- Position1 of 2›
- No, corporations shouldn't have moral responsibility
- Argument‹6 of 6
Corporate morals dehumanize the individual
Once a corporation attempts to force its values on its employees, it risks dehumanizing them. "Moral responsibility" is a message that so clearly disenfranchises the individuals within that company who must fall under and conform to that ambiguous mantra, blanketing over them with a meaningless phrase that steals their senses of expression.
The argument
In making corporations define their morals, you are anthropomorphizing corporations — treating an organisational structure as though it were the kind of thing that can hold a conviction. In doing so, you dehumanize the individual, because the moral standing has to come from somewhere, and the only people in the arrangement are the employees. Taking away that sense of humanity from employees and throwing it onto an arbitrary corporate structure does away with so many individual traits and qualities that make people unique. The risk is one that marketing writing has already noticed from the other side. Digitaldoughnut writes, "At the end, brand anthropomorphism can be a double-edged sword; if making brands more humane can create connections and engagement with the customers it can as well allow more liberty for judgment as viewing the brand as a human." Once a company is treated as a person, it acquires both the credit and the exposure of one, and the people who actually make its decisions recede behind it. That is where the cost falls. The humanistic qualities of a brand or company are what disenfranchise its employees and make them blend into this corporate cookie-cutter framework that robs them of their individuality. The company's stated values arrive already settled, and the employee's part is to display them rather than to arrive at them. When someone shows up to work and is told by their corporation what values they must adopt in their professional life, they lose part of their identity and humanity — not because the values are necessarily bad ones, but because a conviction issued as a condition of employment is not a conviction that person actually reached. In the interests of preserving individual autonomy and identity, corporations should avoid imposing their morals on the individual.
Context
When a corporation is anthropomorphized, it dehumanizes the individuals that work for that organisation.
Premises
Counter-arguments
"Moral responsibility" for a corporation is not always a bad thing. With the many loopholes and write-offs that huge companies receive, it is refreshing to hear some of them calling for accountability in the ways their structure is processed. They should always have the moral obligation to put both their employees and their customers first, no matter what. An ethically beneficial attitude and mindset toward their constituents would raise their brand and, in turn, provide them with better business and quality of products. An individual worker should focus on the ways in which "moral responsibility" in their company works for them rather than finding a problem in the anthrpomorphizing of the company itself.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P2] Company-wide values are not always negative, especially when they apply to an ethical and moral relationship between a company and its employees. [Rejecting P3] Corporate morals are not necessarily always bad.
Framing
Corporations should aim to preserve the individual’s autonomy or humanity. Setting corporate morals and instilling them on corporate employees dehumanizes the individual.