Conclusion

When corporations commit wrongs, we rightly feel that it is imperative to cast blame some­where. But the corporation itself cannot bear this blame if we understand that the ends of blame — crucially, protest and punishment — presuppose a capacity for pain and guilt and we see that the corporation has neither.

Notes

1 Aggregates are groupings of individuals fully reducible to the individual members. One defining feature of an aggregate is that there is no organizational structure that allows the grouping to act in a unified way, such that acts of some of them can be attributed to them all. For example, “the set of individuals on the 92 bus this morning” is an aggregate. For more on aggregate groups and their opposites (i.e., associ­ations), see French, 1984; Held, 1970.

2 While I focus here on moral responsibility for wrongful acts my comments apply mutatis mutandis for moral responsibility for commendable acts.

3 How could an entity that does not qualify for moral agency commit a wrong? When I refer to instances when a corporation commits a wrong, I am using shorthand. The full formulation would be something like, “when a corporation commits an act that would constitute a wrong were it to have been committed by a moral agent.”

4 It is important to note that the pragmatic arguments theorists offer in support of corporate moral agency are not meant to stand alone. These theorists supplement their pragmatic arguments with capacity-based accounts of corporations, in an effort to show that the corporation contains the capacities necessary for moral agency.

5 To borrow an example from David Copp (2006,211): Suppose that a three-person committee, consisting of A, B, and C, is charged with making faculty tenure decisions on the basis of three dimensions of performance: research (R), teaching (T), and service (S). Each committee member votes up or down on whether the candidate has a satisfactory record of each of R, T, and S. So long as a candidate gets at least two-thirds “up” votes on each of the three dimensions, the committee will decide in favor of that candidate’s tenure. Were any of the individuals to vote directly on the candidate’s tenure, however, it would need to be the case that the candidate received an “up” vote on all three dimensions. After all, no one would want to approve a tenure candidate who had a sub-par research, teaching, or service record. Now suppose that A alone finds the candidate deficient on R, B alone finds the candidate deficient on T, and C alone finds the candidate deficient on S. The candidate will receive a majority of “up” votes on each of the three dimensions; the committee as a whole, then, will approve the candidate’s tenure. But none of the committee members would have voted in the candidate’s favor because each found the candidate to be deficient on one dimension. It is in this way then that the voting procedure can produce results that no individual would endorse.

6 David Sosa takes issue with Pettit on this point. He notes that, for Pettit, “groups are under pressure to collectivize reason,” and he argues that “this represents a striking contrast with the case of the individual person. The important thing about individual persons is not what practical pressure they are under to be rational: the demand on a person to be rational is constitutive” (2008, 222—223).

7 More precisely, the question should include not just what the entity or individual has done but what he has associated himself with in a way that renders him liable to blame.

8 Other theorists contend that what is essential to blame is its conative component (Sher, 2006; Scanlon, 2008). I am skeptical (see Sepinwall, 2016b) that blame necessarily involves a desire that the wrongdoer not have been the sort of person who would offend (Sher), or an inclination to distance oneself from the wrongdoer (Scanlon). But the more important claim on the account advanced here is that, what­ever else blame involves, it necessarily involves felt emotions. If blame also necessarily has a conative component then it would be the case that forswearing blame entailed forswearing that component too.

9 This isn’t to say that anger must be felt on each and every occasion when it is expressed. It is only to say that blame paradigmatically involves angry feelings, and that the cool blamer could nonetheless be worked up into a state of anger under the right conditions.

10 Putting the point this way implies that the psychopath, or anyone incapable of empathy for that matter, is not an appropriate object of blame. I endorse that implication although I do not seek to defend it here.

11 Of course, one might resist the analogy, claiming that, unlike Spock, the child does not grasp the intrinsic force of the rule. By contrast, Spock knows not only that, e.g., destroying another’s work is against the rules but also that it ought to be against the rules, that it is the way of the universe that there should be a rule against wanton destruction because wanton destruction is wrong. In response to the claimed disanalogy, one might concede that Spock can grasp some of the features that make wanton destruction wrong but contend that neither the child nor Spock can fully appreciate its wrongful char­acter — in Spock’s case because he cannot know what it is like to experience the malice and suffer the disappointment that the destruction entails.

The more general thought is this: it might be the case that a lack of emotion rules out not just certain moral reactions but also deep moral knowledge (see Sepinwall, 2016b).

That knowledge would be shallow in two respects. First, as just described, the force of the moral rules even someone like Spock could recognize would be weak. Moral rules would function for him like the rules of etiquette of some alien species would function for us — we could commit them to memory and aim to practice them but could not find any of them intrinsically motivating in its own right (although we would presumably harbor a background motivation not to offend that secured our adherence to all of them).

Spock’s knowledge of right and wrong would be shallow in a second respect, for in fact moral knowledge cannot comprehensively be committed to memory in advance. Instead, moral discernment requires the capacity to extend moral principles to novel situations. To the extent that this extension requires in turn a capacity for empathy, someone like Spock will again be compromised. If he cannot know what it will feel like to be on the receiving end of the contemplated conduct, Spock will again be without the resources to know how the rule applies or extends.

All of this suggests an impairment that may reach beyond Spock's capacity to be blameworthy; it may implicate his ability to function as a moral agent altogether. I do not explore that possibility further for it suffices for my purposes to establish it makes no sense to blame Spock even if he is adequately capable of fulfilling the conditions for moral agency, including the capacity to judge conduct as mor­ally right or wrong.

12 Some have objected to the claim that blame necessarily has an emotional component by pointing to instances when a person blames without emotion (Sher, 2006. Cf. Wallace, 1994; Hurley, 2007).

13 Mitchell Haney has argued that, because corporations lack a capacity for guilt, they also lack for moral motivation: the corporation does not care about the moral quality of its acts for their own sake and so it cannot be self-motivated to rectify the wrongs it commits (2004). All of that is congenial to the arguments I offer here but it is worth noting two points of divergence between Haney and me: First, Haney is primarily concerned with the corporation's capacities for taking responsibility — in particular, by reforming itself. By contrast, I am concerned not so much with the corporations responses to its own wrongdoing as with the responses of the moral community. And my emphasis is not on how the community can get the corporation to avoid wrongdoing in the future but instead with whether it can get the corporation to experience guilt over its past acts. Second, Haney maintains that corporations are members of the moral community even though they cannot self-regulate through guilt. Like Haney, I believe that we can and should continue to hold corporations to moral rules and sanction corporations when they deviate from those rules. We should, in other words, treat corporations as mor­ally responsible for their acts. But if, as I have argued, corporations are not susceptible to blame then I am doubtful that they belong in our moral community. Blaming is a central practice within that com­munity. While I do not develop the thought here, I would venture that our moral community should consist only of those who can not only discern right from wrong and act accordingly but also relate emotionally to their own wrongs, whether revealed through self-evaluation or the blame of others.

14 Tollefsen raises the notion of feeling for the corporation vicariously (2008, 12), but that notion would seem to make sense only if the corporation can feel in its own right, which Tollefsen denies.

15 In later work, Tollefsen allows that the ways in which the corporation differs from individual moral agents might entail that we subject the corporation to something less robust than moral responsibility — a form of treatment she terms “accountability,” following Mitch Haney (2004) (Tollefsen, 2015). This is an intriguing suggestion and it certainly tracks some of our moral practices — in particular, it justifies our expectations that corporations will compensate the victims of their wrongs and perhaps also undertake the rituals around apology and expressions of remorse. But the possibility that corporations are proper targets for this thinner form of moral address does nothing to undercut the position I stake according to which corporations are inapt targets of blame qua protest and punishment. To reiterate, protest and punishment (in the form of angry blame, not material sanctions) presuppose that their target can feel guilt. Insofar as accountability comes into the picture precisely because corporations cannot feel guilt, the fact that corporations can be morally accountable offers no support whatsoever for the prospect of their being appropriately subject to blame given the ends of blame that I adduce here.

16 But suppose some low-level employees do experience loyalty to the firm and solidarity with the other employees of their corporation, even though loyalty and solidarity ought not to be expected of them. Are they then blameworthy? Not on the account I go on to advance. Executives ought to conceive of the corporation's acts as their own, and take responsibility accordingly. Outsiders to the corporation may blame executives for corporate wrongs both as a way of honoring and reinforcing the norms mandating that executives see their agency as entwined with the corporation's and also because that entwinement is real, as I go on to explain. (See also Sepinwall, 2015.) But blaming low-level employees, whose agency is not entwined with the corporation's, for the corporation's wrongs is like blaming a Francophile who has no political connection to France for France's transgressions. The mere fact that the Francophile takes herself to be bound up with France's acts give us no reason to see her that way; nor does it give us a reason to treat her as if she deserves credit or blame for France's acts. Of course, if France becomes hell-bent on evil then there is something for which we ought to blame the Francophile — namely, her loyalty to an evil regime. By the same token, if a low-level employee remains steadfastly committed to her corporation even as, she knows, it transgresses we may blame her too for her loyalty. But we may not blame her for the corporation’s acts for they are not hers. With that said, I leave open the possibility that some other account of shared responsibility could ground responsibility on considerations that do apply to low-level workers.

17 I note also that clerical and janitorial staff contribute to the product by supporting the workers and work environment in various ways. I do not list them in the text because I believe they are foreclosed from contributing in other ways that subject one to praise and blame for corporate acts, as I explained in the preceding note.

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