Understanding corporate responsibility: Culture and complicity

Kipnis's fictional account of the televised treatment of Elaine Robbins clearly shows the surgeon's negligence (Kipnis 2011). The problems with Anodyne's support for the telesurgery breakfast are harder to discern, but show up clearly when we take into consideration how surgical evidence is generated, evaluated, and used by surgeons. Current evidentiary practices in surgery have two major weaknesses, related to the epistemic culture of surgery and to practices of knowledge transmission. We argue that this is a systemic problem, which companies such as Anodyne both contribute to and benefit from. Thus, while we agree with Kipnis's claim that Anodyne is complicit in creating "conditions of danger," we believe that Anodyne's contributory roles extend beyond creating moral hazards for susceptible surgeons and harms for individual patients.