy is a "basal belief" --- a foundational
> belief upon which many other beliefs rest, from which they follow. Like
> the
> overthrow of the "flat Earth" or Ptolemaic cosmology in earlier times,
> undermining a basal belief will topple a whole structure of derivative
> beliefs. Naturally, people tend to be defensive of their basal beliefs,
> since without them they would be cast adrift, no longer certain of the
> nature of the world they live in or their place in it.
>
> Unfortunately also, clinging to the organic fallacy often has a pragmatic
> motive. If one is a member in good standing of a social organism, then
> that
> "organism" has duties to one --- one may justifiably press some claim to
> its nurture and patronage. I.e., it entitles one to a "free lunch." That
> prospect alone will mobilize vigorous resistance to any effort to dispel
> that fallacy.
>
> So for the foreseeable future we can not only expect the corporation-
> bashing to continue, but also the relentless efforts of the critics to
> enlist the government in forcing corporations to conform themselves to the
> critics' misguided notions of their "roles."
>
> It is ironic that in order to eliminate the "evils" of corporations, the
> critics resort to the institution whose evils, by the usual criteria,
> exceed by far those of all other human institutions combined, namely,
> governments. Governments in the last century alone have murdered at least
> 150 million people, and maimed and imprisoned tens of millions more,
> mostly
> in futile attempts to implement some version of the organic fallacy.
>
> So, like Ptolemaic cosmology and the theory of "Divine Right," we cannot
> expect it to go peacefully. At least not anytime soon.
>
>