Predictable rant: flatfish souffle served with root veggies on a bed of bile

Let me see if I get this straight.

Actions are either moral or not moral, depending on two possibilities (unless of course you want to discount the idea of morality altogether).
1: Actions are either moral or not moral in and of themselves
2: Actions are moral based on who performs the actions.

Now, I might have missed a few pages of the last couple of thousand years of philosophical writing, but I’m pretty sure the gist of things as they stand today is, excluding an exception discussed below, tending toward the first choice of the above. The generally accepted idea is that an action isn’t moral because it’s performed by a moral person, but because the action itself is moral. There’s a number of ways of evaluating an action’s morality, but none of them include interviewing the actor to find out if, underneath it all, he’s a really nice guy.

If an action is moral or immoral absent the actor, there can be little meaningful, or interesting, argument about the actor in measuring the morality of actions.

There is an important exception to this. The morality of one culture may not equal the morality of another culture. This does not disprove that actions are moral or not moral in and of themselves, but it does require one to either accept or dismiss relativism. We might even get in interesting discussion going, if you wish to defend the acts of a given culture as somehow acceptable because they are a part of that culture while I might find them inherently “barbaric” (for example, the rather uncivilized albeit internally accepted practice of capital punishment in the United States). The real argument here would be moral relativism versus moral absolutism. There’s plenty of ammunition for the moral relativist, up to and including the idea that each individual may acceptably have a different moral compass. Which, unfortunately, would mean that there is no moral standard on either side. Which I guess you could argue, but please do so while I’m somewhere else.

The real problem with a manageable approach to moral relativism, i.e., multiculturalism, would be that, in the resolution, the corporation and the individual are, presumably, in the same culture and performing the same action. I don’t think we want to argue that Unilever should be held to the standards of the Oogabooga tribesmen, even if the action takes place in Oogaboogaland. How cockamamie is that? So the relativism we must apply, and we must apply relativism in order to be resolutional, states that a corporation is different from an individual, and therefore different rules apply to the same action. Sure. You don’t believe that any more than I do. Given that a corporation can be as few as one individual, how does being one individual in a corporation differ from being one individual not in a corporation? Because you have the burden of a shareholder, your actions, which would be wrong if you performed them as an individual, are now right? Sure. Again, you don’t believe that any more than I do. I can’t cheat you but Enron can? Or vice versa? Unquestionably my priorities in conducting business may change in view of my ownership, as well as plenty of other conditions, but there is no license to a new morality that arises simply from filing some incorporation papers.

So it seems that the resolution forces the negative to take a position of moral relativism. What fun! And how wonderfully appropriate for high school debate. I never should have ripped up my Legion of Doom membership card. Damn!

To be honest, the real bottom line in this resolution, as with many that do not find general favor with the hoi and the polloi like me, is that I have never once sat around bloviating about the difference between the moralities of individuals and corporations. It is an issue of no moment in the real world. Corporate malfeasance is fascinating; the responsibilities of global corporations are intriguing; the nuances of cross-cultural business and the problems that can ensue can keep you up late at night and make your hair stand on end. Unfortunately, none of them are this topic. At the point when we’re not arguing meaningful resolutions, or meaningful moral dilemmas, we are in the business of treading water. As always, we’ll try to cover meaningful subjects in the topic research, and people will learn a bunch of things, this time out on corporate ethics. But when they go to tournaments won’t be arguing anything meaningful. You can’t get turnip juice out of a turbot.

Trust me on this.