1. What are four general obligations of corporations?
Before laying out answers to these questions on corporate ethics, I think it is important to lay out a basic framework for talking about corporations in the first place. First, the old model of seeing a corporation as a well-maintained machine is no longer salient or useful to the analysis of ethics. Second, we need to substitute a new model of the corporation as organism. This switch should make clear the ethical issues. It will also help managers and employees to overcome some destructive assumptions; that everything is a resource, that resources are unlimited, that the corporation must grow to survive, that the purpose of the state is to legitimize exploitation, that the purpose of humanity is to produce and consume, and that the purpose of the universe is to supply human and corporate desires. Additionally, the machine analogy of the corporation leads to false economic assumptions; that mass production is most efficient, obsolescence is necessary for growth, that people's base desires are satisfied by advertised products, and that cost is more important than quality (Wittbecker, 2). By making this switch of analogies, it will be more clear that four general obligations of corporations are: stability (people depend on corporations for existential survival), cooperation (with human and non-human resources), justice (within the corporation's loci of operation), and environmental/ecological responsibility (because corporations share the earth with everyone).
Corporations need to remain stable for many reasons. Consumers rely on corporations' products for reasons ranging from health to wellness to happiness. Also, employees of a corporation directly rely on their weekly paycheck. In an indirect way, corporate stability factors into the greater community's well-being by being a payer of property and state taxes, by playing a part in a supply chain, and by partic...