Beth Stephens

The Amorality of Profit: Transnational Corporations and Human Rights

Over the past decade, new revelations about corporate involvement in the Holocaust have sharpened our understanding of the extent to which even businesses that remained neutral towards Nazi Germany were able to profit from the Holocaust. One ethical evaluation of such conduct views that behavior as business as usual. Litigation against those corporations, however, has demonstrated that the law takes a different approach. Morally defensible or not, if corporations are complicit in human rights violations, the victims of the abuses have a legal right to compensation from those corporations. Today, the abuses of the Holocaust are contributing to the development of new approaches to human rights accountability and to the line between the legally acceptable pursuit of profit and criminal or tortious behavior. Although corporate accountability for human rights abuses has received much attention over the past few years from governments, human rights organizations, business groups, and the United Nations, little has been written about the relationship between corporate human rights norms and the legal structure of business organizations. My first goal in this essay is to strengthen the foundation of corporate human rights regulation by situating it within the extensive literature on the nature of the corporate entity and government power to impose limits on that entity.My second goal is to propose an assertive approach to interpreting corporate human rights responsibilities. Both domestic governments and international organizations have danced around this topic, urging voluntary codes of conduct rather than seeking to impose binding rules of law. Such circumspection is unfounded. Corporations are already bound by many core human rights norms. So-called voluntary codes that ask business entities to refrain from committing genocide or to avoid profiting from slave labor are weak concessions to the enormous economic and political power of multinational corporations. Core human rights norms apply to corporations as well as to states and individuals. Enforcement of these norms, however, remains “the Achilles’ heel” of the system, as it does generally in the human rights arena. International norms enforced through international mechanisms or coordinated domestic approaches are essential to the effective regulation of corporate human rights abuses.