A group of blind men heard that a strange animal called an elephant had been brought to the town.
Curious, they sought it out and attempted to know it by touch, each reporting what he had discovered. The first man, whose hand landed on the trunk, said “The elephant is like a thick snake.” The next, whose hand reached its ear, said, “No, the elephant is like a kind offan.” The man whose hand was upon its tail disagreed, saying “The elephant is a rope.” The last man felt its tusk, and said, “You are all mistaken, as the elephant is hard and smooth like a spear.
”1Western analytic explorations of human agency and moral agency have been overwhelmingly focused on rational autonomy. Kant is the classic source, but Aristotle also singled out “the rational soul” and Aquinas focused on “man’s rational nature”; even Mill, basing his entire theory on the intrinsic value of pleasure, gave it no role to play in the enactment of moral agency. None of the traditions that have grown from these and other philosophers deny that there are other aspects of the human agent. They simply do not, as a rule, include those aspects in their treatments of agency. The collective result is a literature in which the central figure is a caricature of a human agent reduced to a single mechanism: a robotic calculator who gathers data (empirical, intellectual, or intuitive), processes, and — ideally — executes; other aspects or inputs that might shape behavior are generally treated as impediments to “proper” agential or moral function (Blum 1982, Held 1990). In short, the collective result is a literature about human agency which lacks a recognizable human agent, one in which a wide range of human behaviors are ignored, read as flawed, or rejected as not truly “actions” (or not fully “human”). Philosophers working in this field have begun to flesh out the caricature, drawing on findings from cognitive science, psychology, and neglected aspects of traditional philosophical accounts to incorporate some of the aspects of human agents excluded from the traditional treatments.2 This process has generated illuminating theories that address the whole human agent, and thus provide a much richer conception of her agency.
The literature on corporate agency has — perhaps unsurprisingly — followed a similar path, with dominant accounts from Peter French (1979, 1984, 1995) and Christian List and Philip Pettit (2011) each presenting a single (rational) mechanism by which corporate agents can exercise their agency. While none have explicitly denied the possibility of other mechanisms, or of other significant aspects of the corporate agent, neither they nor the scholars working with their accounts have done anything to develop or even acknowledge the possibility of other factors and inputs as factors or inputs. These accounts have been treated as essentially complete (and mutually exclusive) accounts of corporate agency. The collective result is a literature in which the central figure is a caricature of a corporate agent reduced to a single mechanism: a vaguely assumed group of people with only one acknowledged form of interaction among the members, either following procedures or voting (and in an idealized form at that). Other aspects, inputs, or forms of engagement that might shape corporate behavior are generally treated as impediments to “proper” corporate agential function. In short, the collective result is a literature about corporate agency which lacks a recognizable corporate agent, one in which a wide range of familiar corporate behaviors are ignored, read as flawed, or dismissed as not truly “actions” (or at least, not “corporate” ones). I suggest that this has left us with a sadly impoverished conception of corporate agency — one that inhibits our ability to account for actual events, or to assign responsibility for them.
As outlined in section 8.1, French, List and Pettit (L&P), and the scholars working with their accounts have done an excellent job of detailing some of the mechanisms by which corporate agents exercise their agency. However, like the philosophers who treated rational autonomy as the whole of human moral agency — and the blind men who took the trunk or the tail as the whole of the elephant — they have not searched beyond their chosen mechanism to place it in the context of the whole of the corporate agent, or its agency.
In response, section 8.2 presents an account of the whole agent, of the single metaphysically robust entity that bears the capacity of agency. Once we recognize the whole of agent as a whole, we can see that the behavior of this whole is not adequately captured by French’s or L&P’s accounts (as they themselves acknowledge, in different ways). Rather than rejecting these “non-captured” behaviors as failures of agency, however, this approach allows us to recognize them as arising from other, unrecognized aspects of the agent and its agency — from a multiplicity of mechanisms, many of which draw on different sources and involve different members than those picked out by French and L&P (FLiP). As discussed in section 8.3, this broader, richer understanding of corporate agents and their agency has significant implications for how we understand the moral responsibility of the corporate agent itself, and of the members who constitute it.8.1