The Chinese police state is a great investment says US hedge funds.
The US economy may be on decline but US hedge funds investors considers the Chinese police state to be a good investment for our global economy.
“China’s Hot Stock: Orwell Inc” is the headlines over an article in the NYTimes published September 19, 2007.
“In a stunning report in the New York Times last week, correspondent Keith Bradsher documented the rise of China’s electronic surveillance industry, whose leading companies have incorporated themselves in the United States and obtained the lion’s share of their capital from U.S. hedge funds. Though ostensibly private, these companies are a for-profit adjunct of the Chinese government.”
Do US corporations have any moral responsibility to the citizens of the US?
Do US corporations have any moral responsibility to the people living on this planet?
Yes and yes, of course. They certainly expect people to behave with moral responsibility towards them; I doubt you’ll find many corporations that think it’s just fine if the employees loot and burn them.
Every person and every organization has moral responsibility. That’s the nature of morality.
I’d suppose this bumps up against the legal fiction of corporations as legal ‘persons’. I understand the rationale behind that reasoning but it’s not a perfect match.
A corporation has little to no ‘moral’ responsibility, as I see it. It’s there and functioning with the sole goal of increasing it’s market share and overall value. That’s why the class of corporations known as ‘non-profit’ was created.
The people who WORK for and RUN the corporations, on the other hand, certainly have a responsibility to act ethically and morally.
Corporations have a responsibility to make money for their shareholders, obey the law and to be accurate and forthright in their financial dealings.
What are your indications that the US economy is in any sort of decline? By what objective measurements are you measuring the US economy? GNP? Unemployment?
Your use of the term “police state” is prejorative. China is not North Korea. They are in a state of transition and are trying to join the modern world. Would you have us sanction them because you simply don’t agree with their politics?
You know where they have the most public CCTVs? London, England. Does that make the English fascist?
A better title for your OP should be “Should corporations consider the politics of the nations they do business with?”
For generations capitalists have been lecturing us about how communism is evil. Then some major corporations suddenly saw an opportunity to make a few bucks by allying with the world’s largest communist government, and all of a sudden communism became just another way of doing business. China still ranks near the bottom in economic freedom (#111 out of 157); see here. There are no rights whatever guaranteed to farmers, laborers, women, and others at the bottom of the social ladder in China. Clearly doing business with China is indefensible, yet it gets done all the same.
Well, trade with China allows poor American families to buy products they normally couldn’t afford and it is helping China to create a middle class and improve the standard of living for those farmers, laborers, women, and others at the bottom of the social ladder in China. Not trading with China would not make their government any less “evil” any more than it has had an influence in North Korea, Iran, Saddam’s Iraq or any other country. And as a major trading partner, we can exert a lot more positive influence than we can than with isolation and angry rhetoric.
Corporations are simply amoral structures that allow individuals do to business. The actions of a corporation are essentially the actions of those individuals who buy what a corporation is selling. It is ridiculous to ask if coprorations have any moral responsibility. You should be asking if consumers have any moral responsibility.
As I understand it corporations are a legal entity and legally they have no such responsibility. Do you think that citizens of all nations should demand that the legal characterization of corporations should be changed?
A corporation is a group of people. No “corporation” exists without the people in it. There isn’t a sort of Platonic form of the corporation. When we ask if the corporation has a certain responsibility, what are we referring to? Probably not the machines sitting on the shop floor or the stack of paperwork that identifies the assets that comprise the company. They’re inanimate objects. We’re probably referring to the people who show up and do stuff with the machines, etc.
Every person has moral responsibilities. These moral responsibilites go way beyond making a buck for the owners of whatever company you happen to draw pay from.
Are you asking if there is a legal requirement for employees of corporations to behave morally? I think that’s a different question than “should employees of corporations behave morally.” Also, I’m not sure I understand your use of the word “fiction” here.
Do nations have any moral responsibility? Do churches? Do schools? Do any other organizations?
I’m not sure. I have a hard time thinking of an abstract entity, like a corporation, as having moral responsibility. But if they don’t, the people who make the decisions for them sure as heck do. The moral responsibility has to lie somewhere, either in the corporation itself or in the people who run it. You can’t have it both ways: the CEO can’t say “I’m just acting for the good of the corporation; my personal ethics don’t enter into my running of the company” and then say that the corporation has no responsibility to act rightly.
Would a mass boycott of all business dealings with China make life better or worse for Chinese people? For Americans?
Morality should be forward-looking, not regressive.
(Regressive? Is that a proper antonym for “forward-looking”? I don’t know.)
Edit: Oh, right, the OP. There’s no moral responsibility for corporations per se, but individuals have moral responsibilities in everything they do, including their business dealings. Unfortunately, it seems like stockholders and CEOs tend to forget that.
There are different ways to interpret “responsibility.” Some laws make a person (legally) responsible. Moral responsibility is a social construction. If I sleep around and mislead my mates as to my intentions, most would say that is immoral. But no one can stop me using legal channels. It’s not against the law to be promiscuous. So technically, a corporation is morally responsible only to its shareholders moral outlook, whatever that be.
Corporations are legal persons by virtue of a legal fiction that allows them to be considered as such, and their behavior reflects that. It’s important to realize that the corporate personages are mostly sociopaths. Once you consider that, their behavior is more easily predicted.