Suppose I know that there is corruption in the corporation...

Suppose I know that there is corruption in the corporation, but I do not know which members of the corporation are corrupt. Should I disassociate myself from such a corporation? What if the corporation provides vital services that will be diminished by my resignation? What if I have reason to believe that by staying, I may be able to limit the corruption?

These are just a few of the questions about individual involvement in corporate activities which reveal the need for red lights, that is, for special moral criteria and institutional apparatus to warn of moral peril due to involvement in corporate activity. In short, moral criteria are needed to evaluate corporate behavior per se, the global behavior of the corporation itself, as well as the behavior of individuals or groups of individuals within the corporation.

Such criteria are needed because of the present lack of corporate moral reflection and because individual ethics tends to emphasize autonomous individual acts rather than corporate behavior or the interactions among individuals and corporate entities. Once we recognize that some system of red lights is needed, we can turn to design problems. Safety features must be designed in such a way that operation of the machinery is not unduly hindered.

It is not practical to check every possible flaw prior to each operation of the machine. So too, we cannot expect to put into practice a system of moral checks that would require so much attention that the effective operation of the corporation would be thwarted. Charles E.

Larmore has recently defended the claim that some moral shortcomings are to be tolerated as the cost of bureaucratic efficiency: The political value of predictability is considerable enough that to a certain degree we are willing to forego having the decisions of government display all the subtlety that we expect of the truly virtuous and morally wise.[^2] The thorny problem of how to weigh safety risks with losses in production finds its analogue in the problem of how to weigh the seriousness of possible moral failings against the threats moral challenges pose to the unimpeded functioning of the corporate entity.

How do we measure evil against efficiency? There are many other difficult questions, as well. The system of warning indicators should be reliable. Not every rumor of corruption is to be answered by an investigation, but the persistence of rumors from various sources is cause for alarm.