>Surely every stakeholder has some degree of responsibility in the proper functioning of any system.
A civilization enforces responsibility through the law.
>I am free to degrade public infrastructure such as roads because it is not my responsibility to build them.
Yes. And either the government should set laws to prevent you from misusing the infrastructure, and/or the people should shun your company for being a bad actor. The former being consistent for infrastructure that is owned and maintained by the tax-funded government.
>I am morally justified in committing crimes since I am not a police officer.
Morality and legality are different things. Neither people nor corporations should be judged by the government through the abstract, subjective morality of individuals, only by agreed upon, written law, and at its loosest which is a court's interpretation of the law.
You as an individual can hold anyone responsible for anything under any criteria, but then you should state you're speaking for yourself as per your own moral code. As a society, we have rules for that.
If you want to make your moral code the law, then that should also be explicitly mentioned as such instead of speaking as if it's the status quo.
>Yes. And either the government should set laws to prevent you from misusing the infrastructure, and/or the people should shun your company for being a bad actor.
It seems we agree. Similarly, governments should encode the civic responsibility of businesses into law.
Whether or not they have actually done that is a different debate.
I have a responsibility not to violate the law or vandalize the roads, but I don't think I have a responsibility to drive extra carefully or patch up potholes as I see them.
To me, this seems like a very cynical scheme. We tell "normal people" that they, personally, ought to BUY AMERICAN to prevent jobs from moving abroad. When they eventually do, we can tell them they should've done more and that it was their fault. It shifts the liability on to the victims, rather than the perpetrators.
But the responsibility of ensuring that a country has a good trade deficit is upon the government, if anyone! There's no serious way I can prevent it, so the only real point of saying it's my responsibility is to diminish the government's responsibility for failing to prevent it.
To suggest that the companies have a moral obligation, is to suggest that an abstract body corporate can have a conscience. If it could, there would be no need to ban slavery - just expect that the honest businessmen of America cease to traffic in them.
When you add in "responsibility" like that, it becomes very vague. What does it mean for a company to have morally transgressed? Does it mean that it has violated its conscience, or does it just mean that it's an unfortunate behavior we would do best to punish?
Companies are inert objects. They do not have consciences. I can't say that a company does an evil thing, any more than I can blame a rock someone else threw for hitting my head. It hurts, but I can't very well blame the rock for it. Companies are just like driftwood in the ocean; their motion is defined solely by the forces acting upon them.
What is left, then, is to suggest that society should go after the companies that don't do what we want. But this can never be done by individuals. It has to be done by unions, governments, or something of the sort. It cannot be done by the companies themselves, and it cannot be done by individuals.
When you suggest that companies are doing something wrong, and not the government for failing to regulate them, this is tantamount to suggesting that the responsibility for punishing them actually lay on the individual. But to do so makes the primary victim into the perpetrator of the aggression against him. It is a terrible thing to do.
By your reasoning, I am free to degrade public infrastructure such as roads because it is not my responsibility to build them.
Equivalently: I am morally justified in committing crimes since I am not a police officer.