The
“corporate citizenship” literature has it that companies in the private sector
can indeed be “good citizens.” Even though a company cannot vote or be drafted,
citizenship is said to fit as an apt description of what is organizationally
speaking a profit-seeking machine. To say that a company is a good or bad
citizen is, moreover, to anthropomorphise (i.e., apply human characteristics to
a non-human). Furthermore, in their managerial capacities, the people who run
companies are duty-bound to act in the financial interest of the stockholders,
and only then in the broader societal interest. Even so, an ethical basis does
exist on which some of the banks can be viewed as culpable.
The full essay is at “Enabling
Inversion”
