Heartless

Imagine if humanity developed a group of robots that resembled humans in every way except the ability to act selflessly. In other words the robots would be unable to act against their own interest. These robots wouldn't necessarily be evil, but they could not be good in the sense we generally describe goodness.

The reality is that such machines already exist. Corporations are in fact such machines. They are a human construct for the purpose of making profit. In many respects a corporation appears to be a person. In fact when we interact with businesses we may rarely know whether a business is a true mom and pop type sole proprietorship, a partnership or a corporation.

But there is an important difference that separates corporations from business owned by a sole person. A person may do as the please. They can invest all the companies money in strengthening the business or give all the profits to the poor.

A corporation is something different altogether. The decisions of the corporation are made by people but people who are not free to act as they desire. The officers of the corporation have a fiduciary duty to the investors. They required to in all matters act in a manner that increases the profits for the shareholders.

The people who run a corporation can not be generous. Even if one of the corporation's officers owns the vast majority of the stock, he can not make decisions that limit the profitability of the company to enrich himself or be generous. Certainly a company can perform costly acts of magnanimity such as making large donations to charities. But these actions can not be selfless. They must be part of an overall plan to grow the brand and increase profitability. For this reason a large anonymous donation by a corporation to a charity that in no way benefits the corporation would almost certainly be illegal and the officers of the corporation responsible for such a decision could Slikely spend decades in prison.

Similarly a serious argument has been made against Costco that its generous employment compensation is in fact illegal because it does not produce positive benefits for its share holders. This restriction on corporate decision making has profound implications.

Absent intervention by the government for example a corporation whose profits were not susceptible to public opinion would not be free to provide equal pay to women and men if the government didn't require it and women could be employed willing to work for less than minimum wage. Similarly such a corporation could not install costly safety measures to protect workers if such measures where not mandated by the government.

This reality has become more and more important as the nation has experienced a generation of deregulation and the Supreme Court seems poised to give free speech rights to corporations. Corporations say that left to their own devices they will do the right thing. But this is simply a lie. In fact, left to their own devices, it is illegal for a corporation to do the right, but in long run unprofitable thing.

Corporations may act like people but they are not people. They are by definition at best amoral actors. For this reason their speech is by almost any definition of lesser value than speech by encumbered persons. Granting the same speech rights to corporations will therefor almost surely degrade the quality of our national conversation.