Recent discussions about whether corporations are capable of being held morally responsible have, in large part, turned on whether corporations possess the capacities required to be a moral agent.
Advocates of corporate responsibility hold that corporations indeed possess these capacities, even if in a manner distinct from individuals (cf. Hess 2014; Hess 2013; List and Pettit 2011; Pettit 2007; Copp 2006; Arnold 2006).
Critics of corporate responsibility invoke arguments to maintain that corporations are incapable of possessing these capacities. The exact conditions for moral agency come in and out of view within these two camps and are the subject of continued debate (Phillips 1995;Velasquez 2003; Ronnegard 2013; Ronnegard and Velasquez 2017; Copp 2006; Donaldson 1982; Sepinwall 2012; Sepinwall 2017).We intend to focus this discussion on two issues that bear on whether, and to what extent, corporations are capable of being held morally responsible. First, we provide an explanation as to why corporate responsibility is important and a feature of prevailing social institutions; specifically, we maintain that there is a political expectation in modern societies to attribute a level of moral responsibility to corporations. A corollary of this presumption is that corporations are taken to possess certain characteristics that warrant thinking of them as moral agents. This political need gives rise to a second, larger question about how a corporation’s moral agency can be established rather than simply presumed.1 To address this matter we critically examine recent attempts to put forth a metaphysically-grounded defense of corporate moral agency. We will focus on one key component of moral agency, specifically the autonomy of corporations, and whether recent attempts to ground corporate autonomy are plausible. We ask whether those that defend the possibility of corporate autonomy have provided a sufficient philosophical defense of corporate moral agency.
While we are sympathetic to these recent attempts, our exploration will ultimately help in drawing an important contrast between two types of autonomy that moral agents can possess. This contrast will allow attributions of responsibility to corporations while also demarcating at least one important way that corporations, unlike individuals, are not autonomous.
In brief, we argue, first, that there is a functional form of autonomy that presumes a capacity on the part of an agent to deliberately restrain its actions in accordance with moral principles and, second, a deeper form of autonomy that implies a kind of self-reflective endorsement of those moral principles. The former type of autonomy is consistent with a correlative sense of moral agency that takes corporations to be the sorts of entities that can restrain their activities consistent with the demands of morality; the second sense of autonomy is linked to a type of moral agency that ultimately cannot be attributed to corporations but is characteristic of moral personhood.In section 29.1 we provide a brief excursus that describes why modern market economies are implicitly designed to presume a level of moral agency on the part of corporations. We then turn in section 29.2 to examine some recent attempts to ground corporate moral agency in the possibility of corporate autonomy. Thereafter we turn to a more systematic exploration of the two above-mentioned senses of autonomy in section 29.3 before concluding. In the end, by distinguishing two senses of autonomy, we hope to bring some clarity to the two competing intuitions that, on the one hand, take corporations to be morally responsible for their conduct as an institutional matter, and, on the other, corporations lack some of the basic features that are associated with ascriptions of moral responsibility.
29.1
More on the topic Recent discussions about whether corporations are capable of being held morally responsible have, in large part, turned on whether corporations possess the capacities required to be a moral agent.:
- Corporations, for all their good, sometimes cause legendary harms without justification or excuse.
- Findings and Discussions
- Part IV of this handbook applies theories and accounts of collective responsibility to real-world problems, including collective responsibility for: war, global poverty, climate change, conspiracy theories, environmental injustice, and institutional racism.