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Question

1)  Should companies be held publicly accountable for their mistakes?

2) Do Puritan values still dominate American cultural morals and values?

Answer 1

Hey Kaitlyn,

I would like to address your second question: "Should companies be held publicly accountable for their mistakes?"

Since there are many types of companies, mistakes, and forms of accountability, we need to break down the question so that we can argue for a specific stance.

First, lets think about the size of the company and who might be affected by their mistakes. If a rather local company, for example a family owned bakery that has a few stores in New York makes bread with rotten flour one day and sells it to people. Those consumers might get sick and never return, others might sue, and maybe some journalists will write a bad report on them. For small scale, local companies, mistakes almost always come back to bite them. This is a fairly typical self-correcting behavior of the market economy. It is based on the idea that social responsibility is built into local market economies because if a business makes a mistake, they will go out of business because the local community will refuse to do business with them. The key component is local.

On the other hand, in our globalized world, multi-national corporations don't have a local community to keep them accountable. For example, if a computer corporation uses exposes it's labor force in China to toxic chemicals, U.S. consumers will not be negatively effected and many probably won't know about corporation's mistake, and even if they did know they probably wouldn't be able to do anything about it. Therefore, the accountability cannot come from the consumer, it usually has to come from international government regulations that force companies to respect human rights.

Relatedly, many companies have been responsible for ecological mistakes. For example, when the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico caused millions of dollars in damage to small local fisherman and wreaked havoc on the local ecology, BP was sued by the US and required to compensate the fishing industry and pay for ecological clean-up.

To answer your question, it is important to think about the type of companies we're referring to and the types of mistakes companies make and who those mistakes effect in order to understand what accountability should look like.

I hope this is helpful, Kaitlyn.

Best,

John-Michael

Answer 2

Hi, Kaitlyn!

Great questions! I will briefly address the 2nd question, "Do Puritan values still dominate American cultural morals and values?".

Puritanism, combined with a couple other Christian denominations and practices, led to what would largely be seen as Evangelicalism today. With the creation of the American colonies and then the United States, this group of Christians began adapting their convictions to American ideals to the point at which it was very difficult to distinguish the two. Take Manifest Destiny for example. Americans at large wanted to venture to the Pacific coast and claim all the land they found along the way. So, the Church bought in and claimed it was God's will that this be done. Today this melding of American and "Puritan"/Evangelical values can be seen in the Religious Right. The reason this block tends to vote in unison so often is because "the American way" is closely tied in their way of thinking to "the Christian way." The two are so closely tied because this fusion has been happening since the founding of the country. For many in the Religious Right, it would be impossible to separate the two.

Studying all this at present for a class I'm teaching next week. Hope this helps!

Katie

Answer 3

What is the context for each of these questions? For example, in what class or unit were they asked? Knowing that would help experts provide more specific answers. :-) In general, we can say that:

(1) It depends on what kinds of mistakes. Say, if a company only harms itself, there may be no need for public accountability. But if its pollution harms the environment, then surely it must be held accountable in some way. What kinds of companies are we talking about?

(2) Yes and no. We can still see certain Puritan values (work ethic, sexual restraint) in certain areas of American life, while others (religious fanaticism) are more rare. So... which Puritan values, specifically?