Evil Corporations
In this episode, we explore the idea of “evil corporations,” prompted by a legal case in which a woman successfully sued social media companies for making their platforms addictive. We examine whether corporations deliberately design harmful products, concluding that in many cases they do, and question whether it makes sense to describe corporations as “evil” in human terms at all. Along the way, we trace a long history of suspicion toward large organisations, from the East India Company to modern tech giants, and discuss examples such as tobacco, leaded petrol and planned obsolescence. We also reflect on how corporations often rely on euphemistic language to soften harmful practices, while the individuals within them may not feel personally responsible for the outcomes.
We then turn to why harmful behaviour emerges in the first place, focusing on structural forces like profit incentives, diffusion of responsibility and competitive pressures that can drive a race to the bottom. We compare corporate harms with those caused by governments, noting differences in visibility, scale and accountability, and ask whether corporations deserve particular scrutiny given their built-in amoral incentives. While we touch on alternative models such as stakeholder capitalism, we remain sceptical about their effectiveness in practice, ultimately returning to regulation as the most reliable tool available. Our conclusion is that corporations behaving badly should not come as a surprise, and that the real challenge is designing frameworks that recognise and constrain those tendencies.
"Nicotine is not addictive": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_ZDQKq2F08
Phoebus Cartel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
The Love Canal incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Canal
Stakeholder Capitalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclusive_capitalism
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast brought to you by Aleph Insights and produced by me, Fraser McGruer. I'm here with Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights. On this podcast we look at a wide range of topics from an analytical viewpoint.
And today we're discussing evil corporations. Nick, evil corporations. What's on your mind? Go for it.
Speaker B:Well, there was a court case recently in LA. A woman sued Meta and YouTube for having made their apps addictive and causing her, therefore, mental health issues.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:I was surprisingly excitingly, from my point of view, they were found guilty, or at least liable or whatever it's called. And she's been awarded four and a half million pounds in damages. Brilliant. This could open the floodgates.
I think if I was either of those companies, I would be slightly concerned about that result.
Speaker A:But.
Speaker B:So the question is really, do they make their apps addictive? I think the answer to that is quite straightforward to answer, but is that sort of bad and evil?
And then, you know, this idea of sort of evil corporations. So Adam Smith said, and we're going back to the 18th century here. People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for the merriment.
Even for merriment. I'll start again.
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or in some contrivance to raise prices. So, you know, this is an old enough concept, the sort of evil corporation, but is it fair?
Is that just a literary device or old fashioned snobbery about trade? You know, are corporations somehow uniquely worse than other kinds of collective endeavor? So, yeah, A range of things you want to talk about.
Speaker A:Yeah. I mean, straight off the bat, I mean, what this makes me think about is we're talking about capitalism, I think.
And perhaps when you're talking about other kinds of body, is it the same with other sorts of body?
Speaker B:Governments, for example?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:Do they get off lightly? Governments?
Speaker A:Yeah.
And also something that we've sort of talked about a number of times, really is something that interests me is how, you know, if we think of the word corporation, where it comes from, you know, it's a body. Right.
I think something that always interests me is decision making within organizations and behavior within organizations versus decision making within individuals. And like I say, going back to this link between, well, it's a body as well, and how these two different kinds of body behave.
Speaker B:Can we ascribe mental states to corporations? Can we talk about their intent?
Does it make sense to say Facebook did This or Facebook did that, or would it be more sensible to say this particular engineering team did that and Mark Zuckerberg did that, and actually, are they getting off the hook as a result?
Speaker C:Well, corporations do enjoy certain legal rights which mean that they are considered moral patients, much like individuals are. You know, they have. They have their own rights to free speech and property and etc.
But they do so without the social empathy that constrains individual behavior.
Speaker B:Well, we'll get onto that.
Speaker A:Right, so that's it. So we framed it. I think there's a lot to go at here. What are you going to talk about?
Speaker B:First, the topic at hand, which is, are, are these companies actually going deliberately, not accidentally, but deliberately making their apps addictive?
Right now I don't really want to get into what addiction is, and I think it's really interesting and there are some counterintuitive elements to addiction. You know, it's a question of when. When simply choosing to do something you enjoy a lot becomes a harmful addiction is a very tricky kind of question.
But let's just say that we know it when we see it, right?
We, let's accept, let's take your cigarettes as a kind of canonical example of addictive thing that, you know, in a sense people, unlike, for example, playing sport after work, most people go, you know, I really wish I could play less of that.
I don't think it's good for me with an addiction, an addiction type behavior, it's something which people do a lot of and kind of at the same time recognize they shouldn't. So let's take that as a working definition. Do these firms make their apps addictive?
Speaker C:Yes.
Speaker B:They even boast about it to their shareholders. But they call it engagement or meaningful interactions or user value or something. Right.
You know, in their public statements and their internal documents, sometimes from whistleblowers. But, you know, is not.
Is an open secret that they are trying to maximize the time you spend on their platform, how often you come back, how many likes and shares you engage, what, how quickly you respond to notifications, ultimately, how much ad revenue you can. You can generate. They. They really care about all that time.
Speaker A:Spent on a given app.
Speaker B:I would have thought that's key. Right? So. And what do they do to do that?
All these, all these things which have gradually increased the sense of kind of gloom when you're using social media, which are, you know, all of these things that have actually initiatified things like Facebook Infinite scroll, you know, so you used to, if you remember, used to scroll down. It's 10 posts and then you'd have to click a button to get onto the next page of posts that's gone. You now have infinite scroll.
So there's nothing to tell you to stop autoplay, you know, autoplay of videos which reduces the little bit of friction about choosing to press play on something. Algorithmic feeds, I mean that's changed completely made. There's now this kind of horrible cognitive chaos.
You go onto YouTube, it's a totally different set of things and channels in different places each time all designed to maximize drawing you in variable rewards. You know, sometimes your content will be sort of randomly.
So things you post might be randomly promoted, you know, and somehow become an inverted commas viral. And of course the ever present menace of push notifications of actually oh, this guy's put his phone down. He's put his phone down for 10 minutes.
How dare he send him a notification telling him that someone's looked at his post on Reddit. So, so yes, they do make their apps addictive. They, they do it deliberately and they show off about it.
So there's no question in my mind that this is true. I don't care about the legal side of it. Well, is that okay? Is it kind of morally okay?
Well, I think the interesting data point for me here is that documentary and this is from six years ago.
But the Social Dilemma, which was a Netflix documentary which had a bunch of people who were the people building these apps saying that they wouldn't let their kids anywhere near social media. So we've got a. But why? Because they know that it's bad. Right.
So, so we've got a bunch of people all doing things in these, in these social media corporations which they know is bad. They are trying to maximize engagement. At the same time they won't let. They know that that's bad because they won't let their kids do it.
So, so there we go. I think, I think, look, it's a textbook fairly, I think so they are making their apps addictive and they know that is wrong. So how did we get here?
Speaker A:So interesting because just as a quick aside has William Morris. I mean they will have been sued.
Speaker B:They're cigarette people, not the arts and crafts.
Speaker A:Yeah, not those guys. Yeah. Have they been sued successfully for selling, you know, and marketing an addictive product? You know.
Speaker B:Oh yeah, cigarette companies for sure. Because they covered it up for years.
There was a huge swath of cases in the, in the 70s, I think and these ghastly footage reminiscent actually of sort of looking at sort of the thing Kind of ideal, you know, political ideologues where. Where you have a whole panel of people from the tobacco industry all standing up and affirming that they don't think cigarettes are addictive. Yeah.
Speaker A:So going back to this, I've got a quick point to make, but just for that, going back to this lady who successfully sued in, I think you said, Los Angeles. Yeah. Presumably part of that case was primarily proving that, you know, to the extent that the court was satisfied that this stuff is addictive.
Right.
Speaker B:Yeah. In such a way that it caused her harm.
Speaker A:Yeah. Okay.
Speaker B:So did they knowingly. So did they knowingly do things that they knew they would be harmful to their users?
Speaker A:So it's that knowingly bit that can lead us into the question is, you know, are corporations evil?
So I don't know what Peter's going to go on to next, but just before you do, just when you were talking there, it made me think about this thing about. We talk about corporations as if they were humans, as if they have sort of emotions, etc. And moral qualities, let's say. But it's.
It feels like the wrong. It's not the right question to ask. Right. And the reason why it's. It sort of. It reminds me of a documentary once or. About dolphins. Right.
Well, I got really annoyed at watching this documentary because it was actually saying, hey, you think dolphins are all kind of nice and fluffy? They're not fluffy.
Speaker B:Yes. I don't think that.
Speaker A:But anyway, it was talking about how, like, how sort of, you know, in their sexual relations with one another, dolphins are just like.
Speaker B:They're not very considerate lovers. Yeah.
Speaker A:And it basically called them rapists.
Speaker B:Okay.
Speaker A:In this documentary. And I remember at the time, you know, this just absurd, this, like, anthropomorphization of dolphins because they don't sort of operate in.
In the way that humans do. They don't, I don't think, have the same sort of moral concerns, let's say. It made no sense.
And it feels to me a bit like this, you know, and it's a bit like that, you know, sort of crossing the river and the fox eating the thing that gave it a lift. That's what foxes do. And the purpose of a company, of a corporation.
Speaker B:You're muddling a few things.
Speaker A:I know. An insight into my mind. Right. But this is what corporations do. They're meant to, in a way, and they've got a fiduciary duty. Right.
This is what they do. And that's why there's even in. If we Think of the most sort of free or least regulated country in the world in terms of business activity.
Let's say that's United States for a moment. Even in the United States, it's not completely unfettered capitalism. There's always regulation.
Speaker B:Loads of regulation. Yeah. For exactly this reason.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:And I think actually I will. I've got a bunch of the kind of history of the evil corporation.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:And actually which I'll talk about in a minute. But actually you can trace a lot of the history of regulation.
Almost all the regulation that exists to stop companies doing naughty things is written in blood, you know, because at some point in the past an evil corporation did. Did that thing.
Speaker A:Yeah, but exactly. But they're not evil. They're just doing what they do, as it were. And it's a mistake to sort of anthropomorphize.
Speaker B:Maybe, maybe we need. We want to discuss that anyway.
Speaker A:Peter.
Speaker C:Yeah, I mean I just.
On the fiduciary duty, it goes a bit, little bit beyond that because the CEO, the board of a company can be sued by their shareholders for not maximizing profit. And that's.
I kind of, I'm going to historical examples, but that is, that can be the case if they are, if they're overly ethical and they make inverted commons bad decisions on behalf of the shareholders, they can be in trouble.
Speaker A:Yeah, I mean, it's one of the issues. I don't know how hot this debate is around ethical investment. That's one of the issues. How do you fulfill both sort of sides of that?
But sorry, Peter, go on.
Speaker C:Yeah, there are some antidotes to that, but I think we'll come on to those a little bit later. But maybe Nick picked up something interesting earlier.
He mentioned the sort of euphemistic language that corporations use to sort of obfuscate what they're doing. And I think that's a very interesting phenomenon is that they almost skirt around the badness by using these euphemisms.
So we taught you to engagement optimization, for example. That is the euphemism for getting users hooked and keeping them on your platform. But then when companies are making big layoffs during restructuring.
Inverted commas. You have.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker C:Sizing. You have legacy liability, which is like, you know, fuck ups that we've done in the past that we might have to revisit.
All this language is interestingly business.
This businessy language is a way of almost the people involved, like forgiving themselves or giving them an excuse to not feel directly connected to what this bad thing is.
Speaker B:Yeah, I feel like there's a good metric you can use which is, am I using euphemisms to describe what I'm doing? And if the answer is yes, perhaps that's a sign that what you're doing is wrong and you know it.
Speaker A:And actually what you're saying there is actually just how I wanted to finish off the point I was making a moment ago, which. It's messy because it's really tempting and natural to think of corporations and attribute human characteristics because they're made up of humans.
Right. And that's why.
So as you say, if a human working inside a corporation needs to ask themselves those questions, there is a moral, ethical dilemma to these corporations, even though as a whole it's not a person. So sorry, Peter.
Speaker C:So I think it's interesting to look at some of the historical examples of evil corpse. So we've mentioned tobacco, but I think another big one, an important one, is leaded petrol. Right.
toxicity of lead since in the: Speaker B:Interestingly, you're going to mention Thomas Midgley.
Speaker C:I was going to say.
Speaker A:Yeah, okay.
Speaker C:Possibly the most environmentally harmful individual in history.
Speaker A:Oh, wow.
Speaker C:Because he was the guy who sort of came up with leaded petrol to improve its qualities in engines, but also CFCs.
Speaker A:Oh, good.
Speaker B:Totally separate line of his career.
Speaker C:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:Quite a man.
Speaker B:I know. It's almost as if, you know, like Alfred Nobel felt guilty about tnt.
It's almost as if he said, right, I'll tell you what, I'm going to invent nuclear weapons.
Speaker C:Yes.
Speaker B:Yeah, it's like that.
Speaker C:Yeah. There's a really good Veritasium video about. About him. Yeah. So yeah, leaded petrol, big. That was a big one. Like opioids, you know, the big.
The big Pharma pushing Oxy, oxycontin and other highly addictive painkillers. And that's a huge health crisis. Half a million deaths or so attributed to that.
You've got the PFAS forever chemicals, duepoint M3 implicated there, health risks of these things added to commonly manufactured things like textiles and insecticides and things like that. My favorite big business is the. The Phoebus Cartel. Have you ever heard of the Phoebus?
Speaker B:God, they sound so evil.
Speaker C:It does sound evil. It's a great name. So the Phoebus Cartel was. It was public. People knew it kind of existed.
But I don't think the extent to which it Was really sort of what it was doing. It was really understood. But it was a cartel between the major manufacturers of light bulbs.
Speaker B:How evil can you make a light bulb?
Speaker C:Well, yeah, it'd be quite evil. So it had Osram Phillips, Tongues Ram, Tokyo Electric, Associated Electrical Industries and various other French and international companies.
Speaker B:He just knew the French would be a problem.
Speaker A:So you took the words out of my mouth.
Speaker C: er in the sort of, I think in:And these manufacturers were making obscene amounts of money. But they realized their sales were trailing off because these light bulbs they were making were too good. They would last for years.
And there's only so many places you can put light bulbs. So the sales were going down. So they got together to decide that we are going to make sure that light bulbs never last more than a thousand hours.
So we get very good at manufacturing them to fail at around a thousand hours. Which is pretty anti consumer.
Speaker B:I mean, it sounds like a bonkers conspiracy theory. Yeah, it's true.
Speaker C:Yeah, it's true. It happened. And so. Yeah, and that resulted in lots of legislation.
Speaker B:Phoebus Cartel.
Speaker C:But it's a great name, isn't it?
Speaker B: ne like Michael ironside in a: Speaker C:It sounds like a Marvel plot, doesn't it?
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah, absolutely brilliant. So, yeah, sometimes these corporations actually go out of their way to seem like evil corporations.
Speaker A:So did you have some more historical.
Speaker B:I love evil corporations, obviously, as you can tell, but the concept of an evil corporation has a surprisingly long lineage and. And I feel like our modern day conception of the evil corporation is almost kind of this layered structure.
Because if you go back far enough in time, you know, before there were legal corporations, nevertheless, people, you know, obviously were scared of things like empires, but also other organizations like the church, but also sort of merchant organizations. People have always been suspicious of things like the Hanseatic League.
artered corporations in about:And of course the big, I think the archetypical, the kind of evil corporation is probably the East India Company, which had this sort of quasi governmental power removed from oversight, sort of massive amounts of exploitation in India, which, you know, they didn't care about, has its own. Exactly. And you know, and so I think that sets, that really sets the scene for what an evil corporation should be like.
It should be completely amoral. They should have a lot of power and you know, they have to be. Have limited oversight and control.
So then we get by the late:This is where you have, you know, you've got your huge companies, your oil companies, your train companies and occasionally whistleblowers exposing things like Ida Tarbell, the history of the Standard Oil Company and just looking at all the kind of massive, horrible, unethical, exploitative things that they did. Then gradually that morphs. I think by the time you've got into the early 20th century, it's the sort of exploitative Amor Corporation.
And there were high profile things like I mean Peter mentioned Thomas Midgley, but things like the Triangle Shirtwaist fire which was, you know, exposed the fact that, you know, the corporations didn't care. Company just didn't care about, you know, health and safety.
The, the radium girls who were, who were used, they, they would lick, when they were painting watch faces with radium, they would lick the paintbrushes and all their, you know, they all got kind of cancer in their jaws and stuff. And the company didn't do anything about it and refused to accept that they had any responsibility.
But I think it's the: island accident. Ralph Nader,: nk that's our kind of. By the: Speaker A:Yeah. Lex Luthor.
Speaker B: an, but you just can't have a: Speaker A:Okay. I mean, so before you catch.
Speaker B:Just, just, just. And I think just to describe, I'd say the kind of Modern day evolution of that is.
Is probably best described in Black Mirror where you have these sort of, you know, nosedive where, where a social media platform basically govern can do. Because as soon as you have an unpleasant interaction with someone, they give you a low rating ex machina.
Your kind of evil CEO with, with an AI Westworld severance. I think that, you know, it updates quite nicely to the modern tech world.
Speaker A:Absolutely.
Speaker B:And so, and, and, and as I said, you know, if, if someone had created the idea of Facebook and wanted it to look like an evil corporation, they wouldn't have to work too hard.
Speaker C:Yeah. Just describe how it is.
Speaker A:Yeah.
And, but also thinking about this transition and you know, the evolution of this environment and perception is, you know, as you were talking about 60s, 70s and into 80s, you know, we see in films that you can tell an evil corporation because they say kind of evil things, do evil stuff.
But how that evolves, it's, you know, when people are wise to that, you know, and it makes me think about, you know, greenwashing, for example, and you know, seeing adverts from BP with bunnies hopping around and like this. But also the slightly and moving.
Speaker B:And then it's almost worse because, you know, you know that what, that they know that what they're doing is wrong. Yeah. And. And this almost exposes it.
Speaker A:Yeah. And this kind of unsettling, slightly nauseous which you get in Black Mirror, this smooth friendliness.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:Which is very unsettling. Okay, so brilliant. We can put.
Speaker B:We're making the world a better place through, you know, enhanced social media engagement.
Speaker A:Yeah, there we go.
Speaker B:We're bringing people together.
Speaker A:Yeah. Well, podcast done. Capitalism bad. Boom. Thanks for listening.
Speaker B:Mentioned capitalism doesn't have to be corporations, you know, Go on. Well, an artisan manufacturer who puts a lot of love into the tapestries they're weaving is a capitalist.
Speaker A:But it'd be interesting if you put a sort of. Hey, what if you can sort of sell a tapestry, you know, made out of, you know, human hair or something to that one person.
There are plenty of artisans. I don't get sued by artisans out there, but. Because they could probably do with the money.
Speaker B:But I would imagine human hair is more expensive in this day and age.
Speaker A:But anyway, when you put a moral dilemma in front of someone and say, hey, but you can get some money if you do this, I mean, that's what we're talking about. We're talking about scalability of that kind of ethical dilemma. Right. So where do we want to go? We kind of need to wrap this up.
Can we go move beyond a more interesting conclusion, beyond the one that I've said?
Speaker C:So maybe we can look at some of the causes of why corporations behave badly, notwithstanding Fraser's earlier point, which I think is valid about the. Should we just apply a different ethical framework to them? But I think it was like, you can sum it up as, it's the structure, not the people.
So people in the most people in Facebook and most people in big oil selling leaded petrol, etc. They are probably good people. They look after their family and friends like any other person does.
Speaker A:They pat dogs and cats.
Speaker C:Yeah, they're not kids.
Speaker B:I mean, Hitler was a dog lover. Adolf Eichmann.
Speaker C:They don't see themselves as the bad guys. Right. But there's something about them being in this, this structure causes the causes a bad outcome, an amoral outcome to occur.
So, but, so it's worth, I think, drilling into that, into those causes a little bit. I think a key one is the, the diffusion of responsibility.
Large corporations, you're say you're on the board or management or even if you're in a different part of the business where you're not directly in perceiving the harm that you're causing causes you to be.
You can then abstract that to a state where, you know, it allows you to use your euphemistic language and allows you to sort of not really engage with this harm. So I think that's sort of a key feature.
And that means that, you know, as soon as your corporation is a global one, that becomes, you know, globalization amplifies that because, you know, you're exploit, potentially exploiting workers in Bangladesh or in China or somewhere so miles away from your New York headquarters.
It doesn't, you know, feel so abstract that, oh, well, there's these, this harm going on notwithstanding the actual physical distance of actually being able to perceive it. So I think that's the key thing is the diffusion of responsibility. And the distance that you get.
Speaker B:Yeah, I mean, that's obviously something which is not unique to corporations, but is unique to any kind of collective endeavor is people sense that they are, you know, it's not actually their fault. What the, what the group does isn't really their fault.
You know, taken to an extreme, you have your sort of Adolf Eichmann types who are just doing their job.
And I think in my understanding of someone like Eichmann is that he really did think he should be above censure, that his view was he was just doing his job, that it's not his job to worry about the ethics of the Final Solution. His job is to do what his boss told him to do. And he really saw it like that. He wasn't an evil guy trying to make excuses for himself. And I think.
But, but, you know, to make it more. To bring it home a bit more. Personally, I mean, I used to work in the mod.
I didn't agree with everything the MOD did, but I don't think the individuals in the mod, even when the MOD was doing things I thought were a bit stupid and I mean, you know, the UK and its overseas policies and so on. What I can say is that the people in the mod are not spectacularly bad. They're not bad people.
The system as a whole is capable of making bad decisions that cause harm, but that's not because people in there are trying to cause harm.
Speaker C:They're not stupid or evil.
Speaker B:No.
And so I suspect, I suspect much, though I kind of slightly despised Mark Zuckerberg because I find him sort of a bit pedestrian and, and, and awkward and unimaginative and annoying. But I don't think he's evil. I don't think Mark Zuckerberg has set out to harm people. And so it is interesting to ask that question.
Well, how is it that we have managed to diffuse responsibility in such a way that no one feels that they're making a decision to cause harm and yet the system as a whole is somehow producing harm? Now, maybe it's always. That's not true with Eichmann. I mean, the system as a whole was led by someone who was evil.
But I think, you know, you don't need. What I'm saying is you don't need that for a system to cause harm. You don't need anyone to intend it.
Speaker C:It's an interesting emergent property of a system.
Speaker A:Had you finished your point, Peter?
Speaker C:Yes, more or less. So I just rounded off it. So it's the scale of bigger corporations. You've got more diffusion, you've got more distance.
But I think it's worth looking again at the drivers that a capitalist system sort of forces.
Because if you have two companies, A and B, one decides to be more ethical and therefore its costs are greater for the same level of output, it will, all else being equal, be less competitive than the evil corporation. So there's a sort of. Naively, there is a sort of problem with that system being how it is, hence regulation.
Speaker A:Right, yeah.
Speaker B:Well, I, I agree. I don't. I think there is. It's interesting that we sort of let.
Let them off, that we Let corporations off having that kind of moral responsibility because there's actually nothing unique to like governments do that.
You know, you could say, you could look at sort of arms race type behavior, you know, if governments kind of doing, doing immoral things because otherwise some other government is going to perhaps invade them or whatever. You know, that actually, that, that. So what is it that stops us?
What we're saying is that is corporations are in this kind of prisoner's dilemma situation where they, let's say that they actually kind of want, you got Facebook and Google, let's say they both sort of want to be nice. Let's pretend for a sec. But as Peter says, if one corporation suddenly starts doing the bad thing, they will out compete the other one.
So, you know, we'd like to have nice responsible social media. But as soon as Facebook makes their.
Makes, makes their platform addictive, they will suddenly have twice as much ad revenue and they will out compete us. We have to chase them in the addiction kind of.
Speaker C:And you'll have a race of. Race to the bottom.
Speaker B:And so, and so the answer. And that exists in real life, you know, that's, that's what I don't mean. You know, outside corporate life, individual interactions.
Why shouldn't you cheat your shopkeep when you shouldn't you steal from each other? Why shouldn't you? You know, and what's our solution? Our solution is the government stops us doing it. Right.
We aren't spectacularly good, we aren't really well behaved, and corporations are evil. Humans are also evil. But we've invented governments to stop us. Right.
Speaker C:Or in some cases you have a sort of like a positive cartel where companies get together and decide to draw up their own ethical framework for which they will abide by. So it's not a forum for sharing secrets or for carving the market.
It's a forum to get together and say, here are some principles by which we will operate.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Although curiously, as Adam Smith said, it does seem to be more often that they get together in a room and decide that light bulbs will only last for 10 minutes.
Speaker C:Yes.
Speaker B:Yeah, but so I suppose what I'm saying is, you know, we hold each other to moral standards, but that is not in some kind of enforcement vacuum. You know, we know that we have those moral standards and we're well behaved and it's not chaos because the government is there enforcing it.
And so I guess I'm saying maybe if we follow that through, we go, yeah, of course corporations are evil and they get tempted by, you know, the prospects of Profits. So do humans. We'll just apply the same solution that we do to everything else. Which is what?
It's that occasionally if they do things that are wrong, they get sued and then we add in regulations and the government applies the same regulation to those corporations as it does to us, and, you know, problem solved. So it doesn't feel particularly satisfying to me.
Speaker A:Oh, really? I was about to say it does feel satisfying because everyone gets that.
Speaker B:It has a symmetry to it.
Speaker A:It does, it does.
And people understand, I think intuitively that it's probably a good thing that laws exist, broadly speaking, because we know that, you know, if someone murdered a mate of ours, we know that we would feel angry about that and we would. Might want to murder them back. And we kind of recognize that. I think famously, running for New York mayor, was it someone Spirag. No, not Spiragnew.
Someone else maybe. Where, you know, the candidate was asked, you know, how would. It was.
It was a question by journalists about law and order and how would you feel if your daughter was. Was murdered? Or something like that. And, you know, he said, look, of course I would want to sort of, you know, harm the other person.
But it's a ridiculous question because that's why we've got laws. Because laws recognize, you know, human sort of emotions, infallibility, etc. So.
But for me, well, your conclusion there, I mean, there's a symmetry between governing of people, governing of corporations. I feel satisfied with that.
Speaker B:Well, you don't know, because I think there is a. There is a bit of a difference, which is.
Which is, you know, goes back to this kind of profit motive which is legally baked in, you know, as Peter says, fiduciary duty to try and be profitable. And I. So in a way, we've. We've created corporations with an incentive we know is amoral.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:So whereas humans, there is an expectation, in fact, in reality, we do apply moral considerations to the way we behave. We're not only good because the government tells us to be good, we've made the government tell us to be good because we know that that's better.
Right. Corporations don't actually have that. Corporations are not born with a sense of morality, they're born to pursue profit. And in a sense.
So there's slightly the feeling that they are sort of saying, look, don't blame us. It's just, you know, that's our incentives. We're incentivized to do evil stuff. Yeah, it's your job, the government, to stop us.
And that is a bit annoying. Right. It feels like we have to catch you with your hand in the cookie jar to, to get. To bring in new laws and regulations.
Why can't you just do that to begin with? It's a little bit like a government, you know, someone stealing stuff and then saying well it's not my fault, you didn't stop me.
Do you know what I mean? So. So I think there is a difference. Is that kind of sense that, that we have built. That we know they are intrinsically amoral.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:That they. Whereas you know, they're kind of almost psychopaths as, as entities. Corporations.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:And we've designed them that way. So I think we are right to have a bit more suspicion. Sure. Having said all that.
Speaker A:Well, hold on, wait. And it's compounded and sort of ties in nicely with, you know, the bigger. The corporation.
Speaker B:Well, Aleph Insights, my company. We're not. We're. We've never done anything evil.
Speaker A:Exactly. We haven't polluted the planet. Are you some huge big multinational.
Speaker B:No, we're not. There's four of us.
Speaker A:Yeah, there we go. And so one of the issues with big corporations is that they can be quite big and big ones can be quite powerful and have all the.
That's the difference creating these sort of things. But they're big and they're so they're difficult to regulate. Yes.
It reminds me a little bit about like the end of what's the comedy zombie movie in the uk?
Speaker B:Shaun of the Dead. Yeah.
Speaker A:So yeah. Thanks.
So it reminds me of Shaun of the Dead where at the end of the film his, his buddy, his sidekick is a zombie so he chains him up in the shed and it's fine. That's how we should maybe view corporations as.
Speaker B:Okay, it is very good analogy.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker A:It does what it does. But we'll just got to kind of contain it a bit. Now you've got something called the ledger of something that we're going to have and then Peter.
And that might lead us to a kind of conclusion. Ledger of harm. Was it? Yeah.
Speaker B:Well not. Don't. It's not a two by two matrix. It's just a. I. Let's try and think about. Okay. No, I'm just.
What I'm asking is having said all the stuff we've said, are we actually a little bit unfair on corporate operations when we, when we set the harms they cause against harms caused by other things like eg governments who for example. The same kinds of people who are very anti capitalist cut governments an awful lot of slack. You know, so, so also the benefits that they provide.
Speaker C:Big corporations are big employers, they drive the economy.
Speaker B:Well, not, but they're. And they create all the things that make our life worth living. Governments don't do that.
You know, what is it that you've got, you know, what makes you got a nice coffee from some people this morning. The government didn't give me that. The most government gives money to poor people. They don't invent new kinds of, you know, medicine and they don't.
So, but just thinking about harms, I think, and I think this partly explains why it is that corporations get a lot of, A lot of. Why it is that corporations come in for a lot of criticism is that the types of harms that governments produce tend to be big and catastrophic.
They tend to be things like wars and you know, genocides. Whereas, whereas companies tend to cause incremental, chronic, quite visible, daily type types of harm like lung cancer and mobile phone addiction.
So I feel like there's that sort of visibility of the kinds of harms. So let's, but let's try and put some numbers on it, right?
So if I was the king of the capitalists, I'd want to say, well hang on, but have corporations killed more people than governments? And I'm afraid the answer actually seems to be yes, much as I want to be, you know, anti government in equal measure.
Speaker A:Quite difficult to separate out the two. But anyway, go on.
Speaker B:Yeah, well, but if you think, well, let's include the Second World War and ask how many people a year do governments in inverted commas kill? Right. How many?
Now that there is, I'm doing some, a lot of hand waving here, but it comes to, let's say 2 million people a year on average, something like that. It's in that realm. Corporations, right. If you're allowing the inclusion of just tobacco.
And deaths from tobacco usage comes to about 10 million a year.
Speaker A:Wow.
Speaker B:Just on tobacco, let alone all of the other things where you might say, well, this corporation has, I can causally link it to this death. Right. So I think now, however, that is not fair.
It's not necessarily fair because, and this is, and this is where I think a lot of the difficulty comes from is that in a sense corporate harms are because we are ultimately because we're choosing them. Governments impose a war on people. The Germans bombed us. We didn't ask them to do it and then regret it.
Whereas smoking, mobile phone addiction, driving a shitty car, that you die in a car crash.
You know, all of those are choices that you've made and corporations have in a sense have just said, well there it is, you know, here's your free, you know, social media platform, here's your cheap car, here's your packet of fags. I'm not forcing you to buy it.
So I think that's the difficulty we have here is that yeah, they do cause more harms, but in a sense those harms are looking a lot more self inflicted.
Speaker C:I think there are some anti libertarian arguments. They do a bit more than facilitate.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker C:Just by their very presence they have a.
Speaker B:But I think it is it's easy to blame deaths in World War II on the Nazis. It's not quite as easy to blame deaths from lung cancer on, you know, the smoking companies. Okay, it's not quite as easy.
But I'm just saying that, you know, surprisingly, if you are just going to say well, how many debts, roughly what we're talking, I think actually you might find that corporations are at least a sizable weight in that balance. So there we are anyway. Peter, is there anything we can do about this?
Speaker C:Well, there are some interesting initiatives, models, different ways of doing corporate organization or models for corporations that might help. I don't know to what degree they do help, but I'll just list a few very briefly.
m and examples of this were a: Speaker B:I think. Isn't this one of the things that Will Hutton came up with in the 90s? This was Tony Blair's third way.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:Which was supposed to be a sort of nice kind of capital.
Speaker C:Yeah. So the idea being that corporations shouldn't just serve shareholders, they should have another.
What they should also weight their employees, their communities, their suppliers, the environment, various other things as well. And that that sort of general model doesn't have the same legal framework and protection that the sort of Milton Friedman model of corporations does.
But it's sort of gaining support and gaining traction. So there are some definite example models you can, you can actually adopt as a corporation. So there are things called B Corps.
B Corps, as I understand it, they are companies that have sought out and achieved certification by an accrediting. Accrediting agency. And there are B Corp accrediting agencies out there you can approach.
And basically that is like an assessment of your business processes and your business policies to say that yes, you operate ethically. There are Criticisms of that model though because it is largely cosmetic.
What you say in your policies doesn't necessarily have to be the same thing that you actually do business day to day. So for example Brewdog has had bad press for various reasons, but is a b, is a B corp. Right.
Also Aqua is a brand apparently of bottled water and is the most common found litter in Indonesian waters. Aqua plastic bottles.
Speaker B:So to be fair that's not their fault. I assume they're not telling people to throw their bottles.
Speaker C:But other, other soft drink and water manufacturers do a big. They do. They are pretty overt in there trying to support and implement recycling and everything else anyway. So there's a. The object.
There's problems with that because it's just a sort of accreditation of your policies, not your behavior, not your outcomes. Right. There's also benefit corporations, not to be confused B Corps. It's confusing benefit corporations. Now this is a.
There are legal protections around this. It's not a certification.
So where if you declare yourself as a benefit corporation, your directors are legally protected to weigh shareholder interest over the other things environment, other stakeholders, employees, etc. So that removes the Friedman liability risk. There's no. But they are rare. There's no UK equivalent. This is, that's an American thing.
The closest we've got is a community of interest company. Yep. Wherever that is.
Speaker B:It all sounds a bit pie in the sky to me. All of this though I, I think to be honest that these are all. These are all like alternative models that.
But they doesn't sound like they're necessarily going to work very well and creating corporations that are efficient.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:I think the best bet is is is go back to plan A. If they step out of line, we smash them by suing them and regulating them.
Speaker C:Well the point is we have to switch spot that they're going to.
Speaker B:That's true but I'm afraid that's the same with any other kind of harmful behavior, isn't it?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker C:And they don't work terribly well. I mean John Lewis is an employee owned company and it's not terribly competitive in the sort of retail consumer retail market.
You know, big losses in: Speaker A:So. Yeah. Look, we need to draw things to a conclusion.
I don't know if I've got anything to wrap this up on other than to say well I know Nick, you might be the guy to wrap this up. The question was big corporate, no corporations being evil. What's that all about?
And we've established that they kind of are, but they're going to be. And the answer is regulation. And is that it? I don't know. Can you give me something more than that? I mean, no, I'm.
Speaker B:I. I think basically that's it. We. It actually shouldn't be surprising.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:That they're evil corporations.
Anyone who sort of is tempted to defend I'm a massive defender of capitalism, but it doesn't mean, you know, I'm a defender of freedom, but it doesn't mean I want people to be going around murdering each other. I'm a massive defender of capitalism, but it doesn't mean that I think I'm naive enough to think corporations are, you know, benevolent. They're not.
So we just need to recognize that and build it into our system.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker A:Okay. All right, we'll stop there.
You've been listening to the Cognitive Engineering podcast brought to you by Aleph Insights and produced by me, Fraser McGruer. If you haven't already, please like and subscribe. We try to release an episode every week or two.
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