Who can feel anything but disheartened by the full-page advertisement in the Bangor Daily News last Friday calling on International Paper to be a responsible citizen. To avert the economic damage that will result from the closure of the Passadumkeag and Costigan sawmills, the ad begged IP to sell the mills to someone who would operate them. The plea is likely to be ignored.

The sponsors of the ad claimed IP has a “civic and moral responsibility” to Maine citizens. This may be true, but corporations rarely behave in a way that reflects such responsibilities when their own private interests (profits) are at stake.

The result of the closures will be that IP will make more money while the families of people who used to work in the mills, local suppliers and communities and the state of Maine all must deal with the economic carnage that is left behind. This is called privatizing the gain while socializing the loss.

Corporations do it all the time. Not just with the welfare of the communities in which they operate, but with the environment, human rights, the public safety and the dignity of their employees.

Some may say, “It’s a free country and corporations are bound by the law like everyone else,” but this argument fails to recognize certain things about corporations that make them different from individual citizens. Corporations exist only because state law passed by our elected representatives allows them to be created. Corporations owe as much to the citizenry of the state for their existence and ability to operate as they do to their shareholders.

Corporations are also the only citizens for whom the state determines a purpose. Strange as it sounds, every state in the country (including Maine) has decided to make that purpose the unqualified pursuit of self-interest, often called greed.

Corporations are not just other citizens. The aggregation of behavior of hundreds and sometimes thousands of individual employees under a corporate banner can do much more harm than the collective behavior of the same people operating separately. Corporate behavior is also much more likely to be insensitive to the interests of real people and communities far away from corporate headquarters.

A recent Business Week/Harris Poll survey found that 95 percent of Americans believe there are times when corporations should sacrifice the interests of their shareholders in order to protect the interests of their employees and the communities in which they operated. Unfortunately, the law provides otherwise.

The corporate law imposes a legal duty on companies (actually their directors) to try to make money for their shareholders. It does not impose any duty upon corporations to recognize the public interest.

The fact that corporations are permitted to disregard the public interest in the pursuit of profit is a mistake that should be rectified. This can be done by changing the corporate law so that the duty of corporations to make money for their shareholders can no longer be satisfied by (i) damaging the environment or the welfare of the communities in which the corporation operates, (ii) endangering the public safety, or (iii) violating human rights or the dignity of employees.

Making money is possible without damaging the public interest. More and more companies are proving it every day. The sooner we require this to be the rule for all companies, the better our world will be.

Robert C. Hinkley has been a corporate lawyer for 22 years. He is admitted to practice in New York, Massachusetts and New Hampshire and lives in Brooklin.