Wall Street's Economic Crimes Against Humanity

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Eichmann's trial sent a message to the world that individuals must be held accountable for their judgment, even when they have "thoughtlessly" conformed to toxic institutional circumstances. This message is not restricted to the unspeakable horrors of mass murder. It is relevant to the relationship between individual judgment and institutional processes in any situation. It's a message that says: you can't just blame the system for the bad things you've done. Yet to the world's dismay, thousands of men and women entrusted with our economic well being systematically failed to meet this minimum standard of civilized behavior. They did not capably discern right and wrong. They either did not judge, or they did not act on their judgment. This failure defines the raw heart of the public's outrage at each fresh disclosure of outlandish bonuses. It is less a thirst for revenge than it is a rebellion against this banal evil.

The public's indignation reflects a sense of morality that points deeper and truer than the laws devised to protect self serving business practices. The call now is to take back our community, to return to a place where people are capable of telling right from wrong because they recognize themselves in one another. The public demands—no, commands—that our leaders reassert their capacity, their duty, to judge what is right, even if that means standing up to lawsuits and angry bankers.

Vacuum of Moral Leadership

Edward Liddy, the Paulson-appointed chairman of AIG, initially recommended that the bonuses given to its employees go forward, though he found it "distasteful and difficult." Mr. Liddy missed what could have been the shining moment of his career by failing to insist from the start on what he thought to be right, despite "the unanimous opinion of all those around him." Neither Mr. Liddy nor anyone in the Obama Administration has demonstrated that kind of moral leadership, as they now scramble to respond to the public's demand that AIG employees return their bonuses.

By now the existential security of millions of people has been threatened or destroyed. No one is safe from the waves of value destruction set into motion by the banal evil of this self-centered business model and the unquestioning participants who failed to assert their own moral judgment. The urgent lesson for capitalism's heirs redounds through every headline: There is no "other"; there is only us. The damage that was supposed to be "theirs" is now shared misery on a global scale.

Since the days of Eichmann in Jerusalem, our understanding of human rights has evolved to include economic, social, and cultural rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the U.N. includes "the promotion of social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom." The U.N. Commission on Human Rights has called the business community to account, stating that "transnational corporations and other business enterprises, as organs of society, are also responsible for promoting and securing the human rights set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights."

The economic crisis has demonstrated that the banality of evil concealed within a widely accepted business model can put the entire world and its peoples at risk. Shouldn't those businesses be held accountable to agreed international standards of rights, obligations, and conduct? Shouldn't the individuals whose actions unleashed such devastating consequences be held accountable to these moral standards?

I believe the answer is yes. That in the crisis of 2009 the mounting evidence of fraud, conflicts of interest, indifference to suffering, repudiation of responsibility, and systemic absence of individual moral judgment produced an administrative economic massacre of such proportion that it constitutes an economic crime against humanity.

Shoshana Zuboff is the author of The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism. She was the Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.