Pringles tube tries to wake from 'recycling nightmare'

No, I'm saying that considering corporations to be subjects of morality at all is pointless, and that one ought to consider what they want corporations to do to acheive moral ends, and then work to establish structures to at least incentivize that, if not actually constrain them to it.

> Just because there's an easy way for a collective of people to absolve their moral responsibilities by getting a little certificate that says "We're a corporation" doesn't make it right.

I think you start from a false premise here; that it is of no value to analyze corporations as if they were moral actors does not in any way absolve any natural persons for the immorality of any actions they undertake in or around a corporate structure.

It just removes the ability to pass blame for immorality off on to an abstraction, and focuses it on the people responsible for the abstraction (which, for creatures of law, in addition to any others includes those responsible for the law, either as lawmakers or as electors thereof.)

There was a story on here today about the dilemma a roman consul faced because the laws were contradictory. It was fine to murder for revenge, in fact Roman law didn't get involved in revenge or murders really, but patricide was viewed as an absolute wrong, a no-no. The woman had murder her Mum in revenge as the Mum had killed her grand-children to spite her Daughter. It was a real dilemma, revenge is fine, and it was a good reason for revenge, but parricide is an absolute wrong.

Does that sound normal?

Of course not TO US.

I think that in the future, today's corporate law will be viewed just as asinine and bizarre. Corporations poisoning people by flooding chemicals into rivers or releasing gasses or toxins, murdering people with product defects they decided not recall or destroying society's common goods, but all the people involved were let free rather than incarcerated for 20 years as accessories to murder? Thousands of people colluding to murder people with cigarettes when they knew how lethal they were? Fine. Because they were "employees" and the "person" doing it was a legal figment called a corporation?

A bunch of black people in America get incarcerated for simply being friends/near the murderer, but a bunch of white people who all spent years or even decades covering up systematic mass-murder get to walk away? Man, when you actually think about it it's mind-blowing. White collar crime is so easy to get away with.

It's a convenient fabrication that makes sense only when you're inside the system.

I'm a pragmatist, it's not going to change, it's the way it is, but otoh you simply can't see the wood for the trees. You think, somehow, it's right.

That's because companies don't want us to reduce or in many cases reuse, but recycle makes everyone feel good inside (even though in many cases even that doesn't happen, but we as consumers don't care).

Is it pointless to consider political parties to be subjects of morality? Is it meaningless to say "The Nazi Party is bad."? If so, what is meaningfully different between a political party, a corporation, or any other kind of organized collective activity?

> It just removes the ability to pass blame for immorality off on to an abstraction, and focuses it on the people responsible for the abstraction (which, for creatures of law, in addition to any others includes those responsible for the law, either as lawmakers or as electors thereof.)

I think I get what you're saying. We should focus on the people, not the group, because the people can be punished. But I think that's an ineffective mindset.

The entire reason individuals organize into groups is because they can do more as a group than they could have accomplished as individuals.

If we don't allow our moral code to also operate at the group level, then it will always be at a disadvantage compared to the people whose organized behavior has moral outcomes with strong economies of scale.

We should treat individuals and groups as moral actors. We should be willing to say, "this corporation as an emergent behavior of its otherwise moral individuals did a bad thing, so should thus be dissolved."