Catholic Social Teaching and Corporate Governance

I'm putting together my thoughts for my upcoming (March?) Sen. Benigno Aquino professorial chair lecture which I've entitled "Building Humane Business Organizations: Catholic Social Teaching and Corporate Governance". After reading Joel Bakan's incisive "The Corporation" and watching the DVD based on the book, I thought that it would be timely to suggest inputs for reforming corporate excesses based on Catholic social teachings, especially since quite a lot of board directors in the top Philppine corporations are Catholics who graduated from the top Catholic schools.

Bakan's main thesis is that the legal corporation as constructed is essentially an externalizing machine which is designed to pursue profit. The corporation externalizes when it acquires profits without taking responsibility for the costs and harms caused on others. As such, it is amoral and, as an artificial person, could be reasonably described as psychopathic. This point is similar Kenneth Goodpaster's description of teleopathy, or a sickness of purpose, because a corporation may be solely interested in profit at all cost.

I agree with Bakan's thesis and even with his recommendation that basic reforms are needed in corporate law to make corporations more accountable to democratic governance. A parallel approach is available, I think, through corporate governance. I believe that one way to make corporations moral is to ensure that its governance is guided by moral principles. I will try to develop these points in my lecture.