overfishing policy regulating behavior. Raises and promotions tied to amount of fish caught.
Security: Super-efficient fishing technology that is optimized to maximize the catch.
To encourage people to act in the competing group interest, the society implements a variety of societal pressures.
Moral: Good stewardship of earth's resources, being a good global citizen are valorized.
Reputational: Environmental groups report on company behavior and organize letter writing campaigns or boycotts of defectors.
Institutional: Laws prohibiting overfishing.
Security: Possibly government monitoring of fishing. Pesky protest boats.
There is also the normal gamut of competing interests that Alice might have. Alice might be morally predisposed to respect the authority of her bosses and go along with her group. She might believe that overfishing is morally wrong. She probably has some specialized knowledge of the life cycle of fish and the effects of overfishing. Concerns about her reputation as a good employee or a team player will make her more likely to cooperate with her employer. Her self-regard and her reputation as a moral individual might make her more likely to cooperate with society. Her self-preservation interest—she might be fired if she disobeys the corporate policy—comes into play as well. And remember that emotional distance is important: if Alice has stronger ties to her employer than to society, she's more likely to cooperate with her employer and defect from society. Organizations try to keep their employees loyal for this reason. 2
Clearly Alice has a tough choice to make. Here are some examples of how that choice has played out in the real world. There is a lot of research in decision making within groups, especially corporations. We've already seen in Chapter 9 how financial considerations dampen moral considerations. There is considerable evidence, both observational and experimental, that the group dynamics of a hierarchical organizational structure, especially a corporate one, dampen moral considerations as well. There are many reasons for this , and it seems to increase as organizations grow in size.
From 1978 to 1982, the Beech-Nut Corporation sold millions of bottles labeled as apple juice, intended for babies, that contained no actual apple products. If you read the story of how this happened, and how it kept on happening for so long, you can watch as the senior executives wrestled with their two societal dilemmas. They could cooperate with society and not sell phony apple juice, but that would mean defecting from their corporation. Or they could cooperate with their corporation, first by not questioning how this “juice” supplier could be 25% cheaper than anyone else, and then by continuing to sell the product even after they knew it was phony; but that would mean defecting from society. In the end, the economic and social ties they had with their company won out over any ties with greater society, and it wasn't until an independent laboratory discovered their deception that they stopped the practice. In 1987, they were tried in federal court, and eventually agreed to pay a $2 million fine—at the time, the largest ever paid to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. This is also one of the rare occasions that individuals within a corporation were jailed.
Since the mid-1980s, a growing docket of complaints, criminal prosecutions, and civil suits in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere has revealed that, since at least 1950, Roman Catholic bishops knowingly transferred thousands of priests accused of child molestation into unsuspecting parishes and dioceses, rather than diminish the ranks and reputation of the priesthood and expose the church to scandal. By 2011, allegations had been made against nearly 5,000 U.S. priests, and over 15,000 U.S. residents had testified to being victimized . (Estimates of the actual number of victims range as high as 280,000.) In a 2002 tally, approximately
Security: Super-efficient fishing technology that is optimized to maximize the catch.
To encourage people to act in the competing group interest, the society implements a variety of societal pressures.
Moral: Good stewardship of earth's resources, being a good global citizen are valorized.
Reputational: Environmental groups report on company behavior and organize letter writing campaigns or boycotts of defectors.
Institutional: Laws prohibiting overfishing.
Security: Possibly government monitoring of fishing. Pesky protest boats.
There is also the normal gamut of competing interests that Alice might have. Alice might be morally predisposed to respect the authority of her bosses and go along with her group. She might believe that overfishing is morally wrong. She probably has some specialized knowledge of the life cycle of fish and the effects of overfishing. Concerns about her reputation as a good employee or a team player will make her more likely to cooperate with her employer. Her self-regard and her reputation as a moral individual might make her more likely to cooperate with society. Her self-preservation interest—she might be fired if she disobeys the corporate policy—comes into play as well. And remember that emotional distance is important: if Alice has stronger ties to her employer than to society, she's more likely to cooperate with her employer and defect from society. Organizations try to keep their employees loyal for this reason. 2
Clearly Alice has a tough choice to make. Here are some examples of how that choice has played out in the real world. There is a lot of research in decision making within groups, especially corporations. We've already seen in Chapter 9 how financial considerations dampen moral considerations. There is considerable evidence, both observational and experimental, that the group dynamics of a hierarchical organizational structure, especially a corporate one, dampen moral considerations as well. There are many reasons for this , and it seems to increase as organizations grow in size.
From 1978 to 1982, the Beech-Nut Corporation sold millions of bottles labeled as apple juice, intended for babies, that contained no actual apple products. If you read the story of how this happened, and how it kept on happening for so long, you can watch as the senior executives wrestled with their two societal dilemmas. They could cooperate with society and not sell phony apple juice, but that would mean defecting from their corporation. Or they could cooperate with their corporation, first by not questioning how this “juice” supplier could be 25% cheaper than anyone else, and then by continuing to sell the product even after they knew it was phony; but that would mean defecting from society. In the end, the economic and social ties they had with their company won out over any ties with greater society, and it wasn't until an independent laboratory discovered their deception that they stopped the practice. In 1987, they were tried in federal court, and eventually agreed to pay a $2 million fine—at the time, the largest ever paid to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. This is also one of the rare occasions that individuals within a corporation were jailed.
Since the mid-1980s, a growing docket of complaints, criminal prosecutions, and civil suits in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere has revealed that, since at least 1950, Roman Catholic bishops knowingly transferred thousands of priests accused of child molestation into unsuspecting parishes and dioceses, rather than diminish the ranks and reputation of the priesthood and expose the church to scandal. By 2011, allegations had been made against nearly 5,000 U.S. priests, and over 15,000 U.S. residents had testified to being victimized . (Estimates of the actual number of victims range as high as 280,000.) In a 2002 tally, approximately
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