The documentary, while clearly setting out numerous examples of situations in which a corporation performs socially undesirable acts in the name of profit, reaches a conclusion which I am not entirely comfortable with, namely that corporations are psychopathic entities. My discomfort with this conclusion stems from the fact that corporations are anthropomorphised in order to apply psychiatric terms to artificial persons. Although it may be satisfying to portray corporations as psychopathic, the stigma attached to this word is likely inappropriate in this particular context.
A person who was motivated solely by a desire for money and power would likely be diagnosed as a psychopath for one simple reason, they are an aberration from the average person’s experience. The average person is multi-faceted, with an almost limitless number of competing motivations which direct their actions. As such, an individual motivated by one or two factors, to the seeming exclusion of all others, is seen by the scientific community as suffering from a mental illness.
However, corporations have, throughout history, been developed with the specific goal of limiting individual liability and maximising individual profit. In this respect they differ significantly from humans, as the corporate structure is nothing more than a human construct aimed at one very particular issue. This leads me to question the value of attaching a technical psychiatric term to an entity which was clearly not contemplated when said term was being developed.
As mentioned in the documentary, the current era of increasing social awareness is forcing corporations to take a stance on certain social issues in order to avoid alienating large segments of the market. This is an example of where a desire for profit may motivate corporations to undertake socially desirable actions, thereby providing a situation in which the stigma associated with ‘psychopathic’ is likely unwarranted.
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