How Autonomy Alone Debunks Corporate Moral Agency (original) (raw)
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Corporate moral agency: review and implications
Journal of Business Ethics, 1999
ABSTRACT. The debate concerning corporate moral agency is normally conducted through philo-sophical arguments in articles which argue from only one point of view. This paper summarises both the arguments for and against corporate moral agency and concludes from this that ...
Corporate Moral Agency at the Convenience of Ethics and Law
2019
The construct of corporate moral agency in both ethics and law is far too often regarded as little more than a means to an end, reduced to subtle semantics, attenuated fictions, and poor analogies. Much scholarship on corporate moral agency is used instrumentally to reach certain ideological ends in business ethics. In this article, we also bemoan the criminal law’s perennial search over personhood and agency — a search that takes a host of theoretical casualties and, ultimately, a reluctance to employ formal social controls in response to serious corporate wrongdoing. Jurists, legal theorists, business ethicists, and philosophers are all too eager to avoid any serious engagement with question of CMA.
A Non-Mentalistic Account of Corporate Agency and Responsibility
Social Theory and Practice, 2024
The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it aims to show that there is a way to consider corporations and organizations as agents without attributing to them mental states such as beliefs, desires, and intentions. Looking at the constitutional setup and structure of corporations and organizations, as well as the professional status and role of its principal operative members, provides us with sufficient information to classify them as agents. Corporations and organizations are agents, I argue, because their operative members, acting in accordance with their professional role, turn them into decision-making and acting entities. Second, the paper argues that such a non-mentalistic account still allows us to hold corporations and organizations morally responsible for their impact on the social world and the environment. Taking into account the professional identity and role of senior managers also allows us to show why they might be accountable for a corporation's unethical, let alone illegal practices.
"If You Tickle Us...": How Corporations Can Be Moral Agents Without Being Persons
Legally, corporations are persons, but most of us are relatively clear on the fact that this is a fiction. Recent Supreme Court decisions notwithstanding, corporations aren’t really persons. They are, however, moral agents. My purpose in this paper is to respond to the commonly voiced concern that recognizing corporations as moral agents requires us to recognize them as persons. The paper begins by outlining a holist position that recognizes the “corporate entity” as a moral agent in its own right: effectively rational and free and therefore subject to moral obligations. I then highlight the contrasts between this admittedly rich and powerful entity and a true person, as persons are typically identified in both philosophical and other usage, concluding that corporate entities are not persons and therefore not entitled to the rights or consideration to which real persons are entitled. I close with a brief consideration of the Supreme Court’s holdings in Citizens United (that corporations are entitled to free speech protections) and FCC v. AT&T (that corporations do not have privacy rights), noting that my account would have blocked the unfortunate result in Citizens while supporting the intuitively appropriate outcome in FCC.
Much has been written about what corporations owe society and whether it is appropriate to hold them responsible. In contrast, little has been written about whether anything is owed to corporations apart from what is owed to their members. And when this question has been addressed, the answer has always been that corporations are not worthy of any distinct moral consideration. This is even claimed by proponents of corporate agency. In this paper, I argue that proponents of corporate agency should recognize corporations as worthy of moral consideration. Though particular views of moral status are often taken for granted in the literature, corporations can satisfy many views of moral status given the capacities often ascribed to them. They can even meet the conditions of the views assumed. I conclude by suggesting that recognizing the moral status of corporations may not be as drastic or harmful as we might imagine.
Artificial Moral Agents: Corporations and AI
COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY: PERSPECTIVES FROM POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL ONTOLOGY, 2024
Are corporations moral agents? I seek to make progress on that question by examining, in the first instance, whether artificial intelligences (AI) are moral agents. The appeal to AI stands to bear fruit, I believe, because both AI and the corporation function by way of distributed cognition, and both are capable of intelligence-indeed, intelligence that can surpass that of humans. Yet both lack capacities that are central, I will argue, to our moral lives. We can see this more readily in AI, which do not depend on human capacities once they are up and running. So the deficiencies in artificial moral agency emerge more clearly in the case of AI than the corporation. Having argued that AI cannot qualify for moral agency, I then turn to the corporation. I contend that the corporation lacks the very capacities that disqualify AI from moral agency, and that the corporation cannot overcome the relevant deficiencies by relying on its individual members to provide what is missing. While the bulk of the analysis surveys in turn each of the capacities that sustain moral agency, I end by arguing that the strategy of dissecting moral agency into discrete capacities is misleading and should be abandoned. I urge instead a holistic conception of moral agency, and conclude that, viewed holistically, it remains true that both AI and the corporation are not true moral agents. This chapter seeks to illuminate the question of corporate moral agency indirectly, by considering the question of whether Artificial Intelligence (AI) can qualify as a moral agent. Efforts to mine the moral capacities of one of these "intentional agents" (List 2021) for insights about the other are now commonplace.1 I shall argue that AIs as they currently exist, and will exist in the foreseeable future, do not qualify as moral agents. I shall then extend the argument to corporations: They are deficient in ways similar to AI, and so should fail to qualify as moral agents too.
Corporate Moral Responsibility
Philosophy Compass, 2016
This essay provides a critical overview of the debate about corporate moral responsibility (CMR). Parties to the debate address whether corporations are the kinds of entities that can be blamed when they cause unjustified harm. Proponents of CMR argue that corporations satisfy the conditions for moral agency and so they are fit for blame. Their opponents respond that corporations lack one or more of the capacities necessary for moral agency. I review the arguments on both sides and conclude ultimately that what divides the two is not so much competing conceptions of the corporation as it is disagreement about what moral agency requires. Homing in on the real site of contention will, it is hoped, allow future participants in the debate to focus their efforts more productively.
The Unrecognized Consensus about Firm Moral Responsibility
The Moral Responsibility of Firms Revisite. Orts, Eric and N. Craig Smith (eds). Oxford University Press., 2017
I begin this chapter by arguing that there is an unrecognized consensus just below the surface of the FMR debate: almost everyone believes that firms shouldn’t do things that are morally wrong. This consensus is masked by metaphysical and metaethical complexities (briefly outlined), but the central claim is usually held to be true regardless of how we resolve those complexities. It’s important that we recognize this, as doing so reframes the debate in helpful ways and avoids the appearance of serious disagreement about this basic point. The second section raises two concerns about the contemporary debate. First, the myopic focus on explicit executive decision-making implies what I’ve started to call “the homunculus theory of corporate behavior” – the idea every firm has a little man inside who carefully, precisely, and effectively shapes corporate action. Any executive can tell you that’s simply not the case; they wish it were! We need a theory that captures all of the major forces that shape the actions of firms, and I briefly present my own as a contender. My theory focuses on the corporate commitments that drive corporate behavior – commitments that arise through explicit decision-making, distributed decision-making and cultural shift, among other things. This yields an account that is at once truer to life and more useful in guiding interventions. Second, much of the debate about corporate moral agency relies on human paradigms in a way that closes off the possibility of a non-human moral agent. I close the section by briefly outlining a model which avoids this difficulty. The chapter closes by arguing that even within the “pro-FMR” camp, there is more consensus than is usually acknowledged. After explaining how our current labels mask this consensus, I note that almost all the major players agree with the basic claim that “firms” (in some sense) act morally and immorally. Recognizing this hidden consensus – again – allows us to reframe the debate in helpful ways, and puts us in a position to recognize that most of the “competing” claims don’t really compete. What is needed is an over-arching account of corporate moral agency that captures the contributions made by the other theories, and I demonstrate that my own account (described above) can fill this need as well.