Corporations are prisoners of economic incentive

The argument

The argument is about jurisdiction rather than virtue. Deciding what a society should value is the work of the public, acting through democratic institutions and, where necessary, through government. Those bodies are answerable: they can be argued with, voted out and replaced. A corporation is none of these things. It is accountable to its shareholders and to the law, and to nobody else, which makes it the wrong kind of institution to be settling moral questions on behalf of people who have no say in what it decides. Consider what the alternative would look like in practice. If Coca-Cola were to adopt its own set of values and then press them on the markets and societies it operates in, the objection would not be that the values were bad. It would be that a company with enormous reach and no democratic mandate had appointed itself an arbiter of morality for people who never chose it. The scale that makes corporate moral leadership attractive to its advocates is exactly what makes it objectionable: the larger the company, the greater its capacity to impose a view, and the smaller the chance that anyone affected can contest it. There is also the matter of what corporations are for. Under capitalism a company exists to protect and advance the financial interests of those who invest in it and those it employs, and it operates under competitive pressure that does not pause while it deliberates about ethics. A firm that subordinates returns to a moral programme of its own is spending other people's money on commitments they did not authorise, and one that does so while its competitors do not will be penalised by the market for it. The incentives are structural rather than a failure of character. Proponents of this position conclude that moral responsibility lies outside the scope of what corporations are for, and belongs with the public and the state, where it can be held to account.

Context

Persons responsibilities are to think about the social and physical wellbeing of others. Corporations' responsibilities are purely financial.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Thinking about corporate responsibility in this way would have prevented the development of the academic field of business ethics. A corporation can, and should, have morals. Without them, we cannot hold companies to account for negligent and deliberately harmful behaviour, nor can we expect them to abide by any laws that govern their behaviour outside of financial legislation. We also lose any ability to hold the individual decision-maker responsible when they are acting on behalf of a corporation in the pursuit of profits.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] A company has the responsibility to consider their impact beyond finances and profits.

Framing

A corporation's role, under capitalism, is to protect its employees' and shareholders' financial interests. Any deviation from this clearly-defined role would surmount to private overreach.