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When did Thoreau MacDonald die? People also asked. Which of these rhetorical devices does Emerson use here? View results. Which of these phrases uses parallelism? Study Guides. Trending Questions. What can you hold in your right hand but not in your left hand? Still have questions? Find more answers. Previously Viewed. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.
Unanswered Questions. What characteristics of a tragic hero does Macbeth possess and banquo lack? What could result if a 30 year old lawyer continued to eat as he did as a 17 years old football player? What is the function of resorcinol in the seliwanoff's test? How do you maximally develop the intelligence quotient of a child? Get the Answers App. All Rights Reserved. To be sure, people of this opinion admit, there is a sense in which social or ethical issues can and should enter the corporate mind, but the filtering of such issues is thorough: they go through the screens of custom, public opinion, public relations, and the law.
And, in any case, self-interest maintains primacy as an objective and a guiding star. The reaction from this frame of reference to the suggestion that moral judgment be integrated with corporate strategy is clearly negative. With respect to our SSC case, advocates of the invisible hand model would vigorously resist efforts, beyond legal requirements, to make SSC right the wrongs of racial injustice. Under this view of corporate responsibility, corporations are to pursue objectives that are rational and purely economic.
The regulatory hands of the law and the political process rather than the invisible hand of the marketplace turns these objectives to the common good. Again, in this view, it is a system that provides the moral direction for corporate decision-making—a system, though, that is guided by political managers, the custodians of the public purpose.
In the case of SSC, proponents of this view would look to the state for moral direction and responsible management, both within SSC and in the community. The corporation would have no moral responsibility beyond political and legal obedience. What is striking is not so much the radical difference between the economic and social philosophies that underlie these two views of the source of corporate responsibility but the conceptual similarities.
Both views locate morality, ethics, responsibility, and conscience in the systems of rules and incentives in which the modern corporation finds itself embedded. Both views reject the exercise of independent moral judgment by corporations as actors in society.
Neither view trusts corporate leaders with stewardship over what are often called noneconomic values.
Both require corporate responsibility to march to the beat of drums outside. In the jargon of moral philosophy, both views press for a rule-centered or a system-centered ethics instead of an agent-centered ethics.
In terms of the Exhibit, these frames of reference countenance corporate rule-following responsibility for corporations but not corporate decision-making responsibility. To be sure, the two views under discussion differ in that one looks to an invisible moral force in the market while the other looks to a visible moral force in government. But both would advise against a principle of moral projection that permits or encourages corporations to exercise independent, noneconomic judgment over matters that face them in their short-and long-term plans and operations.
Cries of inefficiency and moral imperialism from the right would be matched by cries of insensitivity and illegitimacy from the left, all in the name of preserving us from corporations and managers run morally amok. Better, critics would say, that moral philosophy be left to philosophers, philanthropists, and politicians than to business leaders. Better that corporate morality be kept to glossy annual reports, where it is safely insulated from policy and performance.
The two conventional frames of reference locate moral restraint in forces external to the person and the corporation. Although the principle of moral projection, which underwrites the idea of a corporate conscience and patterns it on the thought and feeling processes of the person, is in our view compelling, we must acknowledge that it is neither part of the received wisdom, nor is its advisability beyond question or objection.
Indeed, attributing the role of conscience to the corporation seems to carry with it new and disturbing implications for our usual ways of thinking about ethics and business. We believe that the replies to the objections about a corporation having a conscience are convincing.
Corporations are not persons. They are artificial legal constructions, machines for mobilizing economic investments toward the efficient production of goods and services.
We cannot hold a corporation responsible. We can only hold individuals responsible. Our frame of reference does not imply that corporations are persons in a literal sense. It simply means that in certain respects concepts and functions normally attributed to persons can also be attributed to organizations made up of persons.
Goals, economic values, strategies, and other such personal attributes are often usefully projected to the corporate level by managers and researchers. Why should we not project the functions of conscience in the same way? As for holding corporations responsible, recent criminal prosecutions such as the case of Ford Motor Company and its Pinto gas tanks suggest that society finds the idea both intelligible and useful. A corporation cannot be held responsible at the sacrifice of profit.
We must of course acknowledge the imperatives of survival, stability, and growth when we discuss corporations, as indeed we must acknowledge them when we discuss the life of an individual.
Self-sacrifice has been identified with moral responsibility in only the most extreme cases. The pursuit of profit and self-interest need not be pitted against the demands of moral responsibility. Moral demands are best viewed as containments—not replacements—for self-interest.
This is not to say that profit maximization never conflicts with morality. But profit maximization conflicts with other managerial values as well. The point is to coordinate imperatives, not deny their validity. Corporate executives are not elected representatives of the people, nor are they anointed or appointed as social guardians.
They therefore lack the social mandate that a democratic society rightly demands of those who would pursue ethically or socially motivated policies. By keeping corporate policies confined to economic motivations, we keep the power of corporate executives in its proper place. The objection betrays an oversimplified view of the relationship between the public and the private sector. Neither private individuals nor private corporations that guide their conduct by ethical or social values beyond the demands of law should be constrained merely because they are not elected to do so.
The demands of moral responsibility are independent of the demands of political legitimacy and are in fact presupposed by them. To be sure, the state and the political process will and must remain the primary mechanisms for protecting the public interest, but one might be forgiven the hope that the political process will not substitute for the moral judgment of the citizenry or other components of society such as corporations. Our system of law carefully defines the role of agent or fiduciary and makes corporate managers accountable to shareholders and investors for the use of their assets.
Management cannot, in the name of corporate moral responsibility, arrogate to itself the right to manage those assets by partially non-economic criteria. As a practical matter, considerations of stability and long-term return on investment enlarge the class of principals to which managers bear a fiduciary relationship. Both legal and moral constraints must be understood to qualify that trust—even, perhaps, in the name of a larger trust and a more basic fiduciary relationship to the members of society at large.
The power, size, and scale of the modern corporation—domestic as well as international—are awesome. Subscriber sign in You could not be signed in, please check and try again.
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