Abstract
French’s position that the corporation directs its members to act in accord with its intentions can be represented as a vicarious relationship, by which the corporate members only act as the representatives of the organization and therefore their intentions and actions are attributed to the corporation. Larry May (1991: 320) defines vicarious action as “action ‘a’ done by ‘y’ but attributable to ‘x’ due to the fact that ‘y’ has been delegated to do ‘a’ as a substitute for ‘x’”. Vicarious action as stated is represented by a vicarious relationship or as it is often called a principal-agent relationship; in this case ‘x’ is the principal and ‘y’ is the agent of the relationship. The notion of vicarious agency is important for many advocates of corporate moral agency because the corporation’s lack of corporal existence requires human agents to causally affect the physical world. By representing the corporation as the principal in a vicarious relationship the corporation is able to satisfy the necessary moral agency condition of being able to perform an action by virtue of the acts performed by its constituents that are then attributed to the entity itself. French’s position can be represented in such a way that the corporation itself is the principal and the corporate members are the agents. The Corporate Internal Decision Structure (CIDS) (being the personality of the corporation) directs its employees into action in accord with its intentions and the actions of the employees are then attributed to the corporate entity.
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Notes
- 1.
The attribution of corporate liability will be discussed in greater detail in Part II.
- 2.
May does say that the corporation cannot be described as having any intentions without the intentions of its shareholders, but never mentions any moral blame attributable to the shareholders. It seems like the corporate intention, which emanates from the shareholders, gets disconnected from the shareholders because May’s focus on the attribution of moral responsibility is the vicarious relationship between the corporate entity and the employees.
- 3.
Albert Flores and Deborah G. Johnson (1983) explicate a position (which they argue against) that depicts the members of a corporation as lacking the autonomy to choose actions. This depiction helps us understand what French has in mind. They say: “[A]n individual is considered responsible for his actions only if the action is free and the individual is himself at the time of the action… When one acts in a professional role, one acts within a certain fixed framework which is defined by the constrictive rules of the organization… To this extent individuals in these roles are not free…. The individual as a private person seems to disappear in the organization as he takes a public role. The actions or decisions of any particular person apparently could or would be made by any individual in the same role or position” (Flores and Johnson 1983: 541).
- 4.
According Schneider (1975: 474) a work climate is defined as prescriptions that are “psychologically meaningful molar descriptions that people can agree characterize a system’s practices and procedures”.
- 5.
According to Lawrence Kohlberg (1981) people can progress through three levels of moral development, called the (1) pre-conventional level, (2) conventional level, and (3) post-conventional level. Very briefly, behaviour at the first level is motivated by egocentric concerns; at the second level behaviour is motivated by social approval; and at the third level behaviour is motivated by abstract reasoning and universal principals of justice.
- 6.
Moral prescriptions set an ideal behaviour and thus also require an ideal moral development. Moral agents cannot simply excuse their relinquishment of autonomy within organizations because they have not developed their moral reasoning sufficiently. Anyone who has the ability to develop their moral reasoning has a moral duty to do so. However, children and the mentally handicapped are exempt. “Ought” implies “can”. Children are exempt because they need time to develop morally, and the mentally handicapped are exempt because they are unable to develop morally.
- 7.
I have specified the autonomy condition for moral agency to be in accordance with Frankfurt’s notion of second order intentionality (see Chap. 2 “Necessary Conditions for Moral Agency”). This means that a moral agent is able to have desires about his desires, and thus does not merely have to react to his first order desires and external environment, but is able to choose his own intentional actions. An agent that does not develop morally (in accordance with Kohlberg’s (1981) theory of moral development), but is able to have second order intentionality, should still be considered a moral agent. A moral agent’s lack of moral development might lead to a subconscious relinquishment of autonomy within organizations (i.e. the moral agent stops choosing for himself and merely reacts to the new normative environment), but as a moral agent he still has a moral duty not to relinquish his autonomy.
- 8.
French would object by saying that murder is not a legitimate corporate end, but I believe that moral agents must possess the autonomy to choose whatever ends they desire in order to be considered moral agents, in which case murder can be a moral agent’s intention.
- 9.
Note that the agent will usually also be morally responsible in this situation because he has accepted to carry out the directives of the principal.
- 10.
At most one might be morally responsible for negligence, i.e. not preventing the action of another, but never morally responsible for the action itself.
- 11.
The difference between Responsibility and Liability: Responsibility is a metaphysical concept that attributes ownership for actions to an agent. Liability on the other hand is primarily a legal concept that when attributed to an agent makes that agent the subject of certain legal responses/sanctions.
- 12.
Cooper (1968) has said that predicates used to describe collectives can be divisible or indivisible. A divisible attribution applies to each and every member of a collective, in contrast with an indivisible attribution where the predicate applies only to the collective whole. An example of the latter is the taste of a stew. Someone may dislike each individual ingredient of the stew but nevertheless like the stew as a whole. This bears relevance to Werhane’s theory because, for her, predicating responsibility to the corporation may be an indivisible predicate that applies only to the corporation and is not divisible among the corporate members.
- 13.
Moral responsibility is legitimately attributed to moral agents with certain abilities. It would be senseless to morally blame something for not having the requisite abilities; it is not something that is chosen. Some moral agents, in certain situations, for example soldiers in the army, might suppress or disregard their moral abilities and choose to simply follow orders. But in such situations the agents possess the abilities but choose not to engage them. They may thus be blamed for not using the abilities they possess. However, we cannot blame something for a lack of moral abilities, for example a lion. The actions of non-moral agents are amoral actions.
- 14.
Moral agents possess the ability to autonomously choose intentional actions. Structures and codes of conduct may influence (provide reasons for) action, but it is the moral agents that autonomously choose whether to act on those influences.
- 15.
Corporate policies and procedures that are meant to guide corporate members to act ethically is the domain of “organizational ethics”. Organizational ethicists may evaluate the ethicality of organizational policies and procedures based on how various stakeholders are meant to be taken into account for corporate decisions, while the notion of moral agency concerns the identification of the proper bearer(s) of moral responsibility for the actual treatment of the stakeholders. A policy may be unethical, but it cannot be morally responsible. Policies and procedures are important tools in order to steer an organization in an ethically desirable direction, but these tools are not themselves the bearers of moral responsibility.
- 16.
In the nineteenth century legal developments (in the UK and US) led the corporation to be regarded as a completely distinct legal entity from the shareholders. The corporation nowadays is usually referred to in the singular, “it”, but in the early nineteenth century when shareholders were still regarded as forming the corporation it was referred to in the plural “they”. Many advocates of corporate moral agency cite the need to make sense of our linguistic use of corporate names as the references of moral responsibility attributions. Perhaps a plausible explanation is that the legal linguistic development of referring to corporations as “it” instead of “they” lead to the public also employing the singular to refer to a corporation. If this is the case then the public have adopted a legal use of language to make their moral responsibility attributions. This use of language would therefore not imply that people are referring to a distinct moral agent called the “corporation”. When people blame corporations it may on the one hand mean that they are making a legal responsibility attribution, or on the other hand they are making a moral responsibility attribution to a fictional legal entity (which is a category mistake). We cannot infer corporate moral agency from responsibility attributions to an abstract legal entity.
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Rönnegard, D. (2015). Corporate Actions. In: The Fallacy of Corporate Moral Agency. Issues in Business Ethics, vol 44. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9756-6_4
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