What do corporations owe the people who trust them?

In the second of a two-part series, Elle Lorenzoni argues that the retreat from diversity and inclusion exposed a growing contradiction at the heart of modern corporate life. Companies increasingly claim the moral authority of public institutions while continuing to make decisions according to pragmatic rather than moral considerations

This is the concluding part of my series asking what happens when corporations make equality commitments they are not required to keep.

In my previous article, Was inclusion ever more than branding?, I examined what happens when corporations encourage people to rely on commitments they are free to abandon. 

This raises a broader question: What responsibilities should corporations bear when they participate in public life as though they were moral actors?

Part of the answer lies in the unusual legal and moral position corporations occupy within modern society.

The modern corporation occupies a peculiar legal position. It is treated as a person for the purposes of rights, but not for the purposes of responsibility.

Across the United Kingdom and Europe, company law differs but the moral outcome is the same. The corporation exists as a separate legal entity, with the standing to contract, own, and operate — but without the personal accountability that standing elsewhere implies.

EU company and internal-market law have also expanded corporate mobility and establishment rights across borders, sharpening corporate freedom without producing any comparable expansion of duty, even as US authorities now press some of those same firms to certify the rollback of DEI programmes as the price of doing business.

In the United States, the paradox is explicit. Under the United States Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling of 2010, corporations gained extensive political speech rights, allowing them to spend money influencing elections in ways previously restricted. They now hold First Amendment speech rights comparable to those of individual citizens. They may spend without limit to influence elections. They participate in democratic life as though they were persons.

The question Citizens United did not answer, and was not asked, is what obligations follow from that participation. Rights without obligations amount to privilege rather than personhood. The structure permits influence without consequence.

As Joel Bakan argued in The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (Free Press, 2004), “The corporation, like the psychopathic personality it resembles, is programmed to exploit others for profit.” The corporation does not need a conscience because it is not designed to have one.

That raises a broader question about how such institutions relate to the societies within which they function.

The corporation operates within a society it did not build, governed by rules it did not write.

Under John Locke’s framework in Two Treatises of Government (1689), the social contract exists to protect life, liberty, and property. The corporation extracts from that structure — labour, infrastructure, legal protection, including the labour of the women who built the DEI structures now being dismantled — without being bound to its moral obligations.

Under Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762), legitimacy depends on alignment with the volonté générale — the general will. There was a moment when corporate DEI commitments reflected that will. The retreat marks the moment particular corporate interest reasserted itself.

Under John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), a just system is one that rational actors would design without knowing their position within it. Inequality is permissible only if it benefits the least advantaged. The DEI retreat does not meet that standard. The benefits were temporary while the costs were not.

The corporation benefits from the stability of the social contract without being bound by its moral terms. It lives inside a system built on reciprocity while enjoying an exemption from reciprocity itself.

That distinction becomes most visible when corporate values collide with corporate incentives.

Inside a corporation, care functions as an allocation of resources rather than a virtue.

When diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) investments aligned with investor expectations, environmental, social and governance (ESG) frameworks, and talent acquisition, they functioned as assets. They generated return. They were funded. When those same investments became politically contested and legally ambiguous, they were reclassified. Care became a cost centre. And cost centres are managed.

The pattern is documented to the day. In its annual report of October 2024, Accenture wrote that it had “an unwavering commitment to inclusion and diversity.” Women made up 48 per cent of its workforce. The targets set in 2017 had largely been achieved. Less than four months later, that position was reversed. On 7 February 2025, CEO Julie Sweet circulated a memo announcing the company would sunset all DEI targets, end career development programmes for people of specific demographic groups, and pause diversity benchmarking surveys. The stated reason: “the evolving landscape in the United States.” 

Accenture is not an outlier. From global banks to media conglomerates in Europe and the United States, the pattern repeats: public language about inclusion, private revisions to filings, targets, and structures as soon as the political price changes, even as references to DEI quietly disappear from earnings calls and corporate reports.

“Unwavering”, meaning not subject to change, was withdrawn in four months.

This is capital allocation rather than hypocrisy. Executives are rewarded for performance against current metrics — earnings, risk, and share price — rather than moral consistency. As Bakan observed, the corporation “can neither recognize nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others.”

The performance stopped paying, so it was scaled back.

This is the cosplay of care: strategic imitation of care itself; alignment rather than belief; positioning calibrated to incentive rather than commitment.

Corporations are rewarded when the performance of care works.

If that is the reality, the next question is what meaningful accountability would actually look like.

If corporations participate in the democratic sphere as rights-bearing entities — and under Citizens United, they do — the question is what follows from that participation. Citizens United entrenched corporations as political actors with constitutionally protected voices. Nothing in the decision even contemplates a corresponding duty to the workers whose rights and opportunities those voices help shape. Defenders of the decision will say campaign finance law and employment practices occupy separate legal domains. The point is precisely that the law protects the corporate voice in one while leaving its obligations in the other almost entirely to discretion.

You cannot claim the rights of democratic membership and disclaim its obligations.

Accountability would require disclosure that measures continuity as well as intention. In the UK, the Equality Act 2010 (Gender Pay Gap Information) Regulations 2017 require employers with 250 or more employees to publish gender pay gap data annually. The regulation carries no financial penalty for non-compliance. That gap between the obligation to report and the absence of consequence for what the report reveals is the architecture of accountability without teeth.

A corporation that makes representations, induces reliance and withdraws them without consequence is doing exactly what it was built to do. The consequences of that design do not disappear simply because the incentives change. 

The performance of care ended because the return changed. The cost was transferred to the women who chose roles based on stated commitments, stayed in systems that signalled progression and structured their careers around representations later withdrawn. The corporation, however, absorbed no corresponding loss because that asymmetry is built in: commitments are voluntary, reliance is real and withdrawal is costless.

In other words, the corporation performs care when it is paid to do so, and stops when those incentives disappear. The system remains intact because it was designed to register whether the performance still pays rather than the damage it causes.

The retreat from DEI has revealed the terms on which many corporate social commitments actually exist, raising broader questions about corporate legitimacy itself. If the commitments on which that authority rests remain largely voluntary, and shifts in position are ultimately governed by pragmatic rather than moral considerations, we may need to reconsider how much moral authority those institutions should enjoy.

Elle Lorenzoni is an entrepreneur whose work spans media, law, and communications. She holds a BA in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley, a Juris Doctor from Loyola University Chicago School of Law, and an LL.M. from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. Her early career began at the William Morris Agency in Los Angeles, where she worked as a television literary assistant before going on to develop her own ventures, including Planning Pretty Picnics and The Spoken World. As Women, Work and Enterprise Correspondent for The European, she writes on female entrepreneurship, workplace culture, and leadership, with a focus on how power operates in professional environments and how it shapes women’s opportunities, decisions, and outcomes.

READ MORE: ‘Was inclusion ever more than branding?‘. Corporations spent years presenting diversity and inclusion as core institutional values, with many women reorganising their careers around them. Companies across Europe and America, however, are now increasingly retreating from DEI commitments. In the first of a two-part series, Elle Lorenzoni asks what responsibility institutions bear when they benefit from promises they were never legally required to honour.

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