Evil: yes or no?

Lately I've been thinking about corporations and evil.

A person with whom I've been having sporadic corporations wants to write about, if I understand correctly, a business ethic, perhaps modeled on Quaker beliefs. Fair enough (or not, this is far enough outside my area of interest that I'm not sure if anything worthwhile has been written, and if not, why not). She has been running into the problem that most of the people that she's talked to so far balk at the idea: corporations are evil! (I'm not sure if people are actually saying this or simply implying it, but the message seems to be clear regardless.)

Are corporations evil? Maybe not. I'm not an utilitarian, and scoff at consequentialist ethics in general. (My scoffing was once laughed at by Eva Dadlez, after which we argued about the proper interpretation of Homer Simpson hiding a gun in the vegetable crisper.) This is relevant because, on utilitarian grounds, many corporation are evil right on their face: do they create, on the whole, more pain or more pleasure? (I can appreciate the practical aspect of this kind of thinking on Buddhist grounds, but there the question is about individual conduct.)

In my applied ethics classes, I like to go through various approaches one at a time; having sort of dealt with utilitarianism, what might Aristotle say? Funny thing with that (and I'm sure some people would argue with this statement, but that would lead to a more technical argument than I want to present here) is that Aristotle doesn't really have a concept of "evil" per se. Also, insofar as his ethics aims at eudaimonia, it doesn't apply to entities such as corporations at all.

The same is true using Kant's approach: corporations aren't people, therefore can't be evil. The people who run or manage them might be evil, but that is (if I understand my interlocutors concern correctly) a different question. Just to be clear: Kant understands "evil" as knowing the right actions - knowing the appropriate maxim that one could apply as a universal law - and then ignoring it. (I'll come back to Kant though, since that doesn't exhaust the possibilities.)

I would usually proceed to a feminist ethic of care, but there are two problems. First, I don't know how someone, working in the care tradition, would define evil in a way that didn't simply sound Kantian (knowing the right action, doing something else). Second, I wouldn't at all be surprised if someone had made a fairly explicitly anti-corporate argument using the ethics of care. (Maybe I'm wrong, and maybe I should go look that up, but I'm not going to tonight.)

The important thing to note here is that, looking at the question using three of the four dominant approaches in western ethics, corporations aren't evil for the simple reason that they aren't persons, and therefore can't be evil. It's a category error, but not an exoneration of corporations; there are other ways of looking at the problem.

How do corporations look at people? Primarily as employees and customers. There are too many secondary ways to develop a comprehensive list, but in general I'm interested in people affected by corporations in ways that aren't primarily economic (even if they have economic impact). This would include people harmed by the pollution, or, positively, beneficiaries of corporately funded public works, such as parks. Setting the secondary relations aside (even though these are really important!) and noting that a single person can fall into many categories at once (as employee, customer, and community member), I start with Milton Friedman's assertion that purpose of business - it's sole purpose - is to make a profit.

Where does the profit come from? Two sources: employees and customers, specifically, the difference between the value of the labor and how much the worker gets paid, or the difference between the cost of something and what the customers pays. (The particular analysis is irrelevant to my larger point: part of the money changing hands stays in someone's hand: that's the profit. I can provide more explicit examples of what I'm talking about later if anyone wants them, but I'm purposefully keeping the analysis generic and abstract here.) Either way - and here I'm returning to Kantian analysis - people are mere objects, interchangeable, expendable, because the only point is to make a profit.

Just to connect the dots, it is fundamental to Kant's ethics that we treat people as having dignity, not merely as objects; using this formulation, corporations can only be evil. I would still argue that, since they're not people, they can't form intentions. If that absolves them of the possibility of being individually evil (i.e., evil in the way that persons are evil), I would say that corporations are structurally evil. They cannot be good without operating as something other than corporations: they become mutual aid societies, or churches, or something else (there are a lot of organizations like that, and they don't always fall into clear categories).

A different (and possibly more direct) approach to this question might be to note that capitalism as a system operates because of coveting: you want something that someone else has (not necessarily the very thing, but one like it, bigger, better). The point of advertising is to create desires we didn't have before: e.g., when my dad first told me about "cell phones" in the eighties, I wondered why anyone would possibly want one. (Perhaps I'm underestimating the desire that existed at the time for such a thing.)

To summarize: corporations are evil, but not in the way that people are evil. They are evil because they are an essential part of a fundamentally flawed system. A description of an alternative system can be found in that radical book, the Bible: Acts 4:34-35:

"There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need."

But you already knew I was a dirty hippy.