Appetite Curbs
Two problems cause indigestion if stakeholder analysis is swallowed whole in a single gulp. One is a matter of concepts and principles of justice, such as distribution, re- distribution, compensation, and others the case concluding Chapter One touches on. The notion of compensation is too often reduced to financial payoffs. We should know better; even the ancient idea of lex salica (a sixth-century penal code also including some civil law acts) allows for payment or atonement. The ethical (and political) ramifications of buying off the injured party or buying citizen cooperation are all too obvious. Is it too harsh to wonder whether what is being bought off sometimes is the decision maker’s guilty conscience? Duty-based reasoning argues that some things or people should not be bought; the price is never right.
For those with an eye on results, reducing harm via compensation raises the specter of discriminatory, class-based problem solving disingenuously rationalized on ethical grounds. Because the price of a rich injured party is higher than a poor one’s, economical implementation of ethically justified solutions targets the poor. If public service sincerely values social equity, why should poor neighborhoods, or poor countries for that matter, get the solutions to society’s problems (prisons, nuclear waste dumps, and so on)? Because they are poor? Weak? What level of economic distress transforms compensation into coercion? An opposing sentiment clarifies this line of argument. If the value of efficiency prevails in tax policy, assuming the diminishing marginal utility of money, do we really have an ethical rationale for taxing the rich?
