“Don’t Be Evil”

The New York Times’ Dan Mitchell reports,

IN 2001, about a dozen of Google's founding employees sat in a conference room trying to come up with a set of corporate values. After a while, one of them, an engineer, Paul Buchheit, said everything they were saying could be summed up by a simple phrase: "Don't Be Evil."
The phrase stuck, and it became Google's informal motto.
Creating one is easy, of course. Living up to it is a little harder, especially when your company becomes as large and ubiquitous as Google. For most of its short history, all was well, but recently complaints have piled up, reaching a peak this month as Google unveiled yet more products. Long considered the David to Microsoft's Goliath, Google is increasingly being thought of as a Goliath itself…
All over the Web, anti-Google sentiment is on the rise.”

This raises some questions for Christians in an increasingly globalized capitalistic world.

• Is it simply a matter of course that all corporations become evil?
• If not, how can we help corporations not be evil?
• If so, how can we limit the evil that corporations inflict upon society?
• And if corporations naturally have this struggle with being evil, then should Christians do all they can to limit corporations’ rights to “personhood” that they have been granted under the 14th Amendment?

See the debate on corporate rights at PBS’ NOW from earlier this year.


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