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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Terramotus" data-source="post: 4747801" data-attributes="member: 7220">I think here you disprove your own point.I think that, in a publicly traded company, the organization will, almost inevitably, drift towards being institutionally evil.  That is to say it routinely engages in practices that if an individual performed with a personally owned company, would be considered evil.Terramotus' Law of Corporation Evilness: In the absence of government regulation, the evilness of a given corporation will increase proportionately to its size, the length of time the company has been publicly traded and the length of time since the retirement of the founder.Let me explain: First, in a publicly traded company, you are not ever allowed to decide to make less money.  Not only do individual jobs depend on this, the web of obligations to shareholders and legal responsibilities forbids it.  So if something makes the company money but is unethical, so long as there are no laws to forbid it, and so long as public outcry does not impact profits enough to override the practice, it will always continue.  Over time, there will always be executives looking to move up in the company.  Some of them will try unethical things to get there.  Some of them will succeed in these unethical practices, and they will make the company money.  Once this is done, it cannot be undone.  Even after the orignator leaves the position, his successors will be obligated to keep the practice up in order to keep their jobs.  These unethical practices will continue to pile up, unless stopped by laws or unless they Go Too Far.The only brake on this is personal ethics of employees, particularly the founder.  The problem is, the longer the founder is gone, and the larger the company is, the less clout any one individual has to change anything.  Seriously, how often do you see any publicly traded companies announce a big new employee benefits plan that will cost them tons of money?  The only exceptions to this are companies that still have an active founder (Costco springs to mind).Sure, some individuals will seek to curb these practices, but it's virtually always against their self-interest to do so.  It makes their job harder.  And while sometimes large-scale passive-aggressive opposition to a practice can blunt its "evilness", in the long run self-interest will win.  Eventually those individuals will move on, and the "ethical bloc" will be no more.Sorry, corporations can definitely be evil.  IMO, the idea that they can't is nothing more than a polite fiction people tell themselves to salve their own guilt.  This of course is an entirely separate issue as to whether individuals who participate in these practices are ethically tainted by them.</blockquote>

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