Instead of going after the money and hoping it makes corporations care, why not punish carelessness? If you're selling a product there is a pretty strong implication that the product isn't going to kill the user. If a product ends up being unsafe through negligent design the penalties for that should be huge. Businesses and the people running them shouldn't be able to get away with it and operating as normal in the aftermath. Take the profits, force the company to be under government oversight, and go after the people who didn't value the lives of those ultimately impacted.
Also create a program that corporations can register for that allows for increased public access to their inner workings and allows them to agree to a set of higher standards for doing business. These companies could be favored for government contracts which could make it very effective in certain industries.
Gonna make another follow up to this. Architects in the united states must be registered with the AIA to practice. To maintain registration with the AIA, architects must consent to a fairly vast
ethical code that is written in such a way to explicitly prioritize the wellbeing of society
before the client or the architect's business. Failing to adhere to the code of ethics can result in licensure revocation - meaning you can't be an architect anymore. Buildings are definitely public safety issues, but an architect has nowhere near the societal reach as large business owners do. As far as I'm aware, there is no binding ethical code for
business broadly, beyond an individual business, meaning that CEOs and other business owners have no obligation to anyone as long as they stay in the confines of the letter of the law...or not, if they are able to get away with it. I wonder if it wouldn't be a bad start to have some kind of professional registration that requires executives at companies over a certain size be registered and commit to some kind of ethical standard.
Why doesn't the profession of business have a code of ethics? Well, in the grand scheme of things, the profession of business is actually quite new I would argue. The concept of business is not, but the abstract, professionalization of business has not been around very long. The AIA has been around since 1857 - and of course the profession of Architecture has been around for millennia. The pursuit of engineering
as a profession has been around
since 1817. Business as a career path is relatively new, with the first MBA program established
in 1908 and the first program outside the USA not until 1950. I don't have a fully formed argument here, but its interesting to think that nobody went to school to "work in business" for almost all of human history - instead they very likely started businesses with ideas/knowledge learned in other fields. But now we have a whole class of meta-business people who are out there with no other objective than acquiring wealth. I'm not saying acquiring wealth is bad, but I think the scorched earth ways that people take to get there are worth consideration. Looking at the newspaper & railroad tycoons of the 19th century tells me this isn't exactly a new problem with capitalism, but it does feel more widespread now. If we want to answer the question of "Why does big business feel like it is utterly devoid of ethics?" then I think we need to look at who constitutes big business, which is almost for sure legions of MBA holders.
