

Why You Must Separate Personal and Business Morality - burningion
http://www.kpkaiser.com/entrepreneurship/personal-morality-vs-business-morality/

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jimfl
_Corporations cannot behave according to common human morality, because they
are accountable to different systems. They must create profits simply to
continue existing against entropy._

But it is not necessary to have the system in which corporations operate so
divorced from morality, that's just an abstraction that we have allowed to
continue. We don't count things like pollution, destruction of small
businesses, resourse depletion, etc. as being unprofitable, even though they
certainly are. If the so-called bottom line were redrawn, moral ideas could,
in fact, contribute to profit and loss.

For example, if every single current shareholder in BP could be held
accountable to some degree for the current catastrophe, things might have
taken a different course.

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gte910h
The premise is bad as it assumes corporations have to act within today's legal
framework, when in fact that's a human created framework, and when they did
that changed how they'd worked until that date.

Corporations existed for decades with the public good at their heart (and were
chartered for a specific, public oriented purpose). They were enterprises
designed to create a good (or goods) that small businesses run in the sole-
proprietorship could not, such as railroads, public works, and social
institutions.

It is merely by a perversion of this, given by a gilded age supreme court
decision, do we get the "You have to make profit or you can get sued"
companies of today. This could entirely be changed via another supreme court
decision or remaking the corporate sphere to allow non-money centric
organizations.

