Reading 08

Corporate personhood is the idea that a corporation as a whole has some of the same rights that its people (owners, employees, etc.) have. For example, a corporation has the right to have contracts between itself and others in the same way that people can have a contract with another. There is an ongoing debate over to what degree or extent corporations have the same rights as an individual person. One of the readings, How Corporations Got The Same Rights As people (But Don’t Ever Go to Jail, brings out a good point when it states the difficultly of identifying who is responsible for breaking a law when looking at a group. It is relatively easy to do this on a person to person scale but by giving a corporation the same rights as those people makes some cases very difficult to punish. Oftentimes, we see the CEO or owner of a company take responsibility for an illegal action taken by a corporation because of this and there is a hunt for evidence to prove that the individual did know about the actions breaking the law.
            From my previous knowledge and the readings, I do not think that IBM was ethical in doing business with Nazi Germany. Too my understanding, IBM had knowledge of how and for what purpose their technology was being used by the Nazis. Even if it was not made clear to IBM that their technology was being used to violate human rights, the readings suggest that IBM played an active role in servicing and maintaining devices that were being used. I have a very hard time believing that through the up keeping process and through the news the decision makers at IBM did not realize that their products and services were being used in an unjust way. Once there was reasonable suspicion that what IBM was providing the Nazis with was being used illegally, I believe IBM should have cut ties with their customers. While this process would most likely violate a contract that was agreed upon between the two parties, I believe IBM had the moral obligation to do so.
In this case and in others like this, I do not necessarily believe that a company should be held accountable for the immoral use of their products. For example, I do not believe a gun manufacturing company can be held liable for the actions of someone who uses a gun to murder someone. However, while I believe the gun manufacturer should not be punished for this murder, I think that they should learn from these crimes and put in safety measures to try to avoid situations like that from happening again. That being said, yes, I do believe that corporations should refrain from doing business with unethical organizations.
          I do believe that corporations should be held to the same moral and ethical obligations and responsibilities as individual people are. On a very basic level, if a person is not allowed to do something then in no way is it acceptable for a group of people to do that same thing. This logic can and should be applied to corporations.

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