Abstract
Models of moral responsibility rely on foundational views about moral agency. Many scholars believe that only humans can be moral agents, and therefore business needs to create models that foster greater receptivity to others through ethical dialog. This view leads to a difficulty if no specific person is the sole causal agent for an act, or if something comes about through aggregated action in a corporate setting. An alternate approach suggests that corporations are moral agents sufficiently like humans to be treated as persons, which leads to questions of intentionality and the organizational structure required to support the claim. In this article, I make an intermediate claim combining Goodpaster and Matthews' (60:132–141, 1982) view that a corporation may have a moral culture which affects subjective choices, with those of Painter-Morland (17(3):515–534, 2007) who points out that we should move from a model that posits discrete persons acting on each other to one where morality comes about through shared experience between agents who participate in each other’s lives. I argue that the discussion has been trapped in traditional dichotomies, and is better served by language that more accurately represents the dynamic interplay between organization and individual. I underwrite this claim by looking at recent changes in British and American legal approaches to corporate responsibility. These provide greater incentives for owners and business leaders to encourage employees to discuss the reflexive nature of legal and moral responsibility in business, facilitate workers to voice their moral concerns, and create structures and processes that allow those concerns to be heard.
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Notes
Sir Edward Coke, 1612, “Sutton’s Hospital Case” 77 Eng. Rep. 32. 960, which says in part “for a Corporation aggregate of many is invisible, immortal, and resteth only in intendment and consideration of the Law; and therefore cannot have predecessor nor successor. They may not commit treason, nor be outlawed, nor excommunicate, for they have no souls, neither can they appear in person, but by Attorney. A Corporation aggregate of many cannot do fealty, for an invisible body cannot be in person, nor can swear, it is not subject to imbecilities, or death of the natural, body, and divers other cases.”
English law upheld the corporation as a separate entity from its individual members in a 1897 ruling, Salomon v. A Salomon & Co. Ltd. AC 22.
“A company may in many ways be likened to a body. It has a brain and a nerve centre which controls what it does. It also has hands which hold the tools and act in accordance with the directors from the centre. Some of the people in the company are mere servants and agents who are nothing more than hands to do the work and cannot be said to represent the mind or will. Others are directors and managers who represent the mind and will of the company, and control what it does. The state of mind of these managers is the state of mind of the company and is treated by the law as such.” HL Bolton (Engineering) Co. Ltd. v. T. J. Graham & Sons Ltd. [1956] 3 All ER 624.
Report available at www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/documents/DoT_KX1987.pdf.
The Public Inquiry into the Piper Alpha Disaster, Cullen, The Honourable Lord, HM Stationery Office, 1990.
The website www.corporateaccountability.org tallies manslaughter case acquittals. See http://www.corporateaccountability.org/manslaughter/cases/acqcases/2.htm.
In addition to unlimited fines, the court may also impose an order that demands the firm publicize the findings about incident and penalty imposed, something that Peter French once advocated as the “Hester Pryne Sanction” (French 1985).
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The author is indebted to the editors and anonymous reviewers for making contributions by way of their constructive advice and hard work. The author is also grateful to Elizabeth Lentini and Jennifer Kiefer for their assistance.
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Gibson, K. Toward an Intermediate Position on Corporate Moral Personhood. J Bus Ethics 101 (Suppl 1), 71–81 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-011-1174-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-011-1174-5