Implications for Responsibility

There are a number of benefits to an account grounded in the agent in this way. As a minor point, it answers reasonable critical concerns about free-floating intentionality, and it forces us to articulate some of the unacknowledged (and untested) assumptions in the FLiP-dominated literatures.

Most of all, though, this approach forces us to confront the true complexity of corporate agents and corporate agency in a way that has important practical and moral implications for responsibility.

First, the presence of multiple mechanisms undermines assumptions about the degree of control executives and managers (the primary players in FLiPs accounts) actually exercise over corporate intentionality and action. With commitments arising from multiple mechanisms, some of which bypass the upper levels of the hierarchy completely, the effective control of the upper-level players is shown to be more tenuous than is often acknowledged. With so many different mechanisms feeding into the RPV, the resulting complex of corporate beliefs and desires is far less sensitive to the input of any one person or small group of persons than is suggested by the single- mechanism accounts. Further, simply following proper procedures is not sufficient to create a new commitment here. To be part of the RPV, the proposed commitment (however properly voted on) must actually shape the actions of the corporate agent, and this requires substantial, effective participation by the broader membership. This account reflects that reality, and reveals that the commitments of the RPV are not as easily adjusted by execu­tive or high-ranking members as has been assumed by the literature. Corporate intentionality and agency thus become much more autonomous vis-a-vis any particular member or group of members than is typically realized — especially vis-a-vis the ranking executives who figure so prominently in the work with FLiPs accounts. Understood in this way, corporate agents can survive criticisms based on autonomy that trouble other approaches (see, e.g. Albertzart 2017, Altman 2007), and are thus stronger candidates for bearing moral responsibility in their own right.

Second, the lesser control exercised by higher-ranking members and the more significant roles available to lower-ranking members have implications for individual/member moral responsibility as well. It suggests that, in some cases, the higher-ranking members may bear less responsibility than is commonly assumed, and it suggests that the lower-level players — almost entirely absent from the traditional accounts — may bear more.

If responsibility is distributed purely on the basis of membership, then — as described above — this account will pick out a much larger and more diverse set of members than FLiP’s accounts (and a more clearly delineated group than French’s). If responsibility attaches on the basis of causal contribution, then the plethora of practices acknowledged by this approach become sig­nificant. Attending to the multiplicity of mechanisms shows us that almost every member of the corporate agent — every agent embedded in the social structure — is in a position to shape the content of the RPV, in addition to implementing it. This remains true regardless of whether their ability to do so is officially recognized by others and regardless of whether they engage in discourse and voting (however informal). This is not to say that every member has an equal ability to influence the development of the RPV — far from it. The structuring elements will almost always include a strict hierarchy, and massive inequalities in power and authority as well as strict constraints on access to information and other resources. But no contribution (and no member) is automatically excluded from the account. Practically speaking, this emphasizes the need to take lower-level contributions more seriously during the planning and implementation of corporate policies. Morally speaking, this reminds us to look beyond the executive levels — albeit carefully — and to look to the full membership with respect to moral obligation and responsibility.¹⁵ Unlike membership, causal contributions come in degrees, and that makes this approach sensitive to the situatedness of individual members in a way that pure membership­based allocations are not.¹⁶

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