For anyone that doesn’t, as the saying goes, “live under a rock”, it’s difficult not to hear of twisted acts of corporations. Corporations are powerful entities; in some cases their power seems to rival or even exceed the government’s power. Many corporations are huge amoral beasts that serve the purpose of accumulation of capital. As corporations grow in size, they are hard to regulate and as a result are amoral in their actions. This idea of regulation is a tough pill to swallow since corporations of immense size are oftentimes unable to be regulated adequately. If corporations are complicit in human rights violations, the victims of the abuses have a legal right to compensation from these corporations. Corporations should be obliged to assume personal and social responsibility for their actions.
First, the definition of amoral must be clear. Oxford University clarifies, “amoral means lacking a moral sense; unconcerned with the rightness or wrongness of something” (Oxford). Amoral is distinct in meaning from immoral. Immoral means evil or wrong, and it means failing to adhere to moral standards. When someone is immoral, they make decisions and purposely violate a moral agreement. If the two definitions were people, amoral would be the child who doesn’t care if their actions are right or wrong, while immoral would be the villainous character who knows the difference between right and wrong, doesn’t care, and twirls his mustache saying “mwah ha ha” while doing the wrong thing.
Corporations have been granted certain immunity from litigation and as a result have become somewhat untouchable when it comes to regulation. Nina Totenberg explains amorality of corporations as “amorality of the profit motive and its indifference to consequences” (Totenberg). Some corporations are mostly or only interested in maximizing their profit and consequently some corporations don’t care about the means of getting that profit. This blatant disregard for the actions it takes a corporation to make profit dates as far back as during the age of Nazi Germany.
As Bethany Stephens points out, an American company called IBM was condemned by American critics for selling a revolutionary data management system to the Nazis and it was concluded that this system enabled Nazi Germany to organize information about the millions of people under their control. Ultimately, this IBM product was absolutely essential in implementation of their brutally efficient extermination program (Stephens). During this time, American companies made economical, amoral decisions whether to conduct business with Nazi Germany or not. As Bethany Stephens further supplies, an example of the amoral acts of corporations is the use of slave labor by the Ford Motor Company.
The use of slave labor arguably was a contributor to the tremendous amplification of that company in the years afterwards (Stephens). Those in corporate positions of power enjoyed the profits generated from doing such business without being held directly responsible for the human consequences of their operations. Immeasurable numbers of people were affected and harmed by corporate activities that escaped regulation simply for the fact that they spanned iProfit-maximization, if not the only goal of business, is certainly central to the enterprise that is business. Some corporations involve themselves in a number of amoral acts such as child labor, outsourcing offshore to evade taxes, or inflicting environmental damage. These amoral acts have allowed large corporations to produce goods at a lower manufacturing cost; in effect, making their profit margin much larger.
As Timothy Connor reports, investigations of working conditions in factories in countries that check those boxes have drawn unwanted attention to human rights abuses including unpaid overtime, illegally low wages, child labor, as well as dangerous working conditions (Connor). Transnational corporations actively seek out inexpensive locations to manufacture their products, most frequently picking countries with low wages and weak or minimal protection of labor rights. The sheer volume of profit generated by corporations is astounding. William Quigley reports that Walmart is the leading corporation in the world in terms of revenue, generating $219 billion dollars in 2014.
There are many countries in the world that have a lower Gross Domestic Product as a country than the revenue of the 10 largest corporations in the world (Quigley). It’s understandable that people would fear the power corporations have over people when considering corporate revenue because the enormity of their profit has allowed them to become entities that have been given human-like rights. The vast power of multinational corporations comes from their profit and size, and it allows them to cause greater harms with lesser consequences. Meanwhile, the legal system is at a disadvantage when regulating multinational corporations.
The legal structures regulating these entities that are corporations reflect to some degree the outdated structure of the 19th and 20th century corporation. Modern legal systems are chiefly national, while corporations can be and are multinational. This difference in national level causes a disconnect between corporate structures and the law. Multinational corporations are a hard target to regulate because of their layers, including the focus of the enterprise as a whole on division of labor and economic gain. Over time, multinational corporations have outgrown the governing legal structures that oversee them, reaching new peaks of transnationality that eclipses law’s ability to enforce basic human rights norms.
Generally, corporations have been allowed rights that should not be granted. Corporate personhood is a concept that allows companies to hold property, enter contracts, and to sue and be sued just like a human being. But of course some human rights make no sense for a corporation, like the right to marry, to parent a child, or to vote. The abolishment of legal corporation personhood is too far of a stretch at this point in time; hence, corporations should have a statute of their personhood be to take personal and social responsibility for their actions. Corporations can be ethical entities if they can abide by taking responsibility for when amoral actions are made.
