Abstract
The idea that business firms qualify as group moral agents offers an attractive basis for understanding corporate moral responsibility. However, that idea gives rise to the “corporate autonomy problem” (CAP): if firms are moral agents, then it seems we must accept the implausible conclusion that firms have basic moral rights, such as the rights to life and liberty. The question, then, is how one might retain the fruitful idea of firms as moral agents, yet avoid CAP. A common approach to avoiding CAP appeals to specific features of human embodiment, such as vulnerability to pain, as the basis for attributing moral rights to human persons but not to firms. But that response has less purchase in a Kantian framework, which does not ground moral status in such particularities of human embodiment, but rather in the rational nature that humans share with other rational beings. To avoid CAP while retaining a (broadly) Kantian framework, one does better to rely on features of firms as cooperative, compositionally derivative moral agents, created for the pursuit of specific ends. As derivative agents, firms do not qualify as Kantian ends in themselves, and thus are not appropriate bearers of basic moral rights. To further clarify the level of consideration we owe to firms, I draw on Darwall’s distinction between recognition respect and moral esteem, arguing that we should not respect firms as unconditional ends in themselves, but rather esteem morally autonomous firms as collective achievements of their human members.
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Notes
See Kant (1994, p. 3; Ak. 4: 389): “the ground of obligation here must therefore be sought not in the nature of man … but a priori solely in the concepts of pure reason.” Our moral status for Kant depends precisely on our capacity to respond to such concepts, such as the ideas of a good will and duty.
On the idea of status or considerability, see Jaworska and Tannenbaum (2021).
French (1995) attempts to address this problem.
Silver (2019, pp. 262–63) offers reasons for thinking that corporate agents might indeed be conscious, but that claim remains very speculative.
Hess does not use Hindriks’ label, but her argument clearly intends to analyze CAP as it might appear in a Kantian framework.
For the purposes of my argument I re-arrange Hess’s ordering of these components.
Hess (2018, p. 83) simply uses the term “moral agent” in this deduction, but the thrust of her argument justifies the more precise label of “autonomous moral agent.”
Kant’s binary model is not easily avoided, once one grounds moral obligation in autonomous agency (Wood and O’Neill, 1998).
Thus my proposal responds to difficulties that Wringe (2014) observed in the application of Kant’s humanity principle to firms.
See Kant (1994, pp. 35, 40; Ak. 4: 428, 434–35).
Kant’s position on this point is complex; I rely on Denis (2001, pp. 52–54).
See also Hindriks (2018) on the membership presuppositions of firms that qualify as moral agents.
As Werhane puts this point, “Moral reactions of persons [i.e., the firm’s members] are necessary (but not sufficient) for collective moral reaction” (1985, p. 58).
See Denis (2001, pp. 52–57).
For early ideas of derivative agency, see Werhane (1985, chap. 2); also May (1983). Neither is adequate for my purposes. May’s idea of “vicarious agency” relies on a problematic notion of legal legacy (Werhane 1985, p. 57 note 6). Werhane’s distinction between “primary” and “secondary” agency is not geared to a Kantian framework, indeed she explicitly denies that firms are autonomous, a capacity she limits to “psychophysical entities” (1985, pp. 54, 56–57).
Thus I do not think that we rightly esteem a moral machine, say a self-driving vehicle guided by a machine-learning algorithm trained to deliver reliably moral choices. The reason is that such a machine lacks general AI, so we have no reason to think it can receive our esteem any more than a simple tool can.
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I thank James Fisher and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.
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Rehg, W. Business Firms as Moral Agents: A Kantian Response to the Corporate Autonomy Problem. J Bus Ethics 183, 999–1009 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-022-05042-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-022-05042-z