Canuck wrote:Your assuming Corporations have souls or ethics... you assume wrong.
In the case of Google, I think they are young enough that actual ethics MAY come into play there. But I doubt if that will last.
In the case of large telecommunications companies? Nah, I wasn't thinking they were ethical. I work for a large telecommunications company, I KNOW how they think. They want to avoid being sued or penalized. Attempting to follow the law and be "ethical" is a good way to reduce your chances of being sued or penalized.
So what I said still stands. legal penalties for companies that cooperate with the government in shaky legal situations like this is kind of an unfair trade practice. If the government TELLS them to do something, and they cooperate, it would have to be a VERY clear case of an illegal order for me to be convinced the company should be held responsible.
AND, doing business with companies that take stands you approve of is a good way of encouraging them to continue taking those kinds of stands. Money is what they are about. Reward them with it, or penalize them by taking it away. You are absolutely correct that it's not "ethics" as individuals think of it, but it's the way to get the behavior you want out of large corporations.
It still comes down to what foil has been saying, its an issue of accountability. And in this case I think the government may be held accountable, but probably not the corporations.
Just to point this out as clearly as possible: as I said, I work for a large telecommunications company. They keep making us take "ethics training". We laugh because we think upper management needs it, not us peons.
But the courses are very interesting. The focus is BLATANTLY that unethical behavior is behavior that will hurt the company.
Now don't misunderstand, the company recognizes that illegal behavior might help the company in the short term, but causes much more damage in the long term, so the course emphasized at every point that no employee was EVER to break the law. But it was quite clear WHY. Breaking the law will cost the company MONEY.
The company gave us repeated courses on avoiding discrimination in the workplace. But why? Not because discrimination was wrong, but because discrimination hurt the company in two ways. 1: Discrimination will keep the best workers from rising to the level where they can do the company the most good, and therefore discrimination costs the company money. 2: Discrimination will result in legal action that costs the company money.
So yes, it's all about money with most large corporations, but being a capitalism, we need to give them the fairest chance we can to avoid losing money to legal penalties. And penalizing a company that followed orders coming from the very top of the government is just not very fair trade practice.
