Moral Autonomy and Moral Personhood

This last point is important. Advocates of a more robust account of corporate autonomy may simply object that the Kantian emphasis on the phenomenal experience of the self-authorship of morality is an analytic move that immediately—by fiat—excludes corporations from possessing moral autonomy.

Some readers may recall that French (1995) jettisoned his early belief that corporate deci­sion making structures provide the ground to attribute personhood to corporations in favor of the more modest position that corporations are moral agents without being fully moral persons. This shift by French was the result of criticism that the mere presence of internal deci­sion making structures and corporate intentions does not sufficiently establish personhood. Corporate decisions need to be accompanied by the presence of reasons, held and recognized by the actor to whom we ascribe agency.

Again, through a Kantian lens, this connection between practical reasoning and personhood has a straightforward explanation. The formal constraint that one’s actions conform to a uni­versal law also expresses a necessary, “priceless” value placed on the very capacity to reason, i.e., the “humanity” in oneself and others. The special status of being a moral person simply amounts to possessing humanity; to be a moral person is to possess the very capacity to which a rational agent necessarily ascribes “incomparable” value. The inescapable recognition of this “necessary end” arises at the moment of self-experience where an agent asks herself “what should I do”? (Hill 1992).

The central point here is that in making the case that corporations do not possess moral autonomy, we have a clear way to explain why corporations are also not moral persons (cf. Hess 2013: 333—334). Corporations are not moral persons because personhood flows from the presence of moral autonomy.

This line against corporate moral personhood opens up immediate avenues to explain why individual agents have entitlements to basic liberties and citizenship protections but corporations do not. Emergent debates in American jurisprudence about corporate rights, such as the right to political expression and religious freedom, are interesting when placed alongside claims that corporations are autonomous agents. One might ask: if corporations are indeed independent, autonomous actors, then why would we not take seriously the idea that they possess the moral entitlements associated with being autonomous? (Hasnas 2018). On what grounds could we be philosophically comfortable that corporations have autonomy but also assert that they do not possess the rights that flow to autonomous actors? The problem seems to be that the more advocates of corporate moral responsibility attempt to provide richer and richer accounts of the properties of agency—such as autonomy—the more difficult it is to resist the assignment of moral entitlements to corporations if they possess those attributes.

The legal rationale in recent decisions by the United States Supreme Court do not rely on any ascription of autonomy to corporations, at least in any sense being discussed thus far. In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), for example, the Court found that cor­porate spending on political campaigns or issues is a social conduit through which political speech occurs; as such, there can be no legal limits placed on the amount of corporate spending in these areas because such limits would violate the First Amendment of the Constitution which prohibits laws that abridge the freedom of political speech. Some commentators loosely speak of this decision as granting corporations a “right to free speech,” which, at best, may be misleading (cf.

The distinction between administrative and moral autonomy provides a solution to the problem of what, if any, grounds exist to grant corporations rights that would normally be granted only to individuals. Moral principles can limit the conduct of corporations within their decision making structures and corporations can be held responsible when they fail to adequately take account of moral principles when conducting business. What corporations do not have, however, is a recognition that those moral commitments are normative inde­pendent of the decision making structures through which their actions are undertaken. As long as corporations lack moral autonomy, and thereby lack moral personhood, the inherent dignity possessed by moral persons does not extend to corporations. The basis for certain kinds of entitlements, such as expression, political participation and religious freedom, is therefore lacking for corporations. While there is undoubtedly more to be said about this line of ana­lysis, it seems like this is fertile ground to defend a form of corporate autonomy without being concerned that corporations have the same rights as individual actors with moral autonomy.

Second, the denial of moral personhood to corporations that is sketched above also helps provide an explanation as to why we hold corporations morally responsible in the limited, administrative sense, without also extending other important moral attributes to corporations that we associate with being a full moral agent. Amy J. Sepinwall, for example, notes how moral responsibility requires the presence of“reactive attitudes” among moral agents (Sepinwall 2012; Sepinwall 2017: 144—145).

There is, of course, a complex Kantian explanation as to why reactive attitudes are important. Reactive attitudes and other affective states provide direction and insight for an agent to help her “see” what is deliberatively salient in deciding how to act. Kant himself makes it “clear that moral perfection requires the development of feelings compatible with and conducive to those intentions that are dictated by pure reason alone” (Guyer 1996: 30). Indeed, given that humans are affective creatures, a “free practical will” cannot lead agents to moral action without what Kant calls a “disposition of the feeling for practical ideas” (Guyer 1996: 30). “The contingent nature of the self (in particular its [affective] embodiment) is not conceived of as an inevitable enemy of rational nature, but as a potential ally that we have a duty to cultivate” (Sherman 1995: 369). One might reasonably understand that the interface between reason and affect—and the awareness of their duality—is what actually forms the basis of moral personhood.

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