Corporate wrongdoing stems from diffused responsibility rather than individual guilt

Evidence

In unethical and criminal corporate behavior, “it is seldom the case that one individual is clearly responsible for a particular action. Thus, when a crime is committed, everyone can, with some degree of plausibility, point the finger at someone else.” Whether it is precipitated by sociopathological propensity or by what Heath calls a “cognitive” response to the “situation,” it is clear that the very constitution of corporateness lies at the core of unethical and criminal misconduct. … Criminality and breach of ethical boundaries thus in no structural way represent exceptions to an otherwise moral conception and practice but are, respectively, two levels of maneuvering within one and the same system. Criminality begins not where ethics runs its course, but rather where the unethical has been entirely exhausted. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 377

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines bureaucracy as ‘rule by nobody’ (drawn from Arendt via Heath) and positions criminality as continuous with, not an exception to, corporate ethics.
• XREF: Arendt’s ‘the banality of evil’ and ‘rule by nobody’ connects directly to Zamyatin’s We and its critique of the collective subject, and to the diffusion-of-responsibility findings in the Milgram experiments. — connects to: Repeated corporate privacy violations indicate an intentional design rather than oversight — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 153; Multinational managers disowned responsibility while their workers were beaten. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 545; Ethical appeals to individual responsibility let impersonal structures evade accountability — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 139 (+10 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The closing aphorism-like claim that criminality begins where the unethical is exhausted reframes the relationship between ethics and crime as a spectrum within one system, not a boundary between two systems - a genuinely paradigm-shifting formulation.