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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Stakeholders are people with any kind of interest in the company doing well

    Corporate social responsibility as a concept is even broader than that – it’s not just anyone who has interest in the company doing well, but broad consideration of anyone impacted by the decisions of the company.

    A company might be able to save operational costs by dumping toxic sludge in a river, but within a CSR framework, people living downstream would be considered stakeholders and the potential negative impact of the decision on those people is supposed to be taken into account when decisions are made. The corporation is supposed to have a responsibility to do right by anyone impacted by their actions wherever possible.

    At least that’s the theory. It shouldn’t be surprising that the language of CSR gets pretty commonly coopted by companies looking to whitewash what they’re actually doing.






  • Chiming back in here to say that yes, that was exactly my point.

    To maybe make it a little clearer, a hypothetical: imagine a Republican-controlled state enacts a law banning late term abortions and makes it punishable with jail time for women to receive one.

    That hypothetical law includes a clause defining a late term abortion as one taking place at any time past 37 weeks from conception.

    A woman has an abortion at 36 weeks pregnant. Anti-abortion activists insist that she should be culpable under the law; an abortion at 36 weeks is functionally the same as an abortion at 37 weeks and 36 weeks is very obviously late term pregnancy, they claim.

    If the local sheriff then arrests that woman, is the sheriff behaving lawfully?

    That’s why the government being bound to the letter of the law is so incredibly important. A law can be stupid, harmful, regressive, or otherwise bad in any number of ways, but if the government must act within the law as written, then at least we know what rules we’re playing by and can work to change them.

    If the government is allowed to arbitrarily and capriciously ignore the letter of the law in favor of what the people enforcing it wish the law were, that will be abused by bad actors. That sort of thing is more or less a universal component of authoritarianism.

    tl;dr - we shouldn’t do it because allowing it will allow it to be used against us.