Quite. But how do misleading - or socially-damaging - advertising campaigns by corporations differ from those of politically-motivated individuals?
Other than in scale, of course: the campaign budget of a presidential candidate or religious fruitcake is dwarfed by the advertising spend of every S&P500 corporation... Which is at the heart of the problem you are hinting at: it's not that corporations shouldn't have rights, it's that they are so much more powerful than any individual citizen and it's very difficult to force a corporation to discharge the responsibilities that go with citizenship.
Peer pressure certainly doesn't work, and consumer pressure is at best a very weak effect. Worse, many business schools teach that corporations have no responsibilities other than the need to make a profit for their shareholders: a dangerous fallacy that has been incorporated into the internal culture and executive policy of all too many institutions.
Nevertheless, the 'corporate culture' is a community of citizens and 'the executive body' at the head of it is a very small group of people. Often just one or two, and it's worth remembering that 'the corporation' is not an amorphous entity, but an exercise of will by those individuals. They can be identified, no matter how effective the corporate structure may be at shielding them from the consequences of their actions, and they can be influenced.
That is to say: they are human beings. Corporations are made up of people, and they are directed by people: they are not faceless monoliths.
What worries me is that the internal culture of these organisations encourages the rise of hyper-competitive sociopaths who present a facade of urbanity and sociability - and have succeeded in the intensely social task of building a governing coalition in the community of managers, investors and customers - but think and act in ways that are utterly at odds with the values and interests of the wider community of humanity.
I often wonder how this all plays out in the boardroom and the minds of individual directors: it isn't like the movies, where merciless men with white cats and a piranha pool command black helicopters and sinister henchmen with bad dentistry (the continuing survival of anti-vivisection campaigners and class-action lawyers is good evidence that corporate assassinations are a complete fiction outside Russia) but it seems all too easy for these men to distance themselves from the social and environmental consequences of decisions that are all too obviously damaging to people who are not so very different to themselves.
What mechanisms might reconnect them to the real world of their employees and the wider community of humanity? What is the analogue of the psychotherapy that reconnects the psychopathic individual to the wants and needs and feelings of the people he or she must live among?
Questions, questions... But the answer isn't limiting the 'free speech' of corporations. That's just tinkering around the edges of a problem rooted in failures of democracy and the concentration of power outside the checks and balances of a well-formed state.
no subject
Quite. But how do misleading - or socially-damaging - advertising campaigns by corporations differ from those of politically-motivated individuals?
Other than in scale, of course: the campaign budget of a presidential candidate or religious fruitcake is dwarfed by the advertising spend of every S&P500 corporation... Which is at the heart of the problem you are hinting at: it's not that corporations shouldn't have rights, it's that they are so much more powerful than any individual citizen and it's very difficult to force a corporation to discharge the responsibilities that go with citizenship.
Peer pressure certainly doesn't work, and consumer pressure is at best a very weak effect. Worse, many business schools teach that corporations have no responsibilities other than the need to make a profit for their shareholders: a dangerous fallacy that has been incorporated into the internal culture and executive policy of all too many institutions.
Nevertheless, the 'corporate culture' is a community of citizens and 'the executive body' at the head of it is a very small group of people. Often just one or two, and it's worth remembering that 'the corporation' is not an amorphous entity, but an exercise of will by those individuals. They can be identified, no matter how effective the corporate structure may be at shielding them from the consequences of their actions, and they can be influenced.
That is to say: they are human beings. Corporations are made up of people, and they are directed by people: they are not faceless monoliths.
What worries me is that the internal culture of these organisations encourages the rise of hyper-competitive sociopaths who present a facade of urbanity and sociability - and have succeeded in the intensely social task of building a governing coalition in the community of managers, investors and customers - but think and act in ways that are utterly at odds with the values and interests of the wider community of humanity.
I often wonder how this all plays out in the boardroom and the minds of individual directors: it isn't like the movies, where merciless men with white cats and a piranha pool command black helicopters and sinister henchmen with bad dentistry (the continuing survival of anti-vivisection campaigners and class-action lawyers is good evidence that corporate assassinations are a complete fiction outside Russia) but it seems all too easy for these men to distance themselves from the social and environmental consequences of decisions that are all too obviously damaging to people who are not so very different to themselves.
What mechanisms might reconnect them to the real world of their employees and the wider community of humanity? What is the analogue of the psychotherapy that reconnects the psychopathic individual to the wants and needs and feelings of the people he or she must live among?
Questions, questions... But the answer isn't limiting the 'free speech' of corporations. That's just tinkering around the edges of a problem rooted in failures of democracy and the concentration of power outside the checks and balances of a well-formed state.