Conclusion

As should be clear, the account sketched above does not compete with those put forward by French, List and Pettit, and the rest. It incorporates them, providing a foundation that allows us to assemble all of the sophisticated, insightful work done to date into an even broader and more encompassing understanding of corporate agents and their agency.

In the old Hindu parable, each of the blind men inspecting the elephant insists that he knows what elephants are like: they are like the part that he happens to be inspecting. Each treats the part he is attending to as if it captures the whole of what an elephant is, and is thus led sadly astray in his theorizing about what an elephant looks like, how it functions, and how it is likely to behave. Similarly, to date we have treated accounts of specific mechanisms — CID Structures, vote aggregation, even joint intentions, etc. — as if they captured the whole of corporate agency, and thus of corporate agents.

Recognizing the broader, deeper social structure that unifies the membership into a (material) whole lets us move past this. It lets us answer critical concerns about “ghostly,” “bizarre,” “hovering entities,” and allows us to recognize the existing accounts as complements rather than competitors. More importantly, it reveals corporate intentionality and agency as a vastly richer and more com­plex process than previously acknowledged: more deeply rooted in the full membership and more independent of any individual member than the current accounts allow. In short, it lets us assemble the elephant, and see her for the magnificent, independent beast she really is.

Notes

1 Hindu parable, adapted from Wikipedia contributors. (2018, October 29). Blind men and an elephant. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 21:29, December 30, 2018, from https://en.wikipedia. org/w/index.php?title=Blind_men_and_an_elephant&oldid=866284758

2 For philosophical work regarding the importance of incorporating the emotions and other aspects of the relational self, see Baier 1986, Held 1990, Wallace 1993, and Kleingeld 2014.

3 While French typically refers to his entities as “corporations,” legal status plays no apparent role in his account and I will assume that his account extends beyond legally incorporated entities.

4 French has not (to my knowledge) addressed the metaphysical relationship between the commitments generated by his CID Structures and the membership that enacts them, but others working with his account (and similar ones) have generally assumed supervenience. See e.g. (McMahon 1995, Forge 2002). Supervenience is the least demanding of the available options, so I have assumed it as well.

5 Hindriks 2008, 2013 explicitly incorporates artifacts.

6 They acknowledge the possibility that things might be otherwise, but treat it as a very special case (37).

7 L&P acknowledge the possibility of “perhaps other contributions” (61), but do not develop the possi­bility or give it any role to play in their own account.

8 In fact, I suspect that you would need to go pretty high up into management to find the discoursing, committing, fully knowing, and authorizing that L&P have proposed. I leave that question to the empiricists.

9 In order: Velasquez 2003, Miller and Makela 2005, Ronnegard 2015, Ronnegard and Velasquez 2017, and Ludwig 2017.

10 This account is drawn directly from (Haslanger 2016), who builds on Stuart Shapiro's (1997) account of a “system” as “a collection of objects with certain relationships” and a structure as “the abstract form of a system highlighting the interrelationships among the objects, and ignoring any features of them that do not affect how they relate to other objects in the system” (118, quoting Shapiro 1997: 73).

11 See Ritchie 2018 for an interesting discussion of the comparative difficulties in amending feature groups versus organized groups (i.e. corporate agents).

12 See Hess 2014a, Bjornsson and Hess 2017, Hess 2018a, and Hess 2018d for discussion of the mechanisms that allow lower-level members to shape corporate intentionality in addition to inflecting corporate actions.

13 See Hess 2018b for further discussion about social-psychological implications of participating in the kind of social structure that defines a corporate agent. Rovane 2014 addresses related concerns.

14 See Hess 2014b, 2018b for further argument along these lines.

15 For detailed examples, see Bjornsson and Hess 2017, Hess 2018b, 2018d.

16 See Hess 2018d for a more fully developed application of this approach.

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