The Pragmatics of Corporate Moral Responsibility
There are numerous pragmatic reasons to think of corporations as moral agents that are capable of being held morally responsible for their conduct. Consider that we speak as if corporations are the authors of their own action (or inaction) and that such action (inaction) is evaluated against certain moral expectations.
Newspaper articles routinely discuss, for example, “Volkswagen’s act of fraud” or how “BP should properly compensate communities on the Gulf Coast.” In these instances, we seem to understand that corporate action reflects freely undertaken, deliberate acts by the corporation itself, orchestrated by norms, decision making processes and moral commitments that extend beyond the specific intentions, actions or attitudes of its members. Those who dismiss these sorts of linguistic practices bear the burden of developing a detailed explanation as to why we describe corporate conduct in these morally-laden ways.Corporations are also taken to be morally responsible agents through various institutional arrangements. Industry associations representing corporate interests and socially-minded stakeholder initiatives have established compliance expectations that set forth moral standards for corporate conduct. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), for instance, has developed the Code on Interactions with Health Care Professionals designed to reduce conflicts of interest among medical doctors and improve the delivery of medicines to patients by limiting the type of marketing and promotion undertaken by pharmaceutical firms (PhRMA 2017). These sorts of efforts presume that corporations not only can elect to comply (or not) with those norms but that it is within the purview of firms to develop sophisticated, corporate-level decision making systems to satisfy those norms. There is also wide recognition among non-governmental organizations and other advocacy groups that corporations must “do good” and contribute to the public’s interest above and beyond what is required by law.
The entire notion that corporations can be held criminally liable—a unique feature of law in the United States—presumes that corporations are blameworthy for their decision making and conduct (Diskant 2008; Sepinwall 2012).One way of explaining these pragmatic ascriptions of corporate moral responsibility is to conceive of capitalist political economies as presuming the very possibility of corporate responsibility. Corporate discretion over the investment of capital and the production of goods and services within the market, as well as the attendant social authority that flows from this discretion, conveys an expectation that the realization of certain “morally important social values” like liberty, respect, honesty, fairness, and distributive justice, as well as other dimensions of human well-being, such as public health and knowledge, are impacted by firms through their policies and business practices (McMahon 2012). This political expectation implicitly relies on the premise that corporations can exercise their discretion and authority in morally principled ways and that they can be held responsible when they do not.
This presumption of responsibility reflects a liberal view of how responsibilities are to be shared and institutionally divided within a well-ordered society (cf. Lindblom 2001: 60—83). In a market economy decisions regarding investment and production are decentralized and delegated to private actors, most notably corporations. The state could retain authority over these matters; however, by seeking to harness the social welfare gains that accompany a privatization of certain investment and production decisions, it is reasonable to expect that any latitude exercised by corporations in the market is done so in a way that is consistent with other moral objectives. So understood, the political expectation that corporations be taken to be responsible agents and respect the demands of a morality arises out of a specific aim of modern societies to enhance social welfare through decentralized economic decision making while enabling the realization of other moral values.
Modern polities “need corporations to be morally responsible because the social welfare benefits of corporate discretion are best realized when corporations become moral as well as market actors” (Dubbink and Smith 2011).But a mere pragmatic presumption that corporations can be saddled with moral responsibilities—even if grounded in a larger political theory—is not enough. It may be tempting to think that the “justification for treating a [corporation] as a responsible agent [should be] tied to the aims and purposes of the wider social activity” in which corporate activity “plays a part” (Hussain and Sandberg 2017: 84).2 However, in order for this presumption to make sense, there need to be grounds for ascribing to corporations the capability of exercising their economic discretion in a morally responsible fashion. Why does it make sense within our institutional settings to take corporations to be capable of being morally responsible agents? A crucial component of the pragmatic expectation of moral responsibility, thus, is that it is actually supported by certain capacities associated with agency. The central question is whether it makes sense to think of corporations as capable of morally-directed, voluntary action and whether corporations themselves are the authors of their own conduct.
This is where the metaphysical debates taking place around corporate responsibility become relevant. Those discussions have centered on the discovery of characteristics that allow us to ground our manners of speaking and ideals behind our political aspirations. The question, then, is whether this literature has made progress in providing a philosophical foundation for ascriptions of moral responsibility to corporations.
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