If we were trying to engineer a corporate entity to behave morally, we might precommit the entity (using a contract) to generous settlement terms with any whistleblowers providing even relatively minimal evidence of the appearance of unethical or antisocial behavior.
I’m not completely sure, but possibly you would also (or instead?) have to require similar precommitments of the humans (CEO? Directors? Shareholders?) who have power over the entity, so that their incentives align with the corporation’s.
I like this idea a lot. I think some elaboration might be necessary to remove possible system-gaming scenarios, though.
For example, imagine a collusion between an accountant who can manipulate the books and a “whisteblower” employee. If the accountant could alter the books without it being traced back to them, then they could arrange to split the settlement and win big, at the expense of the rest of the corporation.
If we were trying to engineer a corporate entity to behave morally, we might precommit the entity (using a contract) to generous settlement terms with any whistleblowers providing even relatively minimal evidence of the appearance of unethical or antisocial behavior.
I’m not completely sure, but possibly you would also (or instead?) have to require similar precommitments of the humans (CEO? Directors? Shareholders?) who have power over the entity, so that their incentives align with the corporation’s.
I like this idea a lot. I think some elaboration might be necessary to remove possible system-gaming scenarios, though.
For example, imagine a collusion between an accountant who can manipulate the books and a “whisteblower” employee. If the accountant could alter the books without it being traced back to them, then they could arrange to split the settlement and win big, at the expense of the rest of the corporation.
Nick Szabo has written some about “group controls”, which are (I believe) the state of the art for achieving Friendly organizations:
http://szabo.best.vwh.net/groupcontrols.html