Some technologies are self-necessitating; that is, once they are introduced, their use becomes mandatory for almost everyone.  The telephone, the automobile and the computer are typical examples.  Since self-necessitating technologies are not in all respects beneficial to human life or the natural world, important ethical concerns arise, especially with regard to the corporations that produce them.
     Take the automobile, for example.  The environmental changes wrought by automobiles and the infrastructure that supports them have been profound.  Roads fragment land and habitat to a degree unprecedented in biological history.  The automobile is in large part responsible for carbon emissions that produce smog, acid precipitation and climate change.  Automotive air conditioners were an important source of the CFCs that are eroding the stratospheric ozone layer.  The drilling, shipment, and refining of petroleum required by current automotive technology, are among the worst sources of industrial pollution.  Petrochemicals associated directly with automotive transportation are, when spilled onto pavement or leaked from underground storage tanks, significant sources of water pollution.  The urban sprawl made possible by automotive transportation has eliminated vast areas of prime farmland and transformed the land surface on a geological scale.
     These effects also have important social dimensions.  Though in some ways the private automobile has enlarged our freedom, in others it has diminished it.  Because cities have been reorganized around the automobile, most people are no longer free to walk or bicycle where they choose, but are compelled to drive in order to obtain the simple essentials of life.  Children, especially, must constantly be shuttled here and there, since (primarily because of changes wrought by the automobile) few places can safely be reached on foot.
     With regard to all of these effects, a number of corporations--those that manufacture automobiles, those that construct roads, those that supply petroleum, and so on--have combined to reorganize the world in ways that are not wholly beneficial.  It is not unreasonable to ask, therefore, whether the corporations that have had the greatest influence in producing these undesirable social and environmental changes might not also have a moral responsibility to ameliorate them.  We all recognize corporate responsibility, of course, for the most direct and spectacular environmental effects--primarily air and water pollution, especially as they directly affect human health.  But there is less recognition of moral responsibility for long-term effects, such as climate change, habitat destruction caused by the proliferation of roads, or depletion of nonrenewable fossil fuels; still less recognition of responsibility for what might be called the "socioenvironmental" effects:  urban sprawl and the consequent destruction of farmland, loss of the freedom to live without a car, and so on.
     But though these corporate responsibilities are not widely recognized, it does not follow that they don’t exist.  It is clear, of course, that individuals and governments also bear some responsibility for such problems; the question of which technologies are used and how they are used is determined in part by the purchasing decisions of individuals and in part by the laws and taxes imposed by governments.  But corporations, as the creators of self-necessitating technologies, have the greatest responsibility.
    For once introduced, self-necessitating technologies force themselves on people by rendering alternatives obsolete, prohibitively expensive, excessively dangerous, or otherwise impractical.
     The automobile has clearly become self-necessitating.  When first introduced, it was, of course, a luxury.  Each person was free to live without one.  Horses, wagons, bicycles, trains, steamboats, and walking paths provided practical alternatives.  But as neighborhoods, cities, and whole landscapes were redesigned around the automobile, these competing technologies have either vanished or become too dangerous, expensive, or otherwise impractical for most people.  Thus, though many of us are reconciled to or even sanguine about the necessity of driving, it is, nevertheless, a necessity.  This necessity also entangles governments, which must meet the demands of automotive technology by constantly expanding the system of roads and the infrastructure that supports it.
     The automobile, of course, is just one example, though perhaps the most egregious one.  Since self-necessitating technologies, when widely adopted, compel most individuals to use them and governments to adjust to them, much of the moral responsibility for their negative effects lies with the corporations that create them.  This is not, of course, to say that automobiles, computers or other self-necessitating technologies should never have been invented or marketed in the first place.  But it is to say that we ought to hold the corporations that create them responsible for ameliorating their damaging effects.