"The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits"

[long board]

[QUOTE=SlowToady;3755517]while doing some reading/research for an ethics paper for a class. QUOTE]

Hey Slow, what's the 'ethics' paper you're writing about?

[SlowToady]

For the most part, what we have to do is read "An Enemy of the People" then choose an ethical framework with which to analyze the play (or at least parts of it), and then apply it to real life business situations of our choosing. Fun stuff.

[long board]

Ethical framework? Not sure what that means. Do you mean if they acted ethically, or unethically? Corporations can't be ethical or unethical, only the people who run them can be either. But if a corporation existed in a vacuum, its only goal is to achieve Pareto Optimality. Tell me more about what the prof wants in the paper.

[Superman]

Originally Posted by YTNUKLR

......We have to look to the marginal utility of any given dollar. ......

Bingo. And in a society as affluent as we are, you've got to sometimes wonder whether some of the heat from our economic furnace might be better used on people who are cold, as opposed to people that additional warmth might not really benefit. Well, I gues you don't HAVE to wonder that if your focus has little to do with social responsibility.

And yeah, I've heard all about the notion that a multibillionaire who finds a way to make another fifty million dollars provides an immense benefit to poor people. So save it.

[DanielDudley]

Originally Posted by Wayne at Pelican Parts

I think the socially responsibility of corporations is to serve their customers. Doing a good job of that typically generates good profits - the two go hand in hand, and in any business must be balanced. That is at least how this corporation (Pelican Inc) works...

-Wayne

And of course to pay a living wage. Good business models suggest that every person involved in a transaction must benefit. And of course one needs to make a profit to ensure future service to customers and employees like.

[Racerbvd]

Originally Posted by DanielDudley

And of course to pay a living wage. Good business models suggest that every person involved in a transaction must benefit. And of course one needs to make a profit to ensure future service to customers and employees like.

That is a given, any business is only as good as its employees, and we take good care of ours. It cost more to rehire & retrain than to retain good people. There have been times when I didn't get a check, but those who work for us did, that is just one of the things people forget about, at the end of the day, I'm still working.

[long board]

Originally Posted by long board

Ethical framework?

Hey Slow, if you need help with that paper, this site might help.

http://ethics.sandiego.edu/index.asp

[jyl]

I agree that a corporation's job is to maximize its profits and hence its shareholders' wealth.

It should do this using any legal means possible.

- Shutting down US factories, outsourcing manufacturing to China.
- Laying off US engineers, moving R&D to India.
- Replacing US vendors with low-cost suppliers in Vietnam and Indonesia.
- Moving operations and intellectual property to foreign subsidiaries, to avoid paying US taxes.
- Eliminating health insurance for low-level employees.
- Terminating medical benefits for retirees.
- Incorporating in tax haven countries.

Its all good!

When investors meet with managements, they press on this stuff. Why haven't more operations been moved to China. Can't they be faster at shifting vendors to low-cost countries? Can they cut headcount? Implement a tax reduction strategy? Outsource R&D and manufacturing? Etc.

Investors l-o-v-e profit maximization.

Investors also love monopolies and oligopolies. And polluters who don't have to pay for polluting.

These are some of our fa-vor-ite things. {insert trill here}

[WI wide body]

Originally Posted by Wayne at Pelican Parts

I think the socially responsibility of corporations is to serve their customers. Doing a good job of that typically generates good profits - the two go hand in hand, and in any business must be balanced. That is at least how this corporation (Pelican Inc) works...

-Wayne

First of all, guys like you should be running more large American companies!

But Wayne, would it not get a bit dicey if, to serve your customers better and to stay in business, you were forced to use products or services that you KNEW were taking jobs away from Americans.

I never ran a company but I did have to deal with the loss of American jobs thing when I was doing foreign assignments for my company. I knew that if I did what I was being paid to do (increase the productivity and efficiency of foreign manufacturing plants) I was positively taking jobs away from workers in our domestic plants.

No easy answers to the globalization mess.

[long board]

Originally Posted by jyl

Its all good! {insert trill here}

[Carrman]

Like Wayne said, profits and social responsibility are not mutually exclusive. Some of the posters here seem to think that a corporation is prohibited from doing anything socially beneficial, charitable or responsible.

In addition to doing things like providing jobs, etc., for-profit corporations and business donate (i.e., give) billions of dollars every year to all sorts of worthy causes.

And does a corporation have a conscience? Well, I guess as a non-human business form, it doesn't. But every business is run by people, and they exercise their conscience when they make a decision for the business. While of course profit is the main motive, they do have a conscience.

For example, if faced with a decision of making an additional profit of $1 per year at the cost of laying off 100 workers, I doubt any corporation in the world would lay off the workers. If the corporation truly had no conscience, and were driven, like a consciousless computer, solely by profit, you would not get that result. (Even assuming that there were no other negatives from firing the employees, i.e., no negative publicity, etc.) The humans making the decision just wouldn't let it happen.

[long board]

QUOTE=Carrman;3757726] The humans making the decision just wouldn't let it happen.[/QUOTE]

That depends on whether “the ends justify the means, or the means justify the end” Not every corp thinks the same, I’m sure Enron didn’t give a rats ass about the ends, until of course they got caught. There are great examples of corps “doing the right thing,” and great examples of corps doing the wrong thing. The problem is not what is right and what is wrong, all of us have an opinion, the question is: Who decides?

[WI wide body]

Originally Posted by long board

QUOTE=Carrman;3757726] The humans making the decision just wouldn't let it happen.

That depends on whether “the ends justify the means, or the means justify the end” Not every corp thinks the same, I’m sure Enron didn’t give a rats ass about the ends, until of course they got caught. There are great examples of corps “doing the right thing,” and great examples of corps doing the wrong thing. The problem is not what is right and what is wrong, all of us have an opinion, the question is: Who decides?[/QUOTE]

Actually, over the past few decades there seems to be little doubt what direction the "human" corporate leadership in the USA has chosen to take.

[RWebb]

No one has mentioned the invisible hand job yet...

[Carrman]

Originally Posted by long board

QUOTE=Carrman;3757726] The humans making the decision just wouldn't let it happen.

Not every corp thinks the same, I’m sure Enron didn’t give a rats ass about the ends, until of course they got caught. [/QUOTE]

That's the flip side of having a good conscience - the humans can also make the corp behave criminally.

just like people, corps are a mixed bag