Reading 08: Holding Corporations to Ethical Standards

I think that the idea of “corporate personhood” or treating corporations the same as indiviuals in terms of constitutional laws was expressed very well in the “If Corportations Are People, They Should Act Like It” piece. As the author expressed, corporate personhood allows corporations to have an identity seperate from the sum of its shareholders — and as he also expressed there are times when this is not reasonable or doesn’t make sense because of what a corporation is (the example he used was religous freedom which should not apply to a corporation without consiousness). But of course, the point of his piece was that just as we expect and demand powerful people to act ethically, we should do the same for powerful corporations.

I read both the Microsoft and Google case study artciles and I thought at the heart they were both asking the same question: Is if okay for incredibly large powerful companies to use their dominance to crush other competitors? Of course, when worded that way it seems the answer is obviously no but the issue is more complex than that. After all don’t these companies in creating their own commerical goods have the freedom to create them as they wish? If Microsoft wasn’t Microsoft no one would have cared that they were restricting the software that could be downloaded on their computers — it’s only because of their existing monopoly that left consumers with essentially no choice. And similarly it’s only because of Google’s extreme search dominance that anyone cares about the ways that their algorithm restricts competing sites. These issues seem obvious and harmless and just a by-product of the free-market economy that we enjoy until you encounter a Google or Microsoft level dominance that leaves any cascading products to the mercy of the giant, monopolizing corporation.

I don’t think anything that Google or Microsoft did was inherently unethical. As I said before, if any company did that we would shrug and say “weird” but in these cases it can be extremely stifling to competition. As mentioned in the New York Times “The Case Against Google” article, if you love the kind of products that Google creates, you should hope that it is punished because otherwise we will never know what kind of excellent innovative things could be created without the monopoly that it holds. I think that it should be the role of some governmental agency to relegate these giant companies to allow competition to flow. It’s not exactly the fault of the companies for growing big and powerful — after all compeition is good and corporations acting in their best interests in what fuels our economy. However, there does need to be some outside power to recognize when an imbalence is present and step in to keep the market competitive.

I think that corporations are different enough from people to have slightly different regulations regarding their behaviour — however in general, I still believe that the idea of corporate personhood is good. We should expect ethical behavior from companies and demand it if that doesn’t happen.