Corporations and the lateral obligations of the social contract

A recent string of events has stirred great interest in the area of Business Ethics. The names Enron, Worldcom and Adelphia have become household names and not on the basis of their good deeds and general benefit to society. Each of the companies has contributed to an unprecedented spectacle of corporate malfeasance and consequently, a greater public awareness of the nature and power of corporations in the modem world. I wish to suggest that this series of recent scandals is not something particularly unusual in the sense that such behaviour is atypical for the actors concerned. Although the actions may have been notable because of the size of the transactions involved, or because of the novelty of the legal issues, I believe these actions are consistent with the way the rules of the game are currently interpreted by the players. As much as we may wish to ascribe these scandals to individual executives, I believe it is more a case of one type of citizen of our society being designed more or less for the purpose of amassing as much wealth as possible for itself. This series of scandals has done us the service of drawing our attention to these actions and the broader issue of corporate behaviour in the early 2111 century. More importantly, the scandals serve to make us question and re-evaluate the role of corporate persons in a society of human persons