Are corporations capable of ethics?

I'd love to read about any good examples of a large company acting in an ethical way that was objectively harmful to its bottom line (factoring in the financial benefit of PR stunts).

Volvo rather famously invented the 3 point seatbelt and then open sourced the tech instead of patenting it so that it could save more lives: https://www.forbes.com/sites/douglasbell/2019/08/13/60-years...

Thanks! That's exactly the kind of story I was curious to discover and read about.

There is no law that corporations have to act in their financial interests. They merely have to act in the interests of their owners (shareholders). Owners can choose to prioritize ethics over maximum financial return. This tends to be less likely (and harder to for owners to communicate) with publicly traded corporations, but studies do show e.g. that privately held large corporations are far more reluctant to do mass layoffs.

The real issue is Darwinian survival of the most profitable though - if doing the ethical thing isn't sufficiently rewarded with goodwill etc., then the least ethical corporations will expand the fastest, and outcompete the more ethical corporations. In the end, it is up to government, consumers, and workers to ensure that acting in an ethical way is not net harmful to a company's bottom line.

I like to think that "ethical" bad decisions are also "short term thinking" bad business decisions.

Two small examples that come to mind:

(1) Investing in clean energy is both ethical and cheaper in the long term. This one is straightforward. (2) Apple not turning ads on in iMessage. I assume they could, they just don't. If I was them I wouldn't because then it would start degrading consumer trust in the security of their products, losing that as a differentiator in the long term despite minting money in the short term.

Happy to be wrong though. Some data that I think could weaken my argument is if there are counter-examples of large companies that have been around for a long time that have sustained ethical compromises that haven't see hits to their bottom line because of it.

The trouble is, short term thinking practically defines our financial and corporate culture these days. Gotta chase this quarter's growth, or our stock price might drop!

More broadly, if a business decision is good for the short term but bad for the long term, but the person making that decision doesn't expect to be around for the kind of "long term" that would show how bad it is...then that person is incentivized to make that kind of decision, absent a) regulations of some sort changing those incentives, or b) actually caring about human beings in some meaningful way.

And partly because of the general short-term-thinking-ism, it's very common—almost expected—for people of all levels to jump ship for a better paycheck after 3, 5, maybe 10 years, tops...and, of course, for the bigger short-term thinking problem (climate change), a significant percentage, if not a supermajority, of the people making the decisions that affect that don't expect to be alive long enough to see the serious effects of it, whether or not they believe they will actually happen.

I guess I would argue that, for the purposes of ethics, corporations don't exist. They are just people-groups organized (more in a flocking sense than a regiment) around some particular goal.

So, to rephrase the question, can an arbitrary collection of human beings behave ethically? The answer largely depends on your worldview, of course, but all unethical actions are taken by humans. Sure, it is a useful mental model to think of a corporation as a gestalt whole for some things, but that's all it is - a mental model.

It's the opposite. For the purposes of corporations, ethics don't exist.

Corporations are a people-group where everyone validates each other's decision to pursue profit ("we work for the shareholders") to the exclusion of ethics or morality. They're finely tuned mechanisms to exploit human's group-mentality in order to circumvent people ethical mores.

That’s a very cynical world view. So the second someone forms a corporation, they lose all their ethics and become slaves to making a profit?

No, it usually happens when they become immensely profitable and there is a lot of shareholder pressure.

Google started with harmless search adds to the side and out of the way of search results. Gotta grow for the shareholders though.

> factoring in the financial benefit of PR stunts

That makes it a little difficult to argue with you, doesn't it?

Many companies recycle (use recycled goods) where non-recycling (non-recycled goods) would be cheaper.

But you can just spin that as PR that offsets the added cost.

I guess at the end of the day do I care if it is PR?

I thought that too when I wrote that line.

What I'm aiming for, I think, is intent.

Newman's Own is a for-profit corporation that gives 100% of its profits to charity (about 5% of revenue).

All 501(c)(3)s are corporations. They largely exist to achieve ethical, charitable goals.

"They largely exist to achieve ethical, charitable goals."

I wouldn't go that far. There are certainly 501(c)(3)s that actually focus on charitable goals, but many are just focused on enriching their execs and tax avoidance.

>Facebook ain't running full-page ads in major newspapers because it feels strongly about it from an ethical perspective.

Why do they need to do this at all? Surely as a vendor of advertising they can use their own to greater and cheaper effect?

Or is their advertising not quite what they claim?