Penalties of the Moral Rationales for Following the Law

Dr. Silver,

In your book, the first sentence of chapter 5 states:

“Corporations are not required to follow the law when it requires them to do deeply immoral things, such as to participate in genocide.”

I want to raise the question of the penalty a company must pay if they do not follow the immoral laws. I will argue that the more immoral the law, the higher the penalty.

For example, if you run a cruise ship company and the law states that you are not permitted to feed your guests dinner on Tuesday’s, this is a minor immoral law that a government would probably just slap a small fine on you.

But what if the law was more severe, the penalty would be more severe.

For example, in 1939, the St. Louis cruise ship was faced with a morale and ethical dilemma. This ship housed about 1000 Jews who were escaping Germany to go to Cuba. Cuba officials and law makers decided not to allow the entrants of the Jews even though all of the Jews had the proper papers and a ticket which they paid for. After being rejected in Cuba, the captain sailed for Miami where the US Coast Guard also said no to the entrants. The captain, faced with the dilemma of should he break the US law and enter the territory or just sail back to Germany. If the captain broke the US law and entered the US territory, he would probably have had his boat sunk and all killed or a German Nazi official on the boat would have had him killed. The penalty for not following this immoral law was death.

So in the end, the St. Louis sailed back to Germany where about half of the Jews were killed during the Holocaust. Everyone should watch the movie Voyage of the Damned.

So my question is, at what price does human thought become simply a matter of survival during immoral law times? My answer would be that sometimes it is not realistic for companies or business people to act ethically when the immoral law is so extreme that it interferes with your survival.