If corporations are afforded the same rights as individual persons, then they should obviously be expected to have the same ethical and moral obligations and responsibilities as individual persons. Corporations shouldn’t be able to enjoy the liberties and rights of humans and not be expected to behave ethically and morally as us. It was proven in several court cases that corporations, as they are recognized as a group of individuals, that they deserve basic human rights, which implies that they should also be obligated to behave with good morals and ethics since they are simply a group of people. In the case of IBM’s partnership with the Nazis, we saw an example of a corporation doing business with an unethical group of people. Using the same logic that corporations are rewarded with rights as individual persons and have an obligation to behave morally, IBM clearly should not have aided a group that was torturing and killing millions of innocent lives. No amount of profit should have justified this partnership with the Nazis; yet, the fact that IBM valued making money over ethical obligations suggests that they were clearly in the wrong in this case. Instead, IBM should have based their business decision on morality and ethics and confidently declined the partnership with the Nazis. So going back to the idea that corporations are just a group of individuals, everyone who is a part of the corporation should have a say in what is a right or wrong decision. A corporation is not just one person or made of few important board members; it encompasses everyone who is involved in the corporation. It makes more sense to say that if a corporation is a group of individuals that it should make a collective decision that is supported by the majority rather than a few higher-ups making all the decisions that may not be agreed by many, although it may not be actually applied in practice. Additionally, there should be limits that should be placed on how competitive a corporation can be. Generally, competition is a good thing because it drives corporations to develop better technology than their competitors in order to survive, which pushes innovation to new heights. However, corporations forcefully destroying their competitors to get the upper hand is not permissible. For instance, the competition between Microsoft and Netscape was very controversial because Microsoft specifically targeted Netscape’s browser and tried to take it down. Even though Netscape had the early lead in the browser war, Microsoft exploited its Windows monopoly by excluding Netscape’s browser on the operating system and integrating their own browser, Internet Explorer, not giving Netscape a chance to have its browser available to their consumers. This type of competition shouldn’t be allowed because it prohibits corporations to even try to compete with the top. In fact, this approach would eventually lead to some corporation becoming a monopoly, which would lower the incentive to further innovation because the corporation who has the monopoly wouldn’t have to worry about other corporations overthrowing its position. Therefore, there should be some sort of government intervention to regulate the competition to make it fair for all corporations to have a chance at competing.
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