The Myth of the Corporate Soul

Corporations are people, or at least the legal equivalent thereof.  The world changed on January 21, 2010.   With little fanfare, corporations became people.  On that date the Supreme Court of the United States decided that corporations, be they American or foreign, are afforded the same rights as a single individual when it comes to contributing money to a political cause or candidate.  The same applies to corporations speaking their mind through lobbyists.  

There are many discussions that might follow, but a perhaps interesting inquiry considers the moral and ethical choices a 'corporation' might make.  Does a corporation have a guiding conscience?  Is there a 'knowing what's right' apart from any other criteria that constrains the decision-making process and guides the whole of the organization?

Of course not.  Despite the legal word-play, corporations are not people.  

Corporate governance is primarily a matter of state law. There are thousands of businesses incorporated in Delaware simply because laws there are more lenient regarding the obligations that directors have to shareholders.

Within that constraint of law (or not), the business model governs the corporation, and the goal is profit.

Examples of corporations taking advantage of laborers and consumers are many. Enron bragged of how they cheated grandmothers who depended on them for electricity in California and cheated their own employees by recommending they buy more stock in their pension funds as company executives were selling. Tyco's top officers used millions of investor dollars for their own personal expenses. American Airlines' former chairman secretly took huge pay increases while negotiating pay cuts for the company's pilots, flight attendants and mechanics.   ~The Global Policy Forum

Wall Street and the banking industry have illustrated the consciencelessness of the corporation. Lacking an ethical governance and oversight, the corporation is just a hungry animal in violent competition for its food.

A mild surprise in the inquiry:  it isn't just the corporations; investors behave much the same way.

"When we looked at the investors, we ran a series of very interesting studies on how people would invest in pension funds. We literally gave them pension fund opportunities where there were social issues embedded in the portfolios they could invest in. What we found is they underinvested in social investment funds, even when it was quite irrational for them to do so – they seemed to discount those funds relative to funds that didn’t have these components.

When we queried people and we asked them, “Well, why are you doing this?” they were fundamentally looking not at the current returns, but basically believing that ultimately they would be forced to make sacrifices in their dividends and the payouts they would receive in the future ...."  Karl Moore of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University, talking management for The Globe and Mail

There are people of genuine conscience.  Our difficulties arise as we attempt to regulate such things as morality in the business realm.  Those with Hobby Lobby went to court on the issue of abortifacient contraceptives.  It's a valid point that they could not in good conscience support or endorse or provide the means of abortion.  But those are people speaking on how they choose to live and do business. A corporation itself has no thoughts on the subject.

The narrow focus on the contraceptive question is unfortunate.  The issues of conscience in business go far beyond.  Questions of fair labor practices and wages, ethical suppliers and manufacturers, and even to the utility of offered products compared to pointless luxury.  Can government regulation resolve these?  Perhaps not.

Our well-intended efforts to legislate morality in the business world must walk a narrow line.  On one side, it's free enterprise; on the other it's government oppression.  Elements of socialism hover in the wings.  Ideas?  What's the underlying problem?

Independence Day

"This is the only country where you can come with just $100 in your pocket and get a PhD in nuclear engineering," she said with a great smile as she prepared for her citizenship ceremony.

"When a boy is born," an Asian mother tells us, "there is celebration. But when a girl is born, nothing."

"When I was a child," a young lady tells us, "all my dreams were taken from me just because I was a girl born in Iran."

"I saw a fellow walking his dog, and the dog had socks on his feet," one fellow remembers.  "Why, I asked."
   "Because the pavement is hot."
"I was amazed, people here care about such things, even a dog's feelings.  Humans are not treated like that in Iraq.  People in Iraq would wish be an animal in America."

Each of these folks were interviewed on the day they became U.S. citizens.  They, and a million more every year, come to America, hoping for a chance to be free.  And not to America alone, for there are many countries who share the vision.

Tahrir Square during the Cairo Revolution

So much is discoverable in the realm of human rights, the inalienable rights which many of us perhaps take for granted.  The stories of escape to freedom are almost endless, and all are deeply moving.  It helps our perspective to remember.

"The great struggle is not for power and dominance, but for the precious life and freedom of each and every individual."  

Happy 4th of July!

Truth Costs

Thomas Nagel, professor of philosophy at New York University, one of America’s leading institutions, candidly wrote, "I want atheism to be true. And I’m made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t that I don’t believe in God and naturally hope that I’m right in my beliefs, it’s that I hope there is no God. I don’t want there to be a God. I don’t want the universe to be like that."¹

Aldous Huxley is even more candid in exposing that his personal biases - even more than the evidence - influenced his rejection of God. In Ends and Means, he writes, "I wanted to believe the Darwinian idea. I chose to believe it not because I think there was enormous evidence for it, nor because I believed it had the full authority to give interpretation to my origins, but I chose to believe it because it delivered me from trying to find meaning and freed me to my own erotic passions."²

Huxley, an intelligent and erudite thinker, did not embrace evolution because of the evidence.  Nor did he reject God for the lack of it.  Rather, he wanted to rid himself of the burden of trying to find meaning. He wanted no sexual restrictions.  In other words, he did not want to pay the cost associated with belief in God. For Huxley, disbelief was not a matter of the mind, but a matter of the heart and will.

~Abdu Murray, What Truth Costs

Nagel and Huxley, how much like these two are we in our leanings?  Do we choose our worldview and personal convictions from knowledge or from preference?  Or from fear of the implications?  Troublesome questions on every side of the issue.

“Until the heart is open, the ears remain closed.”

________________________________________________________________________________

¹ Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 130, emphasis added. Interestingly, Nagel has recently released a book in which he concedes to some degree the credibility of the evidence for a non-material cause of the universe. See Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
² Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means (London: Chatt & Windus, 1946), 310.

Water, no ice

"The findings are striking," NOAA's Kathryn Sullivan, acting administrator, says. "Our planet as a whole is becoming a warmer place."

Scientists are reluctant to point directly to the cause of the changes in our climate, but the annual reports are typically used by the federal government to prepare for the future, and in June president Obama used his climate address to direct government agencies to begin planning for decades of warming atmosphere and rising seas.

Go to the NOAA dashboard for updated information

The biggest changes in the climate in 2012 were in the Arctic and in Greenland. According to the report, the Arctic warmed at about twice the rate of lower latitudes. By June 2012, snow cover had fallen to its lowest levels since the record began. By September 2012, sea-ice cover had retreated to its lowest levels since the beginning of satellite records, falling to 1.32 million square miles.

That was, the report noted, 18% lower than the previous low set in 2007, and 54% lower than the mark for 1980.

The changes were widespread on land as well with record warm permafrost temperatures in Alaska and in the Canadian Arctic. In July last year, Greenland experienced surface melting on 97% of the ice sheet. The record-breaking events indicate an era of "new normal" for the climate, the researchers said.

"The record or near-records being reported from year to year in the Arctic are no longer anomalies or exceptions," said Jackie Richter-Menge, a civil engineer with the US army corps of engineers. "Really they have become the rule for us, for the norm that we see in the Arctic and that we expect to see for the foreseeable future."

The Arctic ice sheet has shrunk so much that National Geographic is having to make what it calls “drastic” changes to its atlas.

That ice melt was also a major cause of sea-level rise, the report found. Global sea levels rose to record highs last year, after being depressed during the first half of 2011 because of the effects of La Niña. The average global sea level last year was 1.4 inches above the 1993-2010 average.
"Over the past seven years or so, it appears that the ice melt is contributing more than twice as much to the global sea level rise compared with warming waters," said Jessica Blunden, a climatologist at NOAA's national climatic data center.


And for those persistent naysayers regarding climate change, just put the ice back and we'll call it even.

(Did we cause the warming trend with our use of fossil fuels?  The cause of warming is a continuing question, but the fact that it is happening appears to be rather well established.)

Your Choice?

Bars of soap along with other common products;
corn meal, rice, salt, sugar, oil, pasta ...

At the store, we've got plenty of choices for bathing products. They're all one or another variety of soap, usually with stuff added.  They're almost all necessary, of course.

For comparison, note the blue bars in the photo (right).

That's soap in Africa and perhaps for much of the world. The large bar is cut off in chunks and used for laundry, for bathing, for hair washing, and pretty much everything along that line.  It's not bad, really.  It's used in school and home and at the river where they do laundry and dishes, and it works fine.  

So how much does our culture shape us?  We know you have to have at least five kinds of soap, and you can't dry clothes without using a softener sheet, and men and women can't use the same deodorant.  True?  OK, five kinds of soap: bath, hair, dish, laundry, and nice smelling stuff for shaving.  And they all use similar ingredients with stuff added for this or that reason; perhaps mostly for smell.

Do we maybe over-do it a bit?  The proliferation of stuff in our lives is in some measure force-fed to us by a profit-driven marketplace and social acquiescence.  Much if not most of it all isn't worth the time and effort, much less the money.

You can choose, despite the social and marketplace pressures.  You can strive to have everything and lots of it, like your culture insists, or you could choose ... to live simply, and leave some room in your budget thanks to the absence of excess.  Then you could do things with your kids or help others or put your kids through school without going into debt, perhaps.  Or travel.  Thoughts?

Just an aside, the cost of the bathing products (top, left) would pay for the products and school uniforms (top, right) plus tuition and fees for a semester, around $45 or so.  Feel like joining the assistance effort?  It's tax deductible!

And on a fun note, I took some kids with me on a trip to a little grocery store for momma.  One pre-teen discovered the nice smelling bath soap (Dial or Dove or something like that); she figured it was really special, so she excitedly asked if I could buy a bar for the kids to use.  Of course.

What matters now?

What matters most?

Lots of time gets expended on less important things. Life tends to consume whatever time is available.

Today, there are people near and far that can and perhaps should be the joy of our lives.  

(The phone rings; it's Walter from Kenya!  He calls to say hello and thanks because we send him a little money each month. He's a polio survivor, lives in a wheelchair, and visited me when I was injured and bedridden in Kenya. He lives in absolute simplicity. He's never asked for anything, and he's taught me more about character and love than most folks in my life. His speech is difficult because of the polio, but we talk regularly and laugh a lot, and he prays for us every day.  He's a treasure.)