1. Most Moral Reasoning is Arbitrary

Most people seem to think of morality as simply whatever feels intuitively right to them in a given situation. These individual, contextualized, intuitive impulses toward right and wrong comprise “ad hoc morality”. Since everyone has a different personality, set of experiences and personal historical context, two sane, reasonable people can reach contradictory moral conclusions in a single situation. “Ad hoc morality” is nothing like honest, thoughtful moral reasoning.

Morality has at least three meanings (wikipedia). I think of the three meanings as follows.
1) An Ethical Framework: An arbitrary code of conduct regarding right and wrong (e.g., The Ten Commandments, the AMA’s Code of Medical Ethics).
2) Descriptive Morality: An ideal or universal code of conduct regarding right and wrong; i.e., one that a typical person would agree with, if he thought about it.
3) Ethics: the philosophical and empirical study of morals.

No universal code of morality has been discovered – at least as far as I, or the editors of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, are aware. Since we have no universal code, we create ethical frameworks to assist in our moral reasoning. The development, analysis and use of these frameworks is the subject of ethics.

An action is “moral” if it is acceptable according to said (unknown) universal code of morality. Thus, the morality of an action is a property of the action, which may be difficult or even impossible to ascertain. In contrast, the ethicality of an action is a relationship between the action and a particular ethical framework. Hence, an action is always either moral or amoral, but an action can be ethical in one framework and unethical in another.

In summary, disagreements regarding morality often arise because people rely on arbitrary (ad hoc) moral intuitions.

Ad hoc moral reasoning is sort of like illogical logic. It has no framework. No system. No rules. No way to reject nonsense. No way to resolve disputes other than to agree to disagree.

2. Unsophisticated Approaches to Morality are Obviously Flawed

Then next problem is that, of those who bother to argue from a particular ethical framework, almost everyone chooses an unsophisticated approach. I have previously outlined the problems with the two most common Christian approaches: The 10 Commandments and the Golden Rule.

Here I’d like to take this one step further. Religious people often claim (or act as though) they have access to “moral authority” (a universally correct moral code) through the teachings of their religion. This is utter hogwash because even the most fundamentalist believer constructs his or her values by cherry-picking the religious teachings they agree with… or worse, the teachings that support their present arguments. When evangelical Christians, for instance, decide to oppose gay marriage, they pull from the bible those verses that support their argument (the Sodom and Gomorra stuff). They conveniently ignore all the turning the other cheek / be kind to everyone stuff.

Let me say this as simply as possible: if someone says ‘X is immoral because God said so in the bible,’ then demand that they also accept that slavery, rape and murdering gays, fortunetellers, adulterers, atheists, and WITCHES are virtuous, but eating shellfish is forbidden. If they do not, they are full of shit. If they do, they’re just evil motherfuckers. Same goes for the Koran and the Torah.

It is a logical fallacy to claim that X is true because it’s in the Bible, but those other parts of the Bible we don’t agree with are just metaphors. Who the hell are you to decide which parts are literal and which aren’t? Same goes for any religious text. Even if you ignore the rampant contradictions in various religious texts, practically everyone agrees that some of the statements in said texts are downright mental.

That means that values drawn from holy books are just another ad hoc approach to morality.

3. Sophisticated Approaches are also Problematic

To summarize the above, most people use an ad hoc approach to morality, which is useless because it’s impossible to reason from an arbitrary foundation, i.e., debates will just endlessly circle among baseless arguments because the debaters are pulling everything out of thin air. Most people who bother to ground their moral rhetoric in a particular framework use childishly unsophisticated frameworks like the Golden Rule.

In contrast, philosophers, ethicists, academics, advocates of social justice and the leftwing parts of the media tend to adopt more sophisticated approaches to ethics. These come in two flavors: absolutism and consequentialism. Both of these approaches to ethics have incontrovertible problems.

Absolutism is the belief that certain actions are inherently good or bad, usually as set out in a guiding document. Prominent examples include the Christian Ten Commandments, Islamic sharia law, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Absolutism is plagued by a plethora of gob-smacking stupidities. Here, I will content myself with the most obvious: the rules conflict with each other. It doesn’t matter which set of rules, or how many rules, or what exactly the rules are. They always contradict each other. As I’ve argued before, practically every right in the UDHR conflicts with every other right – freedom of religion even conflicts with itself!

Consequentialism is the belief that the ethicality of an action is determined by its consequences. The best known example outside of philosophical circles is utilitarianism. Consequentialism also suffers from several migraine-inducing contradictions. Again, sticking to the most obvious: humans suck at foresight. We don’t know what the consequences of our actions will be. What’s worse, we can’t even agree on causes of actions after the fact. Just look at the disagreement over the causes of global warming or the continuing financial crisis. Saying that something is moral if it causes more good than harm is meaningless if you can’t foresee consequence or agree on causation.

In summary, the two main flavours of sophisticated ethical frameworks are based on assumptions that can’t possibly be true.

4. Sophisticated Approaches Contradict Each Other

Aside from the problems within these more-sophisticated frameworks, their use is further confounded by inter-framework contradictions. For instance, when Dick Cheney defends torturing prisoners ‘because it worked,’ his argument is consequentialist. When his detractors argue that effectiveness is irrelevant because ‘torture is wrong’ and ‘people have a right to freedom from torture,’ their argument is absolutist.

As a second example, consider a person who uses rhetoric to incite a revolution. Under an absolutist framework that guarantees free speech, such as the UDHR, or Canadian Charter, the ethical response is to leave this person alone – he is simply exercising his right to free speech. In contrast, under a consequentialist framework, the consequences of not intervening may be much worse than the consequences of arresting the revolutionary; thus, arresting him would be the ethical response.

What’s worse, the same person will readily contend that torture is wrong using an absolutist argument, while abortion is not, using a consequentialist argument, or vice versa.

The contradictory conclusions reached through different types of sophisticated ethical frameworks explains why reasonable people so often talk past, rather than to, each other in ethical debates.

5. Ethical Frameworks Based on Cracked Foundation

More generally, every code of moral conduct, be it religious, national, criminal or organizational is some combination of absolutist and consequentialist principles. Since both absolutism and consequentialism are deeply flawed, so are the moral codes based on them.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Bullshit.
Criminal Code of Canada? Bullshit.
English common law? Bullshit.
Constitutions of the E.U., U.S., Canada, U.K., Japan? Bullshit.
Ten Commandments? Golden Rule? Sharia Law? Precepts of Buddhism?

Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!

It’s not that these codes are imperfect, it’s that they are fundamentally invalid. Human beings cannot anticipate or agree on consequences. Systems of absolutist rules are forever filled with contradictions. It’s like building free market economics on assumptions like “people act rationally” and “no companies are big enough to affect prices on their own”. It’s not even ‘in question,’ it’s absurd!

These ethical frameworks make assumptions that are manifestly, obviously, observably, demonstrably false! This is what happens when people simply ignore reality.

6. Differing Moral Foundations

To add a further complication, Jonathan Haidt, a Professor of Social Psychology, has empirically identified five foundations of human morality. The “five pillars” are:

1. Harm/care
2. Fairness/reciprocity
3. Ingroup/loyalty
4. Authority/respect
5. Purity/sanctity

These pillars are evident in nearly everyone, regardless of ethnicity, cultural, religion or philosophy. Although two reasonable people may disagree regarding what constitutes harm, fairness, etc., in a particular instance, practically everyone understands the concepts of harm, fairness, etc., and agrees that they are important components of morality. Every language has words for these concepts. Every culture observes them.

Unfortunately, just like the rules of absolutist ethical systems, it doesn’t require much imagination to conceive of situations in which two or more moral pillars are in conflict. The issue of gay marriage, for instance, pits fairness (“We should be able to marry, too”) against purity (“We don’t want to change the definition of marriage”). War crimes pit harm (“He ordered people tortured”) against loyalty (“But they were bad people and he’s one of us”). Whenever an innocent person refuses to cooperate with a police officer, authority (the police) is pit against fairness (“why should I move? I’ve done nothing wrong!”).

Therefore, the moral principles that are genetically preprogrammed in human thought conflict with each other.

Conclusion: All Prominent Ethical Systems are Garbage

To summarize, the public discourse on ethics is so confused because: most people apply moral reasoning in an ad hoc or arbitrary way, or (at best) apply some bogus ethical principle like the golden rule; moreover, even if we try to apply sophisticated ethical frameworks, these too are fundamentally flawed and yield contradictory results; meanwhile, our genetics are working against us by way of pre-programmed yet contradictory moral foundations. I haven’t covered all of the problems with the above principles (e.g., absolutism seems at odds with our empirical moral foundations), or all existing ethical principles (e.g., rational self-interest, moral relativity, nihilism); however, I have tried to discuss enough of the mainstream thought on ethics to demonstrate my overall point: the way we think about ethics is broken.

In my next post in this series, I’ll describe a new foundation for ethics – one that solves many of the problems identified here.

Related Posts

8 Reasons Why Freedom of Religion is Impossible
Golden Rule FAIL – Top 6 Examples Where Reciprocity Does Not Apply
United Nations Hijacked by Religious Whackjobs… jumps shark
Discrediting the Christian Core: The Ten Commandments as a Pathetic Basis for Morality

6. Crime

Suppose one day I lost my shit and murdered someone. If, shortly after, I realized that this was a terrible mistake and was sorry, I would like to be forgiven, given a warm hug and let go. I suspect most criminals would appreciate the same treatment. You may think that you would want to be thrown in prison if you broke the law, but if you do, I suspect that you’ve never seen the inside of a federal prison. In North Korea. Empathy is crucial to our justice system, but basing the prosecution of criminals entirely on the Golden Rule would be disastrous.

5. Euthanasia

Some people want to hang on to every last moment of life, no matter what the cost. Other people are terrified of becoming a vegetable, losing their independence in old age, the pain of dying slowly, or the indignity of losing their minds. Asking the family of a suffering person ‘what should be done?’ is ripe for golden-rule-failure. It’s not about what the family wants. It’s about the individual. If every day hurts, you should have the option to end those days, if you so choose.

4. Good Sportsmanship

On a different note, remember the guys in high school who always wanted to play rough? And did so, regardless of who else was on the field/court/etc.? Were you one of those guys? I believe their logic (if you could call it that) went something like ‘Sports are SUPPOSED to be rough, so that’s how I’ll play.’ Except not everyone likes to play rough. Forcing your style on unwilling partners is just as bad as facing your bullshit beliefs on unwilling atheists (more on this below).

3. Homosexuality

Well-meaning (albeit ignorant) parents of out or suspected gay and lesbian children sometimes want to “cure” them because they think of homosexuality as a disease. I’ve never met a gay person who wanted to be so cured. Sending potentially gay youths, or anyone else for that matter, to Jesus Camp for rehab is more likely to instil mental disease than change sexual orientation. Going to one of these anti-gay camps would be an zealous assault on a person’s mentally and emotionally stability. But if you’re an ignorant, amoral, evangelical whackjob, you think the ends justify the means. Golden Rule FAIL.

2. Differences between men and women

At the risk of overgeneralizing, men and women expect and desire to be treated differently. If an attractive young woman walks up to a man in a bar, takes a firm hold of his ass and tells him she wants to take him home for the night, some guys will immediately escort her home, some will politely refuse, but practically none will slap her across the face and charge her with sexual harassment. In contrast, if a man squeezes a strange woman’s butt in a bar and propositions her, most women will not take it well, no matter how much of a pretty boy he is. Put more simply, imagine someone actually using this logic: “I would love it if she pinned me down and had sex with me, so I’ll pin her down and have sex with her.” Golden Rule FAIL!

1. Religions

These unrepentant simpletons who call themselves evangelicals actually think something like ‘If I stopped believing in God, I would want religious people to try to save me from myself, so I better try to save this atheist.’ I never met an atheist who enjoyed listening to the nonsensical ramblings of a believer trying to bring him or her “back into the fold.” Consider the opposite logic: “I’m much happier now that I’ve rejected all this supernatural, talking-snake, wrath-of-god, pro-slavery, rape-condoning theist nonsense, so I should spend my days undermining the belief systems of happy (but ignorant) believers.” Foisting your ideology onto others because YOU think they need to hear it only serves to prove that you are as dumb as a sack of headless turkeys. Golden Rule FAIL!

Conclusion

Treating people as you would like to be treated is like ethics for toddlers – you wouldn’t like it if Jimmy bit you, so don’t bite him! It is a rudimentary understanding of empathy. It’s ethics for SPED class. Not everyone wants to be treated the same way. (Tangent: Some people might argue for restating the Golden Rule as “treat people as they wish to be treated,” but this is equally unsophisticated. Sometimes what’s best for someone (or for society) is not what he wants, as in the Crime example above.) The so-called Golden Rule is a nonsensical basis for ethical action. It’s moral fool’s gold.

Related Posts

Discrediting the Christian Core: The Ten Commandments as a Pathetic Basis for Morality

Jack Bower Defense

The Bower Defense goes like this: ‘If you’ve got a nuclear bomb about to go off, and the only way to find out where it is is to torture a terrorist, fuck him!’

This is nonsense. First, Torture is not effective. You’d have better luck getting the terrorist asylum, a steak and a blow job and then asking him nicely. Second, he’s not a terrorist. He’s some dude that’s been ACCUSED of terorism. In “free” countries, people are innocent until proven guilty. Third, rights don’t go away whenever they’re logistically inconvenient. That is precisely the evil our grandfathers and great grandfathers fought to protect in the last war that was actually justifiable in any sensible way, World War II.

This defense is based on a utilitarian system of ethics, where the motto is ‘do the least harm.’ In a rights-based system, which is what all western democracies have embraced, an individual right to freedom from torture is not contingent upon consequences. It doesn’t matter what’s at stake, torture is off the table. [Note: I don’t actually support either utilitarian or rights-based ethics, but that’s not relevant here.]

Obama Defense

The much more nuanced ‘Obama Defense’ goes something like this. Dick Cheney and his CIA associates went to the Justice Department with a list of interrogation techniques and asked for a professional opinion as to whether they were torture. The DOJ gave the wrong opinion, so Cheney and the CIA approved torture, and ordered it’s use. Officers then tortured individuals. You can then argue that the officers who actually did the torture are not guilty because they were just following orders. The people who gave the orders are not guilty because they did not intend to torture – the justice department said it wasn’t torture, after all. Finally, the DOJ guys aren’t guilty because they just gave an opinion – they did not have any contact with the prisoners.

Nuanced? Yes. Bullshit? Also yes.

Torture is “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a male or female person…”. Unless the DOJ is composed of team of doctors, nurses, surgeons, psychologists, psychiatrists and other medical professionals, it is not qualified to determine whether or not a particular technique or combination of techniques constitutes torture. Hint: the DOJ is a bunch of lawyers! Thus, they gave a professional opinion for which they were obviously unqualified that resulted in a serious crime. They are professionally negligent in this regard, hence GUILTY.

Cheney and the CIA administration knew goddamn well they were going to inflict severe pain and suffering. They didn’t go to the DOJ to find out, they needed to cover their asses. Furthermore, they should have known that only medical professionals, not lawyers, could judge pain and suffering. Moreover, common fucking sense should have told them that they were going to far when prisoners started dying. Hence, GUILTY.

Lastly, the individuals actually doing the torturing can argue that they were told the techniques were approved; therefore, they didn’t think it was torture. Again, when the prisoners began screaming in pain and begging for their lives, common sense would dictate they were going too far. Furthermore, we’ve seen the “we were only following orders,” defense before. It’s called the Nuremberg defense. You see, near the end of WW2, the Allies figured these slippery Nazi bastards would claim that they were just following orders. So they got together and proclaimed explicitly that “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”. Since WW2, the Uniform Code of Military Justice has been updated to reflect this – it now states that a soldier may refuse an unlawful order. In fairness, a soldier refusing an order, while under enemy fire in the middle of a battle might get shot by his CO, but CIA interrogators were not under fire and had plenty of time to resign. Soldiers are supposed to be men and women of honor. A man of honor would not try to beat information our of a helpless prisoner who’s had never even been charged with a crime, let alone tried and convicted. The CIA torturers are not innocent bystanders who honestly believed they weren’t hurting the prisoners. They are sadists or cowards.

Racism

It’s time to call this situation what it is – institutionalized racism. The American public and the Obama administration are not going to prosecute because these victims wear beards and turbans. If the CIA secret prisons were full of white christians, everyone would be losing their minds about this. If the CIA secret prisons were full of black men and women, Kenyans perhaps, there would be riots in the streets. As it is, the Bush administration has incited a hate-shift from blacks and hispanics to muslims (and gays, but that’s another issue). Don’t believe me? Let’s contrast a the 16-year-old black pirate who was taken prisoner after the whole somali pirate standoff, and the 14-year-old arab kid who was picked up in afghanistan, with no apparent evidence of wrongdoing. The black kid will be tried in New York. The arab kid has been in Gitmo for 7 years, despite 1) there being so little evidence against him that the man hired to prosecute him is now his defense lawyer 2) having never been tried or even charged with a crime, and 3) having a federal judge order his release. But he’s still there!

This isn’t just hypocrisy. It’s racism. It is the use of hate as a political weapon.

6. No trials

If a students is accused of wrongdoing, he has no right to any sort of trial or tribunal, and sometimes no opportunity to defend himself. Consider, for example, the no-tolerance policies for fighting at some schools. Self defense? Bah. Never through a punch? Bah. You’re suspended anyway.

5. No elected government

Schools are dictatorships. The students get no say in who’s in charge or what the rules are.

4. No mobility rights

Just imagine if, as an adult, you got up to go take a piss and some dude told you to sit your ass back down and hold it. I’d be so shocked, I don’t know if I’d even have the presence of mind to tell him to go fuck himself.

3. No right to privacy

Here’s a favorite in movies: the teacher intercepts a note and reads it in front of class. Who the fuck does she think she is? Interfering with the post is a federal offense in many countries, but nabbing student’s notes is ok? Another: police need a warrant to search your house or car, but your kids locker in school? Nope. Here’s one that’s far more nefarious: a Canadian school board is considering mandatory drug testing for students.

2. No freedom of association

Something that always rotted me was when teachers give detention to whole classes because some of the students were loud or otherwise misbehaved. This is taught in education degree programs as a method of encouraging students to self-police. Bullshit. It teaches students that punishing people for the actions of others is ok and that freedom of association is nonsense.

1. No freedom of speech or expression

And here is the kicker. Uniforms. No Swearing. No criticizing your school on MySpace. No describing scientific research that conflicts with the views of the school. No criticizing human-rights-violating referendums. Et cetera.

So when the Bush Administration turned the US into a dictatorship, when people are held in prisons without evidence or trial just because they were near by where trouble happened, when people are told to watch what they say and not criticize their governments, when the government spies on its own citizens and taps their phones with no prior evidence, don’t expect outrage. Nobody’s surprised, because that’s what they grew up with.

I don’t think so. When, under Islamic law, Saudi Arabia beats a woman half to death and then throws her in jail for the heinous crime of being gang-raped, that’s a human rights violation. When Christian fundamentalists dehumanize and incite hatred against homosexuals in a misanthropic crusade against gay marriage, that’s a human rights violation. When Israeli troops murder 960 civilians and use civilians as human shields because Israel refuses to give up part of the holy land, that’s a human rights violation. When the Catholic Church tolerates and covers up the molestation and rape of young boys by priests, that’s a human rights violation.

When I say that religions breed intolerance, injustice and a host of diabolical, megalomaniacal motherfuckers, I am stating an empirical fact. If the UN wants to call that a human rights violation, they only serve to delegitimize whatever claim they may have had to moral authority.

I want the freedom to…

believe whatever I like
lock up crazy people

say whatever I like
incite hate against women, muslims, jews, blacks, hispanics, gays and anyone else I don’t like

hire whoever I want
be judged for a job based on my qualifications, not my skin color

keep my private life private
know whatever I feel like knowing about everyone else

live without fear of violence
buy as many guns as I want

smoke and drink if I feel like it
lock up crackheads and potheads

smoke in bars, airports and restaurants
keep second hand smoke away from my asthmatic kid

drive a hummer
breath clean air

educate my children however I want
not be held responsible if I can’t control my kid

eat whatever I want
not pay for the medical care of fat people

market my products and innovations in the most effective way possible
not be lied to by salespeople

vote for whoever I want
have my country lead by the best possible leader

live wherever I like
keep people I don’t like out of my neighborhood

live by my values
prosecute people who live by different values

marry whoever I want
share a husband with other wives

Freedom is a relationship between a person, an action, and a government. You are free to do X if your government has not made X illegal. Freedom of speech is good. Freedom to buy slaves is bad. This constant rhetoric about “threats to freedom” and “free societies” is complete nonsense. The so-called clash of civilizations is a confrontation between the people who think human rights are bullshit, and the people who think only Americans are human. They’re both wrong. They’re both criminal.

Now, mainstream media, please stop oversimplifying the nuanced value-system conflict between western and arab cultures into a dual straw-man about freedom and not freedom.

This is bullshit.

The fact is, those corporations often didn’t get to their billions through wisdom or creativity, or even good luck. They got there through criminal activity, inherited wealth, and ruthless disregard for the value of anything but the stockholders and the corporation’s profit.

Case #1: duPont Chemicals

The duPont corporation is the perfect example of why these global companies think something like a whipping boy is a damn good idea. It’s because these are the same assholes who had whipping boys in feudal Europe. We have this silly idea in America that we are no longer controlled by the monarchs and scoundrels of medieval Europe, but is that really true?

It’s hard to believe that is true when I look at a family like duPont, who were Burgundian nobility who emigrated to the United States to escape the guillotine for their injustices to the lower class during the French Revolution.

If that’s not enough, they were one of the biggest companies accused by Smedley Butler of trying to overthrow the U.S. government to install a fascist dictator, as fascists tend to be more friendly to big, ruthless business. Now, you might not believe in Major General Smedley Butler’s accusations, but that doesn’t clear duPont of dirt. They’ve also been accused of having hemp made illegal to destroy the competition against their new product – Nylon – and they are also responsible for the lovely carcinogen probably in your kitchen right now: Teflon. They’re not even close to the worst.

Case #2: Chiquita

Chiquita weren’t always the non-controversial banana company with the wacky mascot that we all know now. At one time, they had a different name – the United Fruit Company – and a very different business ethos.

You see, rather than grow by producing affordable, delicious fruit… they bribed government officials in third-world countries, amassing enormous power over the politics of these developing nations and using it to exploit the workers in those places, to grow the cheapest fruit known to man (second to slave labor, I guess). Hence the banana republic.

Oh yeah, the guy the U.S. government supposedly sent in to make these banana republics more docile for the companies? None other than Major General Smedley Butler.

Case #3: Ford, GM, IBM and the Nazis

I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem like helping the Nazis massacre millions doesn’t seem like a very American way to make billions, but that’s just what these companies have been accused of.  Yet Ford and GM have been accused of not bothering to close shop when fascists took power in Europe; hell, they took the opportunity to borrow some slave labor from the concentration camps.

IBM took it a step further, and actually provided the punch card system the Nazis used to keep track of all those slaves.

Conclusion

That’s not counting the German corporations you buy products from every day who provided such valuable technology as Zyklon B, the gas used to exterminate the Jews. And the horrible and well-documented business practices of Wal-Mart and the Disney Corporation. Or the ruthless monopoly of Standard Oil, and the shady dealings of Microsoft… the list goes on.

These executives are not the benevolent and wise leaders portrayed by people like Rush Limbaugh or Ayn Rand. They are liars, cheats, and ruthless narcissists. Would you give your money to the Nazis? Then why give it to the people who enabled them?

Businesses exist to make a profit; CEOs of corporations are supposed to keep the interests of their shareholders in mind over just about anything else. Of course they will do what benefits those people who own the majority of a corporation. The problem is that we have set up and accepted, for far too long, a system, a relationship between government and business, that is fundamentally flawed – we have created the corporation as a whipping boy of the executives who run it, allowing them to act for profit regardless of law or morality.

The nobility of Europe often had a privilege for their children that was not at all extended to the common man: the whipping boy. The children of royalty could not be touched, upon penalty of death, and so their parents – terribly concerned with proper child rearing – created the whipping boy as a way to punish their children’s misbehavior without actually punishing their child. Instead, their kid would grow up with a good buddy – some commoner – who would take the beating for the noble child any time they acted improperly.

Now, this seems like a bizarre idea to those of us in America, who live without divine rights and nobility and class divisions (don’t we?). Unfortunately, it’s a concept that is still in practice, except it’s not the children of monarchs who benefit from it; instead, it is the board of executives of national corporations. The corporation actually exists, legally, as an individual, a person – they have the same property rights as you and me, they can sue or be sued, and, more importantly, they can be charged with crimes.

Unfortunately, charging an imaginary scapegoat with a crime doesn’t do too terribly much for the executives who are actually making the poor decisions and breaking the law. It is not the individuals making these decisions who face the consequences of their actions, but the corporate whipping boy – the imaginary ‘person’ the corporation represents. Well, you can’t send an imaginary person to jail. The most you can do is chastise them, and maybe issue a fine.

Thus, we have a corporate system where there are actually business executives sitting around a table with a cup of coffee, discussing whether it is more profitable to break the law and pay a fine, or to follow the rules and regulations passed by our government. Is there any wonder we have places like Cancer Alley in Louisiana, where oil refineries and chemical companies have polluted the water and air to the point that the cancer rate is astronomically high? If I stand to lose $4 million by implementing the proper safety procedures to keep those pollutants out of the water, and only $40,000 if I break the law, dump my chemicals in the river, and get busted by the EPA, of course I’m going to break the law!

Of course, it’s no wonder businesses have adopted an idea from the nobility we decided to throw the hell out of this country during the American Revolution, when you really consider where some of these wealthy corporations originated. For one thing, some of them are the same people who ruled Europe as monarchs. Next week, we’ll take a closer look at some of corporate America’s richest, and we’ll see how much we really have done to divorce ourselves from the same people who have been running the show since they called themselves barons.