Corporations are (made up of) people, my friend! ;-)
The whole purpose of a company is to absolve the individuals involved of some legal consequences. I think right now we are having a debate over exactly how far that absolution extends.
I could imagine a situation where each individual was acting ethically, but the emergent behavior was still unethical. For example, each individual manager might be promoting the worker they feel is best-qualified for the job, but over-all hiring patterns end up being discriminatory due to small, unnoticed biases. Corporations are emergent systems, much like programs themselves. Race conditions, concurrency, stampeding herd dynamics, failing to have anyone be responsible for important considerations: all the downfalls of parallelism apply to human organizations as well.
"Corporations are (made up of) people, my friend! ;-)"
That's funny because for the past few months, my mind has replayed Romney's quote every time I've heard someone say 'corporation'. I don't know why, it just happens.
You make some good points, of course. A company is a single entity after all.
The whole purpose of a company is to absolve the individuals involved of some legal consequences. I think right now we are having a debate over exactly how far that absolution extends.
I could imagine a situation where each individual was acting ethically, but the emergent behavior was still unethical. For example, each individual manager might be promoting the worker they feel is best-qualified for the job, but over-all hiring patterns end up being discriminatory due to small, unnoticed biases. Corporations are emergent systems, much like programs themselves. Race conditions, concurrency, stampeding herd dynamics, failing to have anyone be responsible for important considerations: all the downfalls of parallelism apply to human organizations as well.