businessweek.com— By refusing to consider the consequences of their actions, those who created the financial crisis exemplify the banality of evil, writes Shoshana Zuboff
Mar 20, 2009View in Crawl 4
It's possible to trace this issue to Supreme Court decisions giving corporations constitutional rights as "persons." It's been all downhill since then. Granting rights, with no real consequences for abusing them, and no concomitant responsibilities, has put business on an amoral, if not evil, plane. (A corporation can't serve jail time, or incur the death penalty, no matter how bad it is.) The notion that the only reason for a corporation to exist is to make money for its shareholders is fundamentally flawed because it fails to count all the costs of corporate activity and assign financial and moral responsibility for those costs to the activities that generate them. There should be a legal principle of corporate social responsibility and accountability. Every company's continued right to exist and do business should be predicated on demonstrating its adherence to those principles.
The economic crisis has demonstrated that the banality of evil concealed within a widely accepted business model can put the entire world and its peoples at risk. Shouldn't those businesses be held accountable to agreed international standards of rights, obligations, and conduct? Shouldn't the individuals whose actions unleashed such devastating consequences be held accountable to these moral standards?
seminarianMar 20, 2009
It's possible to trace this issue to Supreme Court decisions giving corporations constitutional rights as "persons." It's been all downhill since then. Granting rights, with no real consequences for abusing them, and no concomitant responsibilities, has put business on an amoral, if not evil, plane. (A corporation can't serve jail time, or incur the death penalty, no matter how bad it is.) The notion that the only reason for a corporation to exist is to make money for its shareholders is fundamentally flawed because it fails to count all the costs of corporate activity and assign financial and moral responsibility for those costs to the activities that generate them. There should be a legal principle of corporate social responsibility and accountability. Every company's continued right to exist and do business should be predicated on demonstrating its adherence to those principles.
garblMar 22, 2009
The economic crisis has demonstrated that the banality of evil concealed within a widely accepted business model can put the entire world and its peoples at risk. Shouldn't those businesses be held accountable to agreed international standards of rights, obligations, and conduct? Shouldn't the individuals whose actions unleashed such devastating consequences be held accountable to these moral standards?