CSR: Corporate Social Responsibility

I’d like to talk about corporations and moral standards. This has been a debated topic over the past couple years, but I personally believe that corporations shouldn’t be held to moral standards.
First, holding corporations to moral standards would substantially decrease their efficiency and power in the market. Since a business must survive in the competitive marketplace, it cannot afford to be ethically better to the point of sacrificing profit and gain without corresponding benefit.

Second, holding corporations as a whole to moral standards would unjustly punish innocent people. For example, if an executive makes a bad decision and the corporation is held responsible instead of the individual, then innocent employees will be chastised when they didn’t do anything wrong.



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Lastly, holding corporations to moral standards would destroy life on Earth.
First of all, the United States economy is on the brink of collapse. US trade deficits and imports shadow exports and profit. The dollar has lost about one third of its value against other major currencies since 2002, and has been falling faster. Oil costs are flying high due to tremors in the Middle East. Recent economic reports and corporate earning statements show an economy rapidly losing steam.
Second, corporations are necessary entities in our economy. Our economy needs corporations to invest in advanced products and facilities, crack sophisticated global markets, and push the limits of our productivity and our expertise. An economy needs corporations to have a fair degree of agility in responding to changing market conditions, and too many restrictions on layoffs hurt the ability of the economy to remain competitive. Large corporations are necessary to achieve those governmental and social necessities that small enterprises are incapable of providing.
Like I said before, holding corporations to moral standards would break their value. Thus holding corporations to moral standards would completely destroy the corporate backbone of our market, throwing the economy into ruin.
The collapse of our economy would result in extreme loss of life. Think about the mother of all global meltdowns: the Great Depression. U.S. stocks began to collapse, and there were similar horror stories worldwide. But the biggest impact of the Depression was World War II. The Depression brought Adolf Hitler to power in Germany, undermined the ability of moderates to oppose Joseph Stalin's power in Russia, and convinced the Japanese military that the country had no choice but to build an Asian empire. Let the world economy crash far enough, and the rules change. Now that more powerful nuclear weapons exist and tension is high on the doomsday clock, a collapse in the economy would result in global terror and genocide, so we shouldn’t hold corporations to moral standards.