Assignment:
Throughout The Corporation, Bakan speaks of the "institutional logic" of the corporation as something that transcends the intentions (for good or ill) of its individual agents. Even when businessmen adopt a more "socially conscious" attitude and espouse an ethics of doing business according to which the corporation should promote objective other than profit alone, Bakan argues that such businessmen are incapable of actually changing the way in which the corporation is, by nature (or by design), programmed to function.
Your Task is first to explain and assess the merits of Bakan's argument (i.e., to lay out and articulate Bakan's argument, taking into consideration, e.g., to what extent this "logic" appears not only pathological, but "psychopathic"; and to what extent it proves inexorable or insurmountable, as Bakan suggests); and second to examine what consequences such a "logic" (whatever the institutional logic of profit-making might be) has on the possibility of making business (or the corporation) "moral". Can, or should it even be "moral," and in what sense?
In order to craft your response, and so as to make your argument more compelling, I encourage you to consider the following questions, which might help guide, your thinking as you write:
- Are profit and morality compatible or incompatible (even logically exclusive)? Must the one always triumph, or take precedent, over the other? Or must one always serve as means to the other , the ultimate "end" of business activity?
- Does, or can, the theory of corporate social responsibility adequately address the fundamental moral issues raised by corporate (mal)practice?
- Is there room for a kind of ethics that would not be subordinate or instrumental to profit, as either Camenisch might argue-one that is distinct from, and moves beyond, "corporate social responsibility'?
- Is the moral virtue of business (and the corporation), as Friedman might argue, precisely that it places responsibilities on individuals, and not on "artificial" entities such as corporations? And in this sense, does it even make sense to speak of corporations as "moral" entities with a "distinct" set of social responsibilities?
- Is business ethics (or should it be) a matter of reforming individual character, thus ensuring the moral responsibility of the personal actors? Or is it also, or in the first place, a matter of reforming the institutional character of the places of commercial and economic transaction?
- And, finally, is there a relation (and if so, of what kind), such that the latter influences and affects the former, or vice versa?