Corporate environments themselves generate unethical behavior beyond individual psychopathology

Evidence

While “sociopathology is a genuine phenomenon,” the ethicist Joseph Heath argues, it is often simply the corporate constitution and corporate environment as such that create unethical and even criminal behavior. It is “the way people think about their actions and the situation [they are faced with in their corporate life that] has an enormous amount to do with their propensity to commit various crimes.” The common explanation of unethical and criminal activity in terms of deviant psychology has been persistent because such discourse provides “a source of assurance” to society that it is not itself, as a “normal” phenomenon, infected with deviancy. Nonetheless, it is society’s ability to allow for “techniques of neutralization” that remains the issue, for it is within these societies, which produce and are produced by corporate values, that unethical and criminal conduct takes a particular form and meaning. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 374

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains ‘techniques of neutralization’ as the societal capacity that allows corporate crime to persist as a normal phenomenon.
• XREF: Connects to Sykes and Matza’s ‘techniques of neutralization’ concept from criminology, and to Milgrom’s work on how institutions shape behavior rather than merely constrain deviants. — connects to: Environmental injustice persists because corporate power is incorporeal and beyond imagination — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 475; Individualistic ethical models cannot grasp how corporations and Capital act — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 140