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54 Sw. L. Rev. 77 (2025)
Public Benefit and Private Profit

handle is hein.journals/swulr54 and id is 85 raw text is: PUBLIC BENEFIT AND PRIVATE PROFIT Darryll K. Jones* I. INTRODUCTION It requires an abiding faith in the human character to convincingly extoll the efficacy of benefit corporations (BC).1 Can instinctive physical selfishness really be tempered by conscientious intellectual selflessness? Self-interest is hard wired because survival is the first human instinct.2 Except in the family or in rare war circumstances, selfishness prevails over any selfless notion to sacrifice one's own survival, even knowing that another's survival is dependent on the sacrifice. The self takes precedence over the other. It seems only an extension of the first instinct, that given a choice between altruism and profit-seeking, people will pursue the latter. Especially when the pursuit of profit does not obviously or immediately portend dire consequences for someone else. In economic transactions, selfishness manifests itselfin profit-seeking behavior. The ethos ofbusiness is that every actor seeks profit, even at the expense of another person or everybody else's loss.4 It is a competition constrained only by wide legal Professor of Law, Florida A & M University College of Law. 1. I will use benefit corporation or BC to refer to entities organized under the Model Benefit Corporations Act or Delaware's Public Benefit Corporations. I use the phrase in reference to business entities that have a legal duty to consider the interests of other groups, such as employees, customers, communities, and perhaps even the environment, when making business decisions. MICHAEL B. DORFF, BECOMING A PUBLIC BENEFIT CORPORATION: EXPRESS YOUR VALUES, ENERGIZE STAKEHOLDERS, MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE 4 (Eric Nee & Johanna Mair eds., 2024). 2. The assertion is, of course, greatly simplified and I do not intend a dissertation on human behavior or the invariability ofhuman behavior. I am instead requesting a stipulation that humans are first and foremost self-serving. But see, e.g., Emma Seppaila, Compassion: Our First Instinct, PSYCH. TODAY (June 3, 2013), https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/feeling-it/201306/ compassion-our-first-instinct#sthash.gwfGEZkd.dpuf. (I acknowledge, however, a great body of scientific knowledge asserting that compassion is the first human instinct). 3. See Scott Barry Kaufman & Emanuel Jauk, Healthy Selfishness and Pathological Altruism: Measuring Two Paradoxical Forms ofSelfishness, FRONTIERS PSYCH. 1, 3 (May 21, 2020), https://www.frontiersin.org/joumals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01006/fulli Two researchers use the phrase pathological altruism to refer to selfless behavior that is damaging to the self. Id. 4. See DORFF, supra note 1, at 10; From this perspective, shareholders are the entire reason corporations exist. All of the other groups who contribute to the enterprise's success must look out 77