Corporate harms escape moral scrutiny when shareholders live remote from their victims

Evidence

Milton Friedman, the foremost proponent of a corporate-centered ethic, contends that the sole social responsibility of corporate officials is to make money for shareholders (Friedman, 1970). However, the effects of business activities extend beyond mutual benefits for firms and their shareholders. … Some moneymaking activities adversely affect the lives of people who are not involved in those activities but nevertheless bear the penalty of collateral harmful life conditions. Business jargon linguistically sanitizes these human and environmental costs as “negative externalities.” Life in the societies of today is increasingly shaped by transnational interdependencies and the power of international financial capital (Keohane & Nye, 1977). Many corporate shareholders do not live in the regions contributing to their wealth. … This remoteness leaves harmful effects largely out of sight and out of mind. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2512

Categorization

• XREF: Directly instantiates Bandura’s displacement/diffusion of responsibility mechanism; connects to the vault’s claims about ordinary people rationalizing harmful policy via distance from consequences.
• ADDENDUM: The remoteness-literalizes-disengagement point could extend the mechanism being developed for explaining Islamophobic policy endorsement.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2512