Individualistic ethical models cannot grasp how corporations and Capital act

Evidence

Similar issues are touched on in a paper by Armin Beverungen on Alan Pakula’s 1974 film The Parallax View, which sees The Parallax View as providing a kind of diagram of the way in which a certain model of (business) ethics goes wrong. The problem is that the model of individual responsibility assumed by most versions of ethics have little purchase on the behavior of Capital or corporations. The Parallax View is in a sense a meta-conspiracy film: a film not only about conspiracies but about the impotence of attempts to uncover them; or, much worse than that, about the way in which particular kinds of investigation feed the very conspiracies they intend to uncover. It is not only that the Warren Beatty character is framed/killed for the crime he is investigating, neatly eliminating him and undermining his investigations with one pull of a corporate assassins trigger; it’s that, as Jameson noted in his commentary on the film in The Geopolitical Aesthetic, his very tenacity, quasi-sociopathic individualism, make him eminently frameable. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 140

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the theme that structure outlasts and reproduces individuals, resonant with Frank’s The Parallax View framing and Žižek on ideology. — connects to: Corporations resist ethical chastisement because they are not human individuals — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 145; Ethical appeals to individual responsibility let impersonal structures evade accountability — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 139; Corporate environments themselves generate unethical behavior beyond individual psychopathology — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 374 (+5 more)
• CANDY: The idea that a conspiracy investigator’s own tenacity makes him frameable is a memorable, conversation-ready paradox.

Related

• Corporations resist ethical chastisement because they are not human individuals (similarity 0.86)
• Corporate vices are engendered by structure, not by individuals (similarity 0.81)
• Corporate wrongdoing stems from diffused responsibility rather than individual guilt (similarity 0.80)
• Capital as cause-that-is-not-a-subject escapes all accountability structures (similarity 0.79)
• Capitalism shifts blame between individuals and structure to deflect accountability (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Ethical appeals to individual responsibility let impersonal structures evade accountability #qualifies (0.85) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 139
• Structural diffusion of responsibility in corporations shields executives and strips morality from harm #corroborates (0.85) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1605
• Corporate environments themselves generate unethical behavior beyond individual psychopathology #corroborates (0.80) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 374
• Corporate wrongdoing stems from diffused responsibility rather than individual guilt #corroborates (0.80) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 377
• Compromise of ethical standards can serve institutional goals rather than individual gain #corroborates (0.75) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2382
• The logic of selfhood becomes indistinguishable from the logic of the corporation #expands (0.75) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 25
• Corporate ideologies can make harming others seem appropriate #corroborates (0.75)