Corporations, for all their good, sometimes cause legendary harms without justification or excuse.
The transgressions include peddling products carrying undisclosed serious health risks, defrauding shareholders, unconscionably exploiting workers, pocketing customers’ money, furthering or even participating in gross violations of human rights, and recklessly poisoning our environment.
This should not surprise us. Individual wrongdoing is hardly anomalous and, when individuals get together, especially in institutionalized groups, the potential for wrongdoing is ever present, and perhaps even enhanced (Katyal, 2002). We should expect that tendency to be even more prevalent in a culture dominated by the thought — mistaken though it is (Stout, 2002) — that the law requires managers to maximize profits for corporate shareholders, which can incentivize perverse, or even criminal, behavior.What is perhaps surprising is the difficulty we face in responding to these corporate acts. To be sure, it is highly common to find excoriations of the transgressing corporation in newspapers, on social media, and in public discourse. But among philosophers and legal scholars, there has been longstanding, heated, and seemingly intractable debate about whether it is appropriate to blame the transgressing corporation (see, e.g., Donaldson, 1980; French, 1984; Velasquez, 1983; Hasnas, 2012; Hess, 2014; Ronnegard, 2015; Silver, 2006). Conflict arises too over which, if any, of the corporation’s members we may rightfully blame for its wrongs (Sepinwall, 2015).
In this chapter, I aim to draw out the reasons for the persistence of this debate, and to make progress toward its resolution. Some of the confusion arises because of the corporation’s murky moral status. There is much disagreement about whether corporations qualify for moral agency. But there is also, I shall argue, confusion about the relationship between moral agency and blameworthiness.
On a widespread understanding of moral responsibility, if one satisfies the criteria for moral agency then one is appropriately liable to blame for one’s wrongdoing. I seek to pull apart the concepts of moral agency and blameworthiness. I shall argue that even if the corporation is a moral agent it lacks an additional capacity necessary to make a moral agent an appropriate target of blame. The additional capacity I have in mind is the capacity to experience guilt. I aruge that only a being with affect can experience guilt and, because corporations have no affect, it follows that corporations cannot be blameworthy in their own right for their wrongs. But I do not conclude that we must then resign ourselves to treating corporate wrongs like natural disasters or cosmic injustices. Instead, I end by arguing that the norms governing corporate officeholders license our taking some of the corporation’s members to be blameworthy for its wrongs, even if they are not at fault. Executives in particular, I shall argue, share responsibility for corporate wrongdoing irrespective of whether they culpably contributed to or failed to prevent those wrongs. In short, this chapter aims to draw out the problems with treating corporations as morally responsible in their own right, and urges instead that we assign blame directly to the corporation’s members in a manner befitting the shared nature of responsibility in hierarchical institutional settings.28.1
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