Then they had to go back and read the first part of the relationship and have the student respond. As part of the experiment the student gets most of the questions wrong and recorded voices are played yelling in agony as the teacher increases the voltage with every wrong answer. What this tells us is that most people respond to authoritative figures even those in lab coats. Most of the unethical acts I have seen committed in business were performed by essentially honest people. At Penn State a while back, after a snow storm a branch on a big tree collapsed killing a girl.
Businesses are legal persons for some situations.
Corporations, governments, and other human organizations are entities that can act ethically or unethically. Such organizations are more than the sum of their parts. It makes philosophical, ethical, and legal sense to ascribe moral and legal responsibility to firms. Thus corporations have responsibilities. Ethics and the Law Ethics is broader.