Somehow pursing a profit is unethical while a non-profit group pursing revenue is not critiqued equally. Many non-profits recklessly gain revenue via many unethical means.

Liberal America’s social vitriol is misguided if profit is the only problem. In fact, profit is only one aspect of the income statement, revenue can be just as powerful of a drug. A social program, public or private, using all sorts of means to increase revenue can be even more unethical, regardless the social change desired by the group.

To refine the quote:

the management chain in any organization is geared for growth (profit, revenue, influence, power, etc.), not ethics.

(via levispires)

A preface. As we’ve seen with the House’s hot-and-bothered rush to defund National Public Radio, perhaps contrasted with the House’s almost insultingly breezy dealings with AIG’s really-wrecking-the-world-one-transaction-at-a-time Joe Cassano, it may be the case that corporations get a little bit freer reign over the American landscape than non-corporate groups. Picture, also, the House’s quixotic (and vicious) assault on Planned Parenthood.

To get into it, though, I don’t think you addressed the meat of the Psychology Advice article. I took “the meat” to be this:

• I. Corporations are afforded the legal rights of individual persons.
• II. Persons are afforded some basic legal rights on the basis of the notion of freedom, perhaps; certainly the basis of legality and civilization itself is an unspoken universal belief system or system of morals shared by a body of persons, though.
• III. If we take, then, the basis of legal personhood to rest on the idea of a shared moral conception (that is, extra-legal or underpinnings of legality), it stands to reason that persons should actually share in “our” moral conceptions.
• IV. For corporations, III is decidedly not the case. That it’s not the case is not a moral critique of corporations; it is to point out that the very idea behind corporations is to pursue the interests of their shareholders. That corporations fail to meet III is not a condemnation of corporations.
• V. An offshoot of IV, then, is that corporations are actually antithetical to the legal/moral landscape of America, since they have paradoxically been granted widespread legal admission to personhood.
• VI. An offshoot of V is that—in an entirely separate argument I’m actually unaware of—the founding fathers would likely see the widespread deployment of corporations as anathema to their originary vision for America.

It seems like the reformation of the quotation you made sidesteps, then, the meat of the piece in order to make a semantic observation, which, yes, is valid. Apple is certainly more influential in the consumer sphere than British Petroleum, perhaps, but brings in less revenue. It is more profitable than Microsoft, but has less reach in most people’s day-to-day lives. It’s still the case that no corporation necessarily partakes in the shared extra-legal underpinnings of America.

Put it this way: When it’s a financially attractive to end life and destroy the world, that’s the choice corporations must make because that’s their goal. If I were a shareholder in BP, it would be against my interests as a shareholder for them not to fucking destroy the world if it meant they made more money.

(via levispires)