Corporations and Corporate Responsibility

Not infrequently in the philosophical literature on collective responsibility another type of entity has been identified as a collective of the conglomerate variety: a corporation.

In “The Corporation as a Moral Person” (French 1979) I offered an analysis of how formal corporate institutions can qualify as full-fledged moral persons in and of themselves. They can be as normatively competent as humans, and that does not require flesh and blood bodies. Corporations exhibit intentionality, are capable of rationality regarding their intentions, and are able to alter their intentions and behavior to respond to reasons, including moral reasons. Conglomerates may, usually minimally, exhibit those characteristics during their typically brief existences focused on specific tasks. Many corporations, however, generally sustain satisfaction of the criteria of moral community membership over time and while engaged in a variety of activities. Corporations have established internal decision structures (CID Structures) that make their concerted decisions and actions possible. By coordinating, subordinating, and synthesizing the actions and intentions of individual humans (employees) and often its machines within a formal organization, a CID Structure transforms them into corporate actions taken for corporate reasons, such as promoting corporate interests. CID Structures are basically composed of two elements: an organizational chart that delineates stations and levels within the institution; and rules that reveal how to recognize decisions that are institutional ones and not simply personal decisions of the humans who occupy positions on the chart. Those rules are typically embedded, whether explicitly or implicitly, in corporate policy. A CID Structure synthesizes the actions, judgments, and attitudes of individuals into the intentions (plans) and actions of an institution while also providing a mechanism for self-reflection essential to its responsive function and rational decision-making processes.

Ordinary conglomerates have no such complex internal structures and typically have limited lifespans. Corporations, it could be said, are intricately evolved, complex, and structurally and functionally integrated conglomerates.

Corporate plans might radically diverge from those that motivate the humans who occupy corporate positions and whose bodily movements and judgments are necessary for the corporation to act. A CID Structure licenses redescribing the actions of humans as the devising and executing of institutional plans thereby revealing the institutional moral person. Gunther Teubner, along similar lines, describes a corporation (or institution) as an autopoietic system of actions that reproduces itself (Teubner 1988), and Carlos Gomez-Jara Diez maintains that (corporate-like) institutions are not made up of human beings or even human actions. They are composed of institutional decisions and actions that construct their own social realities that may be quite different from the reality constructions of the humans working in them (Gomez-Jara Diez 2008).

Some philosophers that favorably view my theory that corporate organizations are capable of intentional action, maintain that moral personhood essentially involves affectivity and such formal institutions lack that capacity qua institutions. They cannot care about the moral quality of their actions or have reactive attitudes and so cannot be full-fledged moral persons. I agree with Deborah Tollefsen that what is needed is an argument to the effect that corporate organizations do not necessarily lack affectivity (Tollefsen 2003 and 2008), though like some humans, they may not always show it. They certainly are objects of the reactive attitudes of humans, such as resentment and indignation, and Tollefsen reads human expressions of reactive attitudes towards such institutions as a demonstration that they are morally addressable, and that entails that they are presumed to have the ability to consider criticism and respond in a morally appropriate fashion.

Corporate entities, however, also regularly express reactive attitudes and emotions in their communications with humans and each other. To account for institutional affectivity Tollefsen offers a vicarious emotion theory in which employees are “conduits” for institutional emotions. The idea is that an institutional employee in her role qua institutional employee may be the vicarious moral emotion expresser for the institution in its dealings with those outside of the institution. Tollefsen notes that humans can have vicarious reactive attitudes and moral emotions for others even if those others do not (cannot?) have the same attitudes about themselves. So, on Tollefsens account, though corporations cannot directly feel moral emotions, moral emotions can be institutionalized within them.

I have maintained that corporate intentional acts are typically human bodily movements under an institutional redescription, CID Structures providing epistemically transparent bases for that descriptive transformation. A similar redescription account might be applied to expose corporate affectivity rather than depending on a vicarious emotion theory. A CID Structure may contain conversion rules for descriptions of certain types of utterances by appropriate humans into descriptions of the expression of corporate reactive attitudes.

No one claims that corporations experience “pangs” of regret or remorse or sorrow as humans might when they express reactive attitudes with regard to the behavior of others or themselves, but the ability phenomenologically to feel emotions may not be a necessary element of moral personhood. Expressions of reactive attitudes generally are performative, ritualistic, conventional. Perhaps the expression in accord with rules is all that is required to attribute affectivity. We might, of course, regard mere ritualistic expressions as insincere if they are not “backed” by a certain sort of feeling, however, even in human affairs, an apology is not void should the apologizer not feel sorrow, regret, or remorse.

If the CEO of an oil company expresses the corporation’s regret for an oil spill, it seems reasonable to take as prima facie true the sentence “The oil company regrets the spill,” though we typically test the sincerity of such regret by monitoring subsequent corporate behavior. Something similar seems usually to occur in the case of human expressions of emotions. Where sincerity is the issue, subsequent behavior trumps appeals to feelings.

If the expression of institutional reactive attitudes and other forms of affectivity can be functionally engineered by the inclusion of rules and policies in a CID Structure so that when an occupant of a certain corporate role expresses regret, sorrow, or some other emotion, that just is the corporation expressing the emotion or making the apology or regretting what it has done, then, regardless of whether or not humans in the corporation, individually, collectively or vicariously, have the appropriate emotion, corporations would seem to meet the standard conditions of moral personhood and be normatively competent; their behavior is subject to moral assessment qua corporations and not merely as conglomerate collectives like the Ox-Bow posse and they certainly are not in any way akin to aggregate collectives.

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Source: Bazargan-Forward Saba, Tollefsen Deborah (eds.). The Routledge Handbook of Collective Responsibility. Routledge,2020. — 538 p.. 2020

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