> Expecting moral courage from a big corporation is probably an exercise in inevitable disappointment though.

I agree about the fact that it is. But why do we accept that? Corporations are made up of people. We certainly do expect people – even groups of people – to exhibit moral courage. Of course, they do sometimes disappoint us, but the expectations remain reasonable in a good society.

>I agree about the fact that it is. But why do we accept that?

Diffusion of liability. It's basically the whole point of a corporation. If you break evil acts down into small unrecognizable chunks that can be turned into a job description and hired for, you're able to run what would otherwise be a detestable business to any single individual person.

Sure. But the buck stops with the corporation's board, or with the CEO that they appoint.

And corporations aren't free to break the law, even though that diffusion of liability should be at play in that case, too.

My guess is it's easy to "spread" guilt around, so that everyone feels like it's out of their hands and they're not entirely responsible for the facts.

Doesn't work with crimes, for instance. Or with poor performance of the company – the shareholders sure won't throw up their hands and say "oh well, we can't figure out why we're not seeing any returns, so we'll just let it slide".

Corporations are made up of a large number of cross-pressured people. It’s not even a purely economic problem for Intel - if they take a hard line on Xinjiang, how many of their Chinese staff will go to prison?

This exactly. We can't give up trying to get corps to show some moral fortitude. It has happened in the past and it will happen again.

Yes.