Archive for the ‘stakeholders’ Category
Reverse Discrimination in High-Profile Hiring
Filed under: activism, decision-making, discrimination, governance, leadership, stakeholders, values |
Comments (5) Discrimination has a bad name, in part because what we typically mean by the word “discrimination” is more like “unjustified discrimination” or “discrimination on morally-irrelevant grounds.” But discrimination per se — even discrimination based on normally-irrelevant characteristics like race or disability — is not always bad. In a very few cases, discrimination is rooted in bona fide job requirements. The classic example is that it’s OK to discriminate against the visually impaired if you’re hiring pilots; having good eye-sight is a bona fide requirement for being a pilot. Being white, on the other hand, is not.
For a recent controversy over reverse discrimination (or rather over a failure to engage in such discrimination) see this recent case from Halifax, Nova Scotia. By Clare Mellor, for the Chronicle Herald: Africville trust hiring prompts some anger: Choosing white minister ‘insulting’
Some members of Nova Scotia’s black community say they are outraged that a white person has been hired as executive director of the Africville Heritage Trust and are calling for her resignation.
“I find it insulting to all black people,” said Burnley (Rocky) Jones, a local lawyer and well-known human rights activist.
“Surely we, within our community, have many people fully qualified to do such a job.”
The trust was set up to establish a memorial to Africville, a major African-Nova Scotian community destroyed on the orders of Halifax officials in the 1960s.
The trust’s board of directors, which includes six representatives of the Africville community, recently hired Carole Nixon, a white Anglican minister, for the position….
So-called “reverse discrimination” is challenging, ethically. Preferential hiring of individuals from historically-disadvantaged groups can be a ham-fisted way to right past wrongs. But in at least some cases — particularly cases involving high-profile positions — the symbolic significance of the job in question has to at least be considered. (A very similar controversy arose a couple of years ago, when the Canadian National Institute for the Blind hired its first non-blind CEO.)
The first thing to note about the Halifax / Africville case is that it’s not primarily a black-vs-white dispute. It’s clear that those who oppose the hire don’t speak for Halifax’s entire black community. The Board of Directors of the Africville Trust is the body that did the hiring, and although detailed information about the composition of the Board is hard to find, the article cited above does say that the Board “includes six representatives of the Africville [i.e., black] community.” That doesn’t change the fundamental ethical questions at stake, but it does sweep away any thought that this is just an us-vs-them debate.
It’s also worth pointing out a legal worry, here. Hiring based on race is generally wrong, and typically illegal. It’s not clear to me (a non-lawyer) that excluding non-blacks from consideration for a job like this would even be legal. Do the critics of this hire simply think that the job posting should have said “Whites Need Not Apply?” Likely not. But a subtler position is logically open to them, anyway, namely a position that says something like “if in doubt, give the job to the black candidate” (based perhaps on a presumption of greater personal understanding of the issues at stake). But again, I don’t know whether that would be legal. (Does anyone reading this know?) And surely no on really wants to settle, as one activist quoted in the story suggests, for a candidate who is merely “fully qualified”. After all, there might well be a number of “fully qualified” candidates, and so you’re still going to need to make a decision. And if the job is important, then we likely want it filled not just by someone qualified, but by the most qualified person.
But on the other hand, critics of this decision do have a point, and that has to do with the symbolic value that would attach to putting a black person in charge of the Africville Trust. It’s not hard to see that selecting a black man or woman for this kind of leadership role would send a certain kind of message, and maybe give black kids in Halifax another positive role-model, one more non-white individual occupying a position of prestige and influence.
All in all, I’m not sure what to think about this one. But one thing I’m pretty sure of is this: if you think a case like this has a clear and simple answer, you’re probably not thinking about it hard enough.
Pipeline Leaks and Stakeholder Theory
Filed under: accountability, corporate citizenship, corporations, CSR, management, pollution, shareholders, stakeholders |
Comments (2) When oil spills in a forest, does everybody matter? That’s the question posed by the events recounted in this recent CBC story: Wrigley residents voice pipeline spill concerns.
The story is about an Enbridge pipeline that sprung a leak in a tiny, remote town in Canada’s Northwest Territories. Not surprisingly, residents of tiny Wrigley are unhappy about the spill, and so Enbridge has to figure out not just what to do about the spill (i.e., how to clean it up) but what to do about the people of Wrigley. More generally, managers at Enbridge have got to figure out, on an ongoing basis, what their obligations are, and to whom those obligations are owed.
There’s an older school of thought (or more likely a caricature of an older school of thought) according to which shareholders are the only ones whose interests really need to be taken seriously. According to this view, an oil company’s managers’ only real obligations are owed to shareholders. After all, says this view, shareholders own the company, and they’re the ones who (indirectly) hired these managers to make money on their behalf. If anyone else matters, they matter in a strictly instrumental way. Don’t treat your customers badly, for example, because they’re the key to making a profit. Or, in the present case, don’t irritate the people of Wrigley, because if you do they might do something inconvenient, like protesting.
A leading modern alternative to the only-shareholders-matter view is sometimes called the “stakeholder” view (or sometimes, in academic circles, “stakeholder theory.”) The core of the stakeholder view is the idea that the real ethical task of corporate managers is to balance the interests of various stakeholders — various individuals and groups whose interests intersect with those of the corporation. After all, many people contribute to the success of a firm, from customers to suppliers to members of local communities. And if they all contribute, they all have the right to ask for something in return. (You can read a summary of my review of a recent book on the topic, here: Managing for Stakeholders.)
The pipeline story is an excellent example of both the strengths and the limits of the stakeholder perspective. It’s surely useful for executives at Enbridge (or any other company, in the midst of an environmental crisis) to survey the situation and ask, “Who do we need to talk to? Who has a stake in this?” So, are the people of Wrigley stakeholders in Enbridge? Pretty clearly, yes. But after that, things get complicated. Does the environment itself automatically count as a stakeholder of some sort, or does it only count if the well-being of the people of Wrigley is jeopardized? What about the residents of Zama, Alberta? That’s the little town, 850 km away from Wrigley, to which Enbridge is planning to ship the contaminated soil. What about me? Like most people, I’m a consumer of oil. I clearly have a stake, here, don’t I? Pretty clearly, there are stakeholders and then there are stakeholders.
But anyway, once you’ve figured out who the stakeholders are, then what? Let’s take the easy one, a group that’s directly affected, namely the people of Wrigley. What are they owed? Are they owed the cleanup? Are they owed a speedy one? At what cost? Do they have a right to participate in the decision-making, or just to be kept informed? Or are they owed, as one resident of Enbridge suggested, a “swimming pool or a hockey arena or something for the kids”?
As you can see, one problem with the stakeholder view is that the word “stakeholder”, itself, doesn’t actually clarify much. Yet some people tend to sprinkle it on like fairy dust, as if simply anointing someone a Stakeholder™ clarifies what is owed to them, ethically. Life in the little town of Wrigley should be so simple.
Managing for Stakeholders (Book Review)
A couple of years ago, the editors of Business Ethics Quarterly asked me to write a feature-length review of Managing for Stakeholders: Survival, Reputation, Success (2007), by R. Edward Freeman, Jeffrey S. Harrison, and Andrew C. Wicks. It was a daunting task. The book was a highly anticipated one — the lead author of the book, Ed Freeman, is the man who imported the term “stakeholder” into the world of business ethics back in 1984, in his much-cited (and recently re-issued) book Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach. Further, Managing for Stakeholders is a book aimed specifically at a non-academic audience, and yet I was being hasked to review it for a scholarly journal. The 4500-word result appeared in the October, 2009 issue of BEQ (Vol. 19, No. 4).
For anyone unfamiliar with the term, a stakeholder in a company is roughly any person or group that can affect, or be affected by, that company’s operations. It’s a useful concept, though its real contribution to business ethics is up for debate. Freeman’s key insight, nearly 30 years ago, was that business managers have obligations to a range of stakeholders (rather than just to shareholders), and that hence the manager’s job is to balance the interests of various stakeholders. But identifying someone as a stakeholder just means, ethically, that they matter — somehow. That still leaves unanswered a whole range of harder questions about how to balance the interests of various stakeholder groups when those interests conflict.
So, here’s a brief summary of my review of Managing for Stakeholders:
On the plus side:
1) The book’s authors express their intention to tell “a new narrative” about business, one according to which a manager’s legitimate social role goes beyond short-term profit-making. They’re right. We desperately need such a narrative.
2) The authors of Managing for Stakeholders aim their message directly at managers, rather than at other scholars, and they try hard to make it a narrative that managers, themselves, can take up and consider their own. In other words, their book isn’t just about managers, it is for managers.
3) The book wisely encourages managers to seek out what might colloquially be referred to as “win-win” solutions. Creating value for all, when possible, is both wise and ethically good.
On the minus side:
1) The authors of Managing for Stakeholders portray, as the “standard” view to which their view is intended to be an alternative, a view of managerial capitalism that I doubt anyone actually holds. According to them, the “standard” view (held by managers and scholars) is that the goal of capitalism is only to generate value for shareholders, and that other stakeholders need not even be considered. This is of course false.
2) The authors of Managing for Stakeholders try very hard to deny that there is any real conflict between the interests of different stakeholders. They’re right to point out that commerce is a cooperative game from which all voluntary participants ought to benefit; what’s in the interest of one stakeholder needn’t automatically be against the interests of another. But that’s not to say that there’s never any conflict at all.
3) Managing for Stakeholders also seems to assume that the mindset of managers is all that matters — it contains no discussion of corporate culture, and no discussion of the requirements of good corporate governance or the dictates of corporate law.
4) The authors slide from the very reasonable claim that managers ought to manage stakeholder relationships to the the much-less-plausible claim that managers ought to manage the corporation for stakeholders. The latter claim is one that many others believe, but it needs support, and it certainly shouldn’t be confused with the former claim.
5) The book also make a faulty leap of logic in jumping from the very sane claim that business is in some sense about creating value for all to the much-less reasonable claim that it is the role of individual managers to ensure value for all concerned. The latter claim puts a lot of pressure on the very managers these authors seek to help, as well as implying what is likely a violation of employment contracts and committing the fallacy of division.
But the biggest problem with Managing for Stakeholders, I argue in my review, was that it was unlikely to serve well its intended audience, namely managers. For example, the authors of the book steadfastly refuse to cite any social science (including economic) literature to back up their many empirical claims. This is surely a result of their well-intentioned populist approach, but the result is that many claims go unsupported, and managers who want to learn more are left with nowhere to turn. And by telling managers that a “simple” change of mind-set is all that is needed, the book fails to make good on the now decades-old promise to turn the term “stakeholder” from a mere category word into a useful tool for ethical decision-making.
Corporate Rights as Stand-in for Human Rights
Filed under: corporations, law, personhood, rights, shareholders, stakeholders |
Comments (5) The rights of corporations are back in the news this week, as the US Supreme Court decided that a California law restricting sale of violent video games to minors constituted an infringement of the constitutional right to free speech.
Far from being shocking, the notion that corporations should be protected by certain rights ought to be utterly commonplace. Here’s why.
Do you believe that human individuals should have a right against unreasonable search and seizure?
Do you believe that human individuals should have strong rights to free speech?
If so, then you must, logically, be in favour of according such rights to corporations. Why? Not because corporations are legally persons, and not because corporations are “like” human individuals in any particular way. We don’t necessarily need to appeal to any checklist of characteristics that a thing must have in order to be accorded rights.
The reason you must logically be in favour of granting such rights to corporations is that granting them to corporations is — in at least some cases — an essential part of protecting such rights for individual humans.
Consider the right against unreasonable search and seizure. Such a right (for individuals) is a central tenet of all civilized societies. It is crucial for our wellbeing that the government not be allowed simply to show up, search our homes, and take our stuff. What about a corporation’s “stuff”? It must be protected as well. Why? Not because corporations feel fear or have interests of their own to protect. No, corporations’ property must be protected because the interests of real, flesh-and-blood people depend on the protection of such property.
Roughly the same argument goes with regard to free speech. It is literally impossible to shut up a corporation without thereby shutting up human persons. If a human being has the right to speak freely, then she also has the right to speak freely about her commercial interests, including about the products and services and viewpoints of the entities (corporations, partnerships, unions, etc.) that advance those interests.
None of this suggests that the rights accorded to corporations must be exactly the same in kind and in character as those accorded to humans. Rights for corporations are largely instrumental, and need only be accorded where doing so protects important human interests. Nor must such rights be unlimited: there are limits on free speech for humans, and those limits generally should also apply to non-human persons such as corporations and unions and clubs and churches. What is essential, here, is to see that corporate rights are not the bogeyman. Just like human rights, they are a tool for helping us get along, and thrive, as a community.
Ethics of Golden Handshakes
Filed under: boards, decision-making, employees, governance, leadership, pay, stakeholders |
Comments (2) When an executive leaves in disgrace, what does the organization owe him or her? How should a Board handle such situations? In some cases, contractual obligations may seem to settle the matter, but contracts can be contested. Should they be? Does the IMF’s Dominique Strauss-Kahn deserve a quarter million dollars?
For further food for thought, see this story, by Tom Hals and Dena Aubin, for Reuters: Strauss-Kahn severance revisits CEO pay dilemma
The IMF now faces a challenge that keeps members of corporate compensation committees up at night: explaining why they may have to pay a handsome severance package to an indicted executive.
…
Former International Monetary Fund managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, facing charges of attempted rape in New York, resigned his post from the global lender on Wednesday.Strauss-Kahn’s contract entitles him to a one-time severance payment of $250,000, the IMF said on Friday….
Whether a Board of Directors should attempt to fight in order not to pay severance to an executive who has brought disgrace upon the organization is clearly going to depend on the circumstances. But it serves as a good example of the conflict between two different styles of moral reasoning. On one hand, a Board thinking primarily in terms of consequences might well reason this way: “Look, we need to get past this unfortunate incident. Let’s pay this guy the money his contract says he is owed, and be done with it. It’s better for the firm, overall, if we pay and get this finished.” On the other hand, a Board might think primarily in terms of justice: “This guy has brought shame (or at least notoriety) upon the organization. He doesn’t deserve a dime. We should fight for what’s fair.”
The tension between these two styles of moral reasoning is an ancient one, and it’s perfectly reasonable to find something attractive in both styles of reasoning. But the fact that both kinds of reasons might occur to a single group of people — a Board of Directors — in a single situation implies an interesting question. Even if we were to agree (even for sake of argument) that a Board of Directors’ main obligation is to serve the interests of the organization and its shareholders, that still leaves open this important question: should a Board of Directors seek the best outcomes for the organization and its shareholders, or should it seek justice for it and for them?
Should We Teach Students About the “Social Impact” of Business?
Filed under: corporate citizenship, CSR, definitions, education, ethics, management, MBA, stakeholders |
Comments (3) As regular readers know, I’ve blogged a lot about the vocabulary we use to talk about ‘doing the right thing’ in business. Here’s another example of a term that some people seem to want to use to capture that entire topic: “Social Impact.”
See for example this piece, by NYU’s Paul Light, in the Washington Post: It’s time to require students to do good.
I’ll start by pointing out that the headline is inaccurate, though that’s likely not Light’s fault. (It’s more likely the fault of the newspaper’s headline writer. Hard to say.) At any rate, Light’s article isn’t about making students “do good;” it’s about teaching them courses about doing good. And that’s a very different thing.
Light points out that many business schools now offer courses on what he refers to broadly as the “social impact” of business. “Social impact,” he says, can variously be defined in terms of “social responsibility, innovation, engaged citizenship or plain old public service.” (Note that Light is in trouble here, already, implicitly assuming all of those terms are good things. For counter-examples, see my recent blog entry on unethical innovation.)
Anyway, Light says business schools are increasingly realizing that they need to teach students something about the social impact of business (and presumably, more specifically, about how to maximize positive social impact and minimize negative social impact.)
For what it’s worth, I should point out that many business ethics classes — presumably among the courses that Light sees as part of the trend — absolutely would not focus primarily on social impact. And that’s a good thing, because social impact is just one of the many ethical issues that arise in business. Courses on business ethics can cover a large range of issues, many of them not directly related to social impact:
- product safety (which is mostly a concern to customers, who very often make up only a tiny segment of “society”)
- employee health and safety
- truth in advertising
- the environment (which, depending on your philosophical views, may have ethical importance independent of society’s reliance on it).
Each of those topics has relatively little to do with social impact, and indeed there can be important tensions between, for example, what is good for employees and what is good for society.
But maybe Light doesn’t want courses in business ethics more generally; maybe he really does think it most important to focus on social impact, thereby ignoring the issues (like those noted above) that got the field of business ethics off the ground in the first place. Such a focus by business schools would be incredibly unfortunate, because it would leave business students radically unprepared to face the ethical challenges that they really will have to face on a daily basis in their professional lives. And even if courses on “social impact” do tackle a broader range of issues (including the ones listed above) the title of the course is going to mislead students into thinking that social impact really is the key issue after all.
Finally, I’m confused by the fact that Light views “social impact” as a skill:
Making social impact part of every student’s curriculum would send the signal that social impact is an essential skill….
What are we to make of this? Is social impact really a “skill”? Personally, I’m not sure how to make sense of that turn of phrase. I suppose we can read Light somewhat more charitably as meaning that an appreciation of the social impact of business, and an understanding of the key issues and how to respond to them, are essential parts of a sound business education. And surely he’s right. But we ought at least be clear on the fact that what we’re struggling with — and what we need students to struggle with — is the complexity of the role and impact of business in society. Calling it a skill misleadingly implies that we know what to do about it all, and now we just need to do it. If only life were so simple.
Utility Monopolies: Who Pays for Mistakes?
Filed under: consumers, corporations, energy, ethics, excuses, government, pricing, profits, shareholders, stakeholders |
Comments (3) Naturally, when any organization suffers unanticipated expenses, it’s going to have to find ways to make up the shortfall in its budget. That’s exactly what happened to Ontario Power Generation (OPG), the provincially-owned power company responsible for generating about 70% of all the power consumed in the Canadian province of Ontario. A legal battle with customers ended up costing the company nearly $20 million. So, where did the company turn to recoup that amount? Well, to its customers, of course.
Here’s the story, via the CBC: Ont. electricity rates expected to rise next week
Electricity ratepayers in Ontario, already reeling from soaring prices, should brace for more increases.
The Ontario Energy Board agreed Tuesday to let utilities raise rates to recover $18 million they paid in fines and legal costs after charging consumers excessive interest on late payments….
Now most companies could only dream of passing along such costs to their customers. Some might even succeed. But most wouldn’t. Most would be hindered by the fact that, if they raise the prices they charge to customers, customers would simply buy from someone else. But electricity in Ontario (as in most places) is a monopoly: an organization called Hydro One has a monopoly on distribution of electricity throughout Ontario, and the power it distributes is produced by a small handful of organizations, the most significant of which by far is OPG. So, with the consent of the Ontario Energy Board (the relevant regulatory agency) all OPG has to do is raise its prices, and the company’s customers end up paying for the consequences of its legal tussle with…the company’s customers.
I don’t know much about the original lawsuit, but I do know that this was a predictable result of it. And that puts customers of utilities in a strange position. Sure, customers can sue the a utility when they screw up, but all the utility is going to do is turn around and raise your rates to get the money back out of you.
Now, just to be clear, I generally have nothing against this sort of monopoly. Electricity distribution is what economists call a “natural monopoly.” It’s crazy to have multiple competing sets of power lines running down to street. And, for that matter, it might well be crazy to let many multiple competing companies all run nuclear power plants (OPG runs several of those). But at any rate, it’s worth recognizing the effect that this monopoly (or quasi-monopoly) situation has in the event that the company screws up (say, by overcharging customers). The expenses incurred are entirely likely simply to be passed along to their captive customers.
By the way, Ontario Power Generation (whose only shareholder is the government of Ontario) had a profit of $333 million for the 4th quarter of 2010.
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Thanks to NW for the story.
Socially Responsible Investing & Value Alignment
Filed under: corporate citizenship, CSR, ethics, finance, investing, stakeholders, sustainability, trust |
Comments (11) Socially responsible investing (SRI) is a big topic, and a complex issue, one about which I cannot claim to know a lot. The basic concept is clear enough: when people make investments, they send their money out into the world to work for them. People engaged in SRI are trying to make sure that their money is, in addition to earning them a profit, doing some good in the world, rather than evil.
There are a number of kinds of SRI. For example, there are investment funds that use “negative screens” (to filter out harmful industries like tobacco), and there are “positive investment” (in which funds focus on investing in companies that are seen as producing positive social impact). We can also distinguish socially-responsible mutual funds from government-controlled funds, such as pension funds.
(For other examples, check out the Wikipedia page on the topic, here.)
Setting aside the kinds of distinctions mentioned above, I think we can usefully divide socially responsible investments into two categories, from an ethical point of view, rooted in 2 different kinds of objectives.
On one hand, there’s the kind of investment that seeks to avoid participating in what are relatively clear-cut, ethically bad practices. For example, child slavery. Trafficking in blood diamonds might be another good example. Responsible investment in this sense means not allowing your money to be used for what are clearly bad purposes. In this sense, we all ought to engage in socially-responsible investment.
(Notice that investments avoiding all child labour do not fall into the above category, because child labour, while always unfortunate, is not always evil. There are cases in which child labour is a sad necessity for poor families.)
On the other hand, there’s what we might call “ethical alignment” investments, in which a particular investor (small or large) attempts to make sure their money is invested only in companies or categories of companies that are consistent with their own values. Imagine, for example, a hard-core pacifist refusing to invest in companies that produce weapons even for peace-keeping purposes. Or picture a labour union investing only in companies with an excellent track-record in terms of labour relations. In such cases, the point is not that the corporate behaviour in question is categorically good or bad; the point is that they align (or fail to align) with the investor’s own core values.
I’m sure someone reading this will know much more about SRI than I do. Is the above distinction one already found in that world?
MTV’s “Skins”: The Ethics of Profiting from Teen Sexuality
Filed under: accountability, advertising, children, CSR, employees, ethics, marketing, media, sex, stakeholders, values |
Comments (5) There’s been a lot of chatter in the last few days about MTV’s teensploitation show, “Skins.” Of course, one theory says that that’s just what MTV has been hoping for — a lot of free advertizing.
I’m quoted giving a business-ethics perspective on the show in this story, by the NYT’s David Carr: “A Naked Calculation Gone Bad.”
What if one day you went to work and there was a meeting to discuss whether the project you were working on crossed the line into child pornography? You’d probably think you had ended up in the wrong room.
And you’d be right.
Last week, my colleague Brian Stelter reported that on Tuesday, the day after the pilot episode of “Skins” was shown on MTV, executives at the cable channel were frantically meeting to discuss whether the salacious teenage drama starring actors as young as 15 might violate federal child pornography statutes.
Since I’m quoted in that story, I’ll just cut to my own conclusion:
“Even if you decide that this show is not out-and-out evil and that the show is legal from a technical perspective, that doesn’t really eliminate the significant social and ethical issues it raises,” said Chris MacDonald, a visiting scholar at the University of Toronto’s Clarkson Center for Business Ethics and author of the Business Ethics Blog. “Teenagers are both sexual beings and highly impressionable, and because of that, they’re vulnerable to just these kinds of messages. You have to wonder if there isn’t a better way to make a living.”
I wouldn’t bet one way or the other on how this will turn out — in particular on whether pressure from advocacy groups and advertisers will convince MTV to can the show. If it does, then this controversy turns into a nice example of how just the wrong kind of corporate culture can produce bad results. Consider: there are an awful lot of people involved in conceiving and producing, and airing a TV drama. In order for Skins to make it to air, a lot of people had to spend months and months going with the flow, basically saying to themselves and each other “Yes, it is a really good idea to show teens this way, to use teen actors this way, and to market this kind of show to teens.” Hundreds of people involved in the production must have either thought it was a good idea, or thought otherwise but decided they couldn’t speak up. If this turns out badly, MTV will have provided yet another example of how things can go badly when employees aren’t encouraged and empowered to speak up and to voice dissent.
Corporate Citizenship, Apple, and WikiLeaks
Filed under: corporate citizenship, decision-making, law, media, NGO, privacy, stakeholders, transparency |
Comments (8) What kinds of political obligations do corporations have? In particular, do they have obligations, like governments do, not to interfere with things like people’s ability to express themselves?
See this short blog entry by Leander Kahney, at Cult of Mac: Apple Pulled Wikileaks App Because It “Violated Dev Guidelines”
Apple has joined the shameful list of companies that have denied support for Wikileaks.
Apple confirmed that it removed a Wikileaks App from the online App Store, as reported earlier, and did so because it “violated our developer guidelines.”
“Apps must comply with all local laws and may not put an individual or group in harm’s way,” Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller told the New York Times.
However, exactly how or why the app doesn’t comply with the law — or puts individuals or groups in harm’s way, Muler didn’t explain. She also didn’t discuss the First Amendment or the freedom of the press….
(I’ve already blogged on the more general question of whether companies are justified in ceasing to do business with WikiLeaks. See: Should Companies Judge the Ethics of Those With Whom they Do Business?)
But what’s particularly interesting in the bit quoted above is that Kahney mentions the First Amendment, implying that Apple ought to support WikiLeaks because it has a First-Amendment obligation to do so.
On the face of it, from a legal point of view, that’s surely false. The First Amendment says:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances
Now, on the face of it, that’s a restriction on what the US Congress may do; it implies nothing at all about what private organizations (including corporations like Apple) may or may not do. (If there are experts on US Constitutional Law out there, please feel free to correct me!) But it may well be that the precepts enunciated in the US Constitution and Bill of Rights (or in other nations’ constitutional documents) should be thought of as having not just legal force, but also moral force, and that that moral force should be thought of as extending to all kinds of institutions, not just government. If that’s the case, then you could argue that, even though corporations are not legally bound by such principles, they ought ethically to be guided by them.
The whole issue of whether corporations have specifically political obligations to citizens (and not just more general ethical obligations to consumers) is a difficult one. Are we gaining something, or losing something, by thinking of corporations that way? Does thinking about corporations as playing a quasi-governmental role illuminate their moral obligations, or obscure them? In this regard, if you’re academically inclined it’s worth taking a look at this masterful article by my friend Pierre-Yves Néron: “Business and the Polis: What Does it Mean to See Corporations as Political Actors?”
The Business Ethics Blog 