I am sure Jake Van der Kamp is a nice man, kind to children and dogs, a cherished companion to his peers and a beloved adjunct to his family. I do not doubt that in his personal behaviour he tries to be fair, just and good, as most of us do. He is unusual, though, in that from time to time he feels it necessary to write a piece urging the view that company directors have no moral obligations. All they must do is obey the law. This cannot be right.
I understand, and indeed I share, the view that Corporate Social Responsibility is an overblown concept which adds little to the notion of doing the right thing, and that attempts to display CSR usually look suspiciously like image-polishing. I agreed with Mr Van der Kamp about both the cases he cited in his latest outburst. One concerned an attempt to persuade a light-bulb company to stop selling the old incandescent bulbs because the new hi-tech version is better for the environment. This sort of call is an attempt to avoid the hard graft of persuading the public to agree with you, and replacing it with a bit of moral blackmail. People are entitled to make their own decisions about which light bulbs they use, without having disapproved ones swept from the marketplace. I object on similar grounds to attempts to make sharks’ fin unobtainable. I do not eat sharks fin myself, because it is over-priced and tasteless. On the other hand people who believe it is OK to eat any animal which would willingly eat you are entitled to their view, and shark-huggers should be trying to persuade them to change it, not sabotaging the supply chain. Mr Van der Kamp’s other target was the notion that companies had some moral obligation to engage in orgies of charitable fund-raising. They don’t. That doesn’t mean it is wrong for them to do it, but those which choose not to participate in conspicuous parades of corporate do-gooding have every right to refuse.
But these two points do not justify the leap to the position that directors can ignore morality altogether, as long as they obey the law. After all shareholders are people, under the same moral obligations as other people. If it would be wrong for you to do something yourself, then it is also wrong to employ other people to do it on your behalf. From the directors’ point of view, the excuse that “I was following the shareholders’ interests” works no better than “I was following the Fuhrer’s orders”. Actually it is a recurring failure of modern economics to assume that there are no relevant moral imperatives, even though it is quite easy to establish what many of these are. For example it is perfectly legal, if you are a shop selling umbrellas, to double your prices when it starts raining. Most people understand that this would be unfair and most shopkeepers do not do it. If you are employing an office assistant for $100 an hour and you discover, reading the job ads, that office assistants can now be recruited for $80 an hour, it is not acceptable for you to cut the wages of your hapless assistant – though if she leaves voluntarily you are free to offer the lower rate to her replacement. If these examples sound too trivial for the Finance Industry (as the people who rob you with a fountain pen are now called) then we can look at more grandiose examples. Is it acceptable to sell a mortgage to somebody who cannot possibly keep up the payments, wrap the payments stream in a complicated financial instrument, get it rated AAA by a bemused rating agency and flog it to the unsuspecting public? It seems that this is perfectly legal, at least in America, but is it right?
It is perfectly legal to sell any product which has not yet been adjudged to be dangerous. Does that mean we can without guilt poison babies? Of course not. Once you admit that there are some things it would be wrong for directors or companies to do, then you have accepted that there are limits somewhere and you have an obligation to work out what those limits are. This means that companies, like the rest of us, have to wrestle with questions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, fairness and exploitation. It is easier, of course, just to say we do anything which the law allows. But that’s a cop-out.
tim's experiment 
Finding something about which I have a bone of contention with you, Mr Hamlett, is rather like coming across a needle in a haystack, yet this has indeed happened with this article. How more inconsistent could you be? How is it that you are free to make your choice to wreck our precious environment because the law permits you to do so but company directors cannot do likewise? Company directors are people, too. Much of their behaviour is morally reprehensible, at least as bad as you eating sharks fin (and engaging in God-knows-what other horrible conduct in the privacy of your own home) but until the community at large (and daringly assuming ours has a right to make a choice!) gets its act together and outlaws it, you can go on oblivious to my disdain. One law (or principle) for all, Mr Hamlett. (But you won’t find any dissent from me if you want to write an article about the low-lifes running companies and what we should do to ringfence their rotten attitudes with laws that make them behave honestly, humanely and with due respect for our plant to boot.)
Whoops! that was “planet to boot”