Conscience, Incorporated — and the Machine That Came After
A review of Conscience Incorporated: Pursue Profits While Protecting Human Rights by Michael H. Posner (NYU Press, 2024)
Some books are worth reading precisely because they are wrong in instructive ways. Michael Posner’s Conscience Incorporated is not one of them. It is worth reading because it is largely right about the disease and only half-right about the cure — and the gap between those two halves is where the most important argument of our moment is being fought.
Posner is no bomb-thrower. He is the Jerome Kohlberg Professor of Ethics and Finance at NYU’s Stern School of Business, founder and chair of the Fair Labor Association, and Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor under President Obama. He has spent a career in the room where the compromises get made, and the book carries the calm authority of someone who has watched a lot of corporate promises curdle. His thesis is bracingly simple: the old story that pits profit against ethics is a false binary, and the firms that thrive over the long run will be the ones that build human-rights diligence into their core operations rather than quarantining it in a corporate social responsibility department that exists to issue glossy reports. He builds the case through familiar defendants — Nike, Coca-Cola, Walmart, Meta — and argues, persuasively, that public awareness alone has never been enough to discipline a global supply chain.
I want to start by giving the man his due, because there is more common ground here than a libertarian reader might expect.
What Posner gets right
A compassionate libertarian and a human-rights lawyer should agree on one foundational point: concentrated power is dangerous to the people on the wrong end of it, and it tends to escape accountability unless something forces the issue. Posner’s catalog of abuses — the contractor four time zones away whose labor never appears on an org chart, the moderator absorbing the worst of the internet for a subcontractor’s wage, the supplier whose conditions the brand prefers not to inspect too closely — is not a fantasy. These are real harms done to real people, and a philosophy that takes individual dignity seriously cannot wave them away with an invisible hand and a shrug.
Better still, Posner’s central operational insight is, in spirit, anti-bureaucratic. Embedding diligence into how a company actually buys, builds, and ships — rather than bolting on a compliance theater — is exactly the kind of bottom-up, incentive-aligned reform that should appeal to anyone skeptical of box-checking. When he frames human-rights risk as business risk — reputational, operational, eventually financial — he is speaking the market’s own language. A firm that treats its workers and users as means to an end, and gets caught, pays for it. That is not a regulatory truth; it is a competitive one.
So far, so good. The trouble begins when Posner reaches for the lever.
The machine he didn’t fully see coming
The book went to press just as the ground shifted. Artificial intelligence does not break Posner’s diagnosis — if anything, it vindicates it — but it stress-tests his prescription nearly to failure.
Consider his core concern, the worker rendered invisible by distance and subcontracting. AI has manufactured an entirely new version of that worker: the data labeler. The large models now reshaping white-collar work were trained, in part, by a “tasker underclass” in the Global South — workers in Kenya, Uganda, and India paid on the order of thirteen to sixteen dollars a day to sort, rate, and sanitize the raw material of machine intelligence, including the disturbing content the rest of us never have to see. This is Posner’s chapter on outsourced labor, rewritten for a new decade, and it is arriving faster than any framework designed for garment factories can track.
At the same time, the displacement has climbed the ladder. The anxiety is no longer confined to the loading dock; it has reached the analyst’s cubicle and the junior associate’s desk. The fear among serious people is not science fiction — the chief executive of one leading AI lab has warned that the technology could eliminate a large share of entry-level white-collar jobs and push unemployment into the double digits. Whether or not that forecast proves accurate, the human stakes Posner cares about have expanded, not contracted.
And on the question he spends real ink on — platform content and online harm — AI now sits on both sides of the ledger. It lets companies moderate at a scale no human staff could match, and it spares flesh-and-blood moderators some of the trauma of the job. It also amplifies the bias baked into its training, hallucinates with confidence, and hands every troll and propagandist a generative firehose. The technology is simultaneously the best tool we have for the problem and a powerful new source of it.
In other words: the moral case Posner makes is more urgent in 2026 than it was in 2024.
Where the libertarian parts company
But Posner’s instinctive remedy is government, and his preferred model is Europe — mandatory due-diligence regulation, enforced from above. Here the compassionate libertarian has to register a respectful dissent, and AI is the cleanest illustration of why.
First, the pacing problem. Regulation moves at the speed of committee; AI moves at the speed of capital. In the time it takes a legislature to define a harm, the technology that produces it has been superseded twice. This is not a hypothetical complaint. The United States has spent the period since the book’s publication moving away from the regulatory approach — a December 2025 executive order now directs the Justice Department to identify and challenge state AI laws and to assemble a federal framework explicitly designed to preempt them. Europe, the model Posner holds up, has proposed delaying the high-risk obligations of its own AI Act from 2026 to 2027. The remedy he prescribes is in political retreat on both continents precisely because the thing it was meant to govern outran it.
Second, the capture problem. Mandatory regulatory regimes are written, in practice, by the largest incumbents — the only players with the lawyers and lobbyists to be in the room. A compliance burden that a trillion-dollar platform absorbs as a rounding error can be a moat that drowns the smaller competitor who might otherwise have done the work better. Rules sold as a check on corporate power have a way of entrenching the most powerful corporations of all. Posner is admirably suspicious of concentrated corporate power; he is notably less suspicious of concentrated state power, even though the historical record gives ample reason to fear both.
Third, and most fundamentally: the book is more confident than I am that the conscience belongs in the statute book. The mechanisms that have actually moved corporate behavior — investors who reprice risk, customers who walk, employees who refuse to build the thing, journalists and researchers who drag the subcontract into daylight — are distributed, voluntary, and fast. They are also, not incidentally, the mechanisms Posner himself spent a career using to good effect before he concluded the answer was a mandate. The Fair Labor Association is a voluntary association. The shaming of bad actors is a market and civil-society process. The most effective tools in his own toolkit are the ones that don’t require a regulator at all.
An honest accounting
None of this makes Conscience Incorporated a bad book. It makes it an important and incomplete one. Posner has correctly identified that scale plus distance plus opacity equals abuse, and that “the market will sort it out eventually” is cold comfort to the person being harmed right now. That is a serious moral point and it deserves a serious answer.
But the answer, I’d argue, is not to transfer the conscience to the one institution with a monopoly on force and a documented record of being captured by the very interests it claims to police. The answer is to make the distributed mechanisms sharper — radical transparency, genuine liability for genuine harm, the freedom of workers and users and investors to exit and to expose. Treat people as ends rather than means, yes. Posner and I agree on the destination. We disagree about who should be holding the map, and AI has made that disagreement the central economic question of the decade rather than a footnote to it.
Read the book. Argue with the second half. The first half will have already won you over, and the argument over the rest is the one worth having.
JD DuRie writes on Connecticut civic life, political philosophy, and the long argument between liberty and power at CT Capital. This review was developed in collaboration with AI Matters.
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