1. 1.

    On the morning of November 28, 1979 flight TE-901, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10 operated by Air New Zealand Ltd., took off from Auckland, New Zealand on a sightseeing passenger flight over a portion of Antarctica. The following are paragraphs from the official Report of the Royal Commission that inquired into the events surrounding that flight.Footnote 1

[#12] The personnel at McMurdo Station and Scott Base were expecting the arrival of an Air New Zealand DC-10 aircraft carrying sightseeing passengers. The flight plan radioed to McMurdo from Auckland had named the pilot in command as Captain Collins. …It was expected that the DC-10 would fly down McMurdo Sound. …The aircraft would come in from the north and in the vicinity of Ross Island would descend to a low level so as to afford the passengers… sightseeing. … The aircraft would probably fly down the Sound at an altitude of somewhere between 1500 feet and 3000 feet, … a perfectly safe altitude at which to fly over flat ground in clear weather, and the cause of no concern to the United States Air Traffic Control.

[#13]…When the DC-10 was about 140 miles out from McMurdo, Mac Centre transmitted a weather forecast… to the effect that there was a low overcast over Ross Island and the McMurdo area. …Mac Centre suggested that once the aircraft was within 40 miles of McMurdo Station, the entrance of McMurdo Sound, it would be picked up by radar and its descent through cloud guided down to an altitude of 1500 feet. This suggestion was accepted by the air crew. At 1500 feet, under the cloud layer in the McMurdo area, visibility would be unlimited in all directions… .

[#15] By 12:35 p.m. it was confirmed between Mac Centre and the DC-10 that the aircraft was now descending to 10,000 feet and was requesting a radar let-down through cloud. The request was accepted by Mac Centre… .

[#16] At 12.42 p.m. the aircraft informed Mac Centre that it was flying VMC (visual meteorological conditions) and that it would proceed visually to McMurdo. This message indicated that the aircraft had found an area free of cloud through which it would descend before leveling out at an altitude less than the cloud base. Thus the aircraft would be approaching lower than the cloud layer, in clear air at an altitude of about 2,000 feet… .

[#17] There followed further transmissions between the aircraft and Mac Centre and then at 12:45 p.m. the aircraft advised Mac Centre that it was now flying at 6,000 feet in the course of descending to 2,000 feet and that it was still flying VMC… . This was the last transmission from the DC-10.

[#22] The United States Navy sent out aircraft on intensive searches and ultimately, after several hours, the reason for the long radio silence from the aircraft was discovered. A United States Navy aircraft found the wreckage of the DC-10 on the northern slopes of Mount Erebus at a point about 1,500 feet above sea level. The aircraft had been carrying 20 crew and 237 passengers. There were no survivors.

  1. 2.

    Those familiar with the unhappy history of the DC-10 naturally would suspect that another engineering fault had been responsible for this disaster. The Mount Erebus crash, however, was not the result of any airplane engineering errors or faults. This DC-10 performed perfectly. The simple fact is that the plane was flown in broad daylight in ‘clear air’ at approximately 2000 feet above sea level directly into the side of a 12,000-foot mountain. ‘Simple facts’ in the case of airline disasters are, however, notoriously complex. Photographs taken by the ill-fated passengers indicate that just seconds before the crash the view from the plane was unobstructed for many miles. The report notes that:

It followed (from the photographic evidence) that as the aircraft had approached Mount Erebus it was flying in skies in which there was perfect visibility for at least 23 miles. It was also apparent that the aircraft had been flying well under the cloud base when it collided with the mountain. [#28]

Air New Zealand Ltd. released a statement proclaiming that the cause of the crash had been ‘pilot error’. The airline maintained that Captain Collins had become disoriented or confused or distracted and had flown TE-901 directly into the mountain. They added that he had no business flying that airplane at 2000 feet. The flight, they said, should have remained at no less than 14,000 feet, a claim that the Royal Commission Report disputes by pointing out that the very nature of the flight necessitated relatively low altitudes. At 14,000 feet the passengers would have seen nothing but clouds. They would certainly not have witnessed the advertised splendor of Antarctica. And, importantly, clearance to fly at 1500 feet down McMurdo Sound was granted by the Mac Centre controller and was generally regarded as a safe altitude for such flights over the flat terrain of the Sound.

The bald fact is that Captain Collins had flown far off course, some 27 miles, and that he was flying into Lewis Bay not the McMurdo Sound. Lewis Bay is a much smaller body of water than the Sound and from its shore on Ross Island rises Mount Erebus. Captain Collins was no fledgling pilot. He had a long and distinguished flying career. The ‘pilot error’ theory called for him to have made a monumental miscalculation as to his location and also to have failed somehow to see the impending doom of the slopes of Mount Erebus rising up directly in front of him.

  1. 3.

    The evidence collected by the Royal Commission established quite a different scenario than provided by the airline. In order to understand their version we need to take a brief digression to explain something about the navigational systems on the DC-10. DC-10s are navigated by a computer system known as the Inertial Navigation System (INS). DC-10s proceed to their destinations by a series of waypoints. The INS

operates by typing into a computer system on the aircraft (the AINS) the latitude and longitude of each waypoint… . Once this series of coordinates has been fed into the aircraft’s computer, the aircraft will then fly its own course from one waypoint to another. [#31]

This flight path is known as the aircraft’s ‘nav track’.

TE-901 was, its recovered black box revealed, flown on its programmed nav track almost the entire distance of the flight. It is also important to note that INS systems are widely regarded in the industry to be highly accurate. [#33]

How then did TE-901 end up in wreckage on the slopes of Mount Erebus when it should have been cruising at 2000 or 1500 feet above McMurdo Sound, passenger cameras clicking wildly at the spectacular vistas of Antarctica?

  1. 4.

    The primary cause of the disaster, the Royal Commission reported, was a direct result of the administrative and communication system of Air New Zealand Ltd. In order to see how they reached this conclusion it is necessary to briefly canvass some of the facts uncovered by the Commission.

Captain Collins and his First Officer attended a briefing on Antarctic flights nineteen days before their TE-901 assignment. At that meeting they were provided with printouts of the flight plan used by a sightseeing flight that had just returned from Antarctica. The coordinates on that flight plan, they were informed, would be the standard ones for all of the airline’s sightseeing flights. The Commission learned that Collins had written the coordinates in his notebook and that on the night before TE-901 was to depart, he had plotted the track of his forthcoming flight on his atlas and a map. That track showed that the plane would head directly down McMurdo Sound with Mount Erebus approximately 27 miles to the east. The Report reads:

When the flight crew assembled on the morning of the flight and were handed the flight plan for 28 November 1979 extracted from the ground computer earlier in the morning and when the flight crew inserted into the computer on the aircraft the series of latitude and longitude coordinates on that flight plan they believed, in accordance with ordinary and standard practice, that they were inserting the longstanding coordinates. [#36]

The tragic fact was that they were doing nothing of the kind. A set of figures different than those provided at the briefing had been substituted and that change had the effect of moving the destination waypoint for McMurdo Sound 27 miles to the east, directly at Ross Island and collision with Mount Erebus (if the plane were flown at less than 12,450 feet). Collins, according to standard operating procedure, holding to his computerized nav track, had flown the plane directly into the mountain, in the mistaken belief the plane was heading down a wide and open expanse of water.

The computer coordinates were changed in the airline’s Flight Operations Division. That Division is comprised of four subunits: Navigation Section, Computer Section, Flight Dispatch Section, and the RCU [Route Clearance Unit] Briefing system. Navigation Section directed the Computer Section to reprogram the computer after it had received a verbal direction to do so from Captain R.T. Johnson, operations manager for DC-10 aircraft at Air New Zealand. There is no record of any direction to Flight Dispatch Section to inform Captain Collins of the change nor any to indicate that the change had actually been made.

There are no records of any kind in Flight Operations Division. It is standard operating procedure in the airline that none of the decisions in the Division are committed to writing.

As it happens, the alteration of the nav track was a very reasonable thing to do. Captain Simpson, who piloted the Antarctic flight prior to TE-901, had noticed that the programmed waypoint for McMurdo was approximately 27 miles to the west of the tactical air navigation system (TACAN) of McMurdo Station. [#242] (The TACAN allows a pilot to determine his distance from it and hence is a useful navigational aid.) Simpson informed Captain Johnson that crews of future flights should be aware of this discrepancy, but he now claims that he did not suggest that a change in the flight plan be made. [# 243–245] Johnson, however, believed that Simpson had told him there was a serious error in the flight plan and that the relevant waypoint ought to coincide with the location of the TACAN. Johnson testified that he believed that when the coordinates were changed in the computer there would be no need to inform Captain Collins because the alteration amounted to only a 2.1-mile movement of the final waypoint. In this calculation he was woefully wrong.

The Commission explained the nav track change in a radically different way. Frankly, they did not accept Captain Johnson’s claim that Simpson’s information had been misinterpreted. Instead, they argue:

Both Captain Johnson and the Navigation Section knew quite well that the McMurdo waypoint lay 27 miles to the west of the TACAN and that since this track had not officially been approved by the Civil Aviation Division, it should therefore be realigned with the TACAN and then someone forgot to ensure that Captain Collins was told of the change. Such an interpretation means that the evidence as to the alleged belief of a displacement of only 2.1 miles is untrue. [#245]

The nav track alteration, the pilot’s reliance on the AINS combined with the practice of descending to a low altitude to allow better views, indeed any view at all, took TE-901 directly into Mount Erebus. The Commission held that it would not be just to hold Captain Johnson fully responsible for the disaster. Although Captain Johnson probably ordered the alterations in the computer to put the Antarctic flights on a course that provided the pilots with a better set of navigational checks than did the path down McMurdo Sound, it is clear that he had no knowledge of the other key factor that brought TE-901 to disaster.

  1. 5.

    Certainly an experienced pilot, even if he believes himself to be flying over a relatively wide body of water, would quickly correct his descent from 16,000 feet when he saw a 12,450-foot obstacle in his direct path. Nav track or no nav track, an experienced pilot can be expected to take manual control and ascend to a safe altitude, fly over Mount Erebus and circle east to the Sound. Why had Captain Collins not corrected his descent when the face of Mount Erebus loomed up before him?

Although the answer is quite straightforward, it took some detective work for the Commission to discover it. They learned that in ‘clear air’ in Antarctica a pilot can experience a visual difficulty called a ‘whiteout’. The whiteout is an atmospheric effect that produces a loss of depth perception, flattening out even mountainous terrain.

Only two conditions are necessary to produce whiteout: a diffuse, shadowless illumination and a monocoloured white surface… . The condition may occur in a crystal-clear atmosphere or under a cloud ceiling with ample comfortable light. [#165]

It is likely that TE-901’s pilot and flight crew experienced a whiteout. The Commission itself experienced the phenomena while on an investigative trip to the crash site. The crew of TE-901 never saw Mount Erebus or rather they never recognized what they saw as a 12,450-foot mountain. Their belief that they were flying over the waters of McMurdo Sound was apparently confirmed for them by what they thought they saw out of their windows.

  1. 6.

    The Commission listed ten factors or circumstances which they believed contributed to the crash. They are as follows:

    • (1) Captain Collins had complete reliance upon the accuracy of the navigation system of his aircraft… .

    • (2) There was not supplied to Captain Collins, either in the RCU briefing or on the morning of the flight, any topographical map upon which had been drawn the track along which the computer system would navigate the aircraft.

    • (3) Captain Collins plotted the nav track himself on the night before the flight on a map and upon an atlas.

    • (4) The direction of the last leg of the flight path to be programmed into the aircraft’s computer was changed about six hours before the flight departed.

    • (5) Neither Captain Collins nor any member of his crew was told of the alteration which had been made to the computer track.

    • (6) Checks made in flight… demonstrated that the AINS was operating with its customary extreme accuracy… .

    • (7) McMurdo Air Traffic Control believed that the destination waypoint of the aircraft was 27 miles west of the McMurdo Station… .

    • (8) Mac Centre invited the aircraft to descend to 1,500 feet in McMurdo Sound for the reason that visibility at that altitude was 40 miles or more.

    • (9) Captain Collins accepted this invitation and made the decision to descend to that altitude.

    • (10) The nature of the cloud base in the area and the unrelieved whiteness of the snow-covered terrain beneath the overcast combined to produce the whiteout visual illusion. [#387]

The Commission maintains that had any of these factors (or what Mackie would have called INUS conditions)Footnote 2 not been present, TE-901 would not have crashed into Mount Erebus.

Despite the fact that the ten factors in this case were all necessary, though individually insufficient, parts of the set that though not necessary were sufficient to result in the crash, the Commission felt it was able to identify two acts, (2) and (5), both omissions on the part of the airline, upon which to found or justify ascriptions of moral responsibility for the crash to the corporation. It was concluded that, “The dominant cause of the disaster was the act of the airline in changing the computer track of the aircraft without telling the aircrew”. [#392] From the point of view of the Commission, factor (5) was the INUS condition with a difference.

  1. 7.

    This lengthy, though sketchy version of the details of this case is justified if we want to understand what the Commission thinks their identification of the ‘dominant and effective cause’ of the Mount Erebus crash entails. Why had they not simply laid the moral responsibility for the disaster at Captain Johnson’s doorstep? He, as the Simpson testimony seems to reveal, ordered the change in the computer track and failed to ensure that the information about the new track was communicated to the on-board captain. The Commission, however, refused to lay responsibility squarely on Johnson’s shoulders. It concluded its report by maintaining that the crucial mistakes regarding the reprogramming and the failure to inform are “directly attributable, not so much to the persons who made (them), but to the incompetent administrative airline procedures which made the mistake(s) possible”. [#393] In other words, the Commission concluded that the cause of the Mount Erebus disaster that founds an ascription of moral responsibility has an organizational nexus, and that it would be unjust to attribute the crucial failures to individuals within the company. In an important and irreducible way, they held that the standard operating procedures of Air New Zealand were causally responsible for the crash. Is this justifiable? And, more importantly, can it be translated to an ascription of moral responsibility to the corporation?

The Commission’s investigation focused on the standard operating procedures of the Flight Operations Division of Air New Zealand. Four major defects in the administrative structure of the Division were identified. The flaws described by the Commission were:

  1. 1.

    Operational pilots held executive positions in the Flight Operations Division;

  2. 2.

    None of those operational pilots had been given a training course in administrative management;

  3. 3.

    There exist no written directives from Flight Operations Division that spell out the duties and administrative responsibilities of the executive pilots;

  4. 4.

    There exist no written directives in Flight Operations that specify the way various duties are to be performed, e.g., there exists no written directive that specifies the steps to be taken by the various sub-sections when adjustments are made to flight plans or changes are made in navigational procedures [see #365].

The structure and practices of Flight Operations depended upon a traditional of verbal communication. There is, in fact, a general policy in Air New Zealand against written memoranda. The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the airline testified before the Commission that he had always “controlled the airline on a verbal basis”. [#366] Communications regarding inter- or intra-departmental business were almost never written. The fatal alteration in the coordinates was, according to standard practice, verbally directed to the Navigational Section by Captain Johnson. If any confirmational or informational messages passed from one subsection of Flight Operations to another or to the flight crew, they would have been verbal.

It might be argued that the CEO or the Board of Directors should have expected their verbal communication policy to result in serious breakdowns. The fact that active pilots also wore administrative hats and hence, on many occasions, had split duties and subsequently split attentions, should have also alerted some concern. A pilot with a number of his own flight problems on his mind could easily forget, misunderstand, or confuse information passed to him verbally, especially when that information concerned flights other than those he regularly flew. The Commission, however, did not make such an argument.

The Commission holds the view that the Board and the CEO could not be expected to investigate the daily administration of Flight Operations and that there was a long history of excellent, safe airline service at Air New Zealand to justify whatever smugness might have been manifested regarding the lack of written documentation of administrative communications.

The CEO’s verbal policy may have been intended to foster a family-like atmosphere in the company or, conversely, one that functioned along military-like verbal command lines. Also, the policy may have been the result of more than a modicum of confidence in the personal care taken by each of the company’s executives to accomplish the various tasks of his office. A breakdown of the magnitude of the Mount Erebus crash likely could not have been foreseen by the Board or the CEO. The CEO, in fact, believes that many other corporations operate with the kind of verbal communication practices he encouraged at Air New Zealand. Whether or not that is true, or is true for corporations of a similar size and engaged in similar activities, is a matter to be determined by further investigation.

Importantly, the existence of a policy of verbal communication, etc., as adopted by Air New Zealand, in itself, hardly constitutes a willingness on the part of the Board or the CEO to have such events as this crash occur. It would be grandly unjust to suggest that anyone connected with the administrative structure of Air New Zealand had calculated the trade-offs and opted for the possibility of a disaster such as Mount Erebus rather than a formalizing of the organizational communication system. The fact that the Board and CEO adopted and encouraged the less formal communication system, though having certain of its own problems, is surely an inadequate basis upon which to find them morally responsible for the disaster on Mount Erebus even though causal responsibility focuses on the organizational breakdown.

  1. 8.

    Let us explore a different tack. Strict liability, in the criminal law, is usually applied on the basis of causal identification alone. (Though in some jurisdictions it may be understood in terms of a limited range of conditions of defeasibility, that will not concern us here.) Strict liability is both blind to the reasonableness of beliefs and morally uninterested. Strict liability can, of course, be used to identify the party or parties about which objective liability and moral responsibility questions might be raised, even though they may not be raised in the criminal context. For objective liability we need a standard of reasonableness of beliefs. For moral responsibility we need agency, intentionality. Air New Zealand’s organizational and communication structure was causally responsible for the crash and the corporation can be held strictly and possibly objectively liable under the law, for damages. But the matter of the corporation’s moral responsibility cannot be resolved by either causal identification alone or by causal responsibility and an appeal to the reasonableness criterion that is embedded in objective liability.

  2. 9.

    The examination of the corporate moral responsibility for the Mount Erebus disaster, however, ought not rest at this level. Commonly, when an untoward event occurs and when the facts will not support an ascription of moral responsibility to the causally responsible party because the event was not intended under the relevant descriptions, the subsequent behavior of the perpetrator is observed to determine whether measures are taken to insure nonrepetition of events of the same kind as the earlier untoward event. If appropriate behavioral changes are not made, a kind of moral reevaluation of the earlier event is made and the perpetrator is held morally responsible for the untoward event regardless of the fact that at the time of its occurrence the perpetrator did not have the morally relevant intention. (Certain excuses, primarily those that claim continuing incapacity or diminished responsibility, defeat the moral reappraisal.)

Suppose, as in the landmark strict liability case of Regina v. PrinceFootnote 3 that a man, named Prince, contrary to law, took a girl who is under sixteen years of age ‘away’ from her parents and suppose at the time he believed that she was older than sixteen and she gave him every reason to believe so and any reasonable person would have guessed that she was over sixteen. We stipulate that it was no part of Prince’s intentions to commit an act under the description for which the law rightly holds him strictly liable. On the basis of the traditional rule of accountability, Prince ought not to be held morally responsible for his illegal assignation. An intuitively appealing, behaviorally orientated, principle of accountability will, however, under certain conditions, license a radical alteration of the finding that Prince ought not to be held morally responsible. I shall call it the Principle of Responsive Adjustment (PRA).

PRA captures the notion that the causally responsible party for an untoward event should adopt specific courses of future action calculated to prevent repetitions. We have strong ‘moral expectations’, identified by Aristotle, regarding behavioral adjustments that correct character weakness, bad habits, and ways of acting that have previously produced untoward events. But PRA, as I construe it, is more than an expression of such expectations. It allows that when the expected adjustments are not made, and in the absence of supportable exculpating excuses for non-adjustment, the party in question can be held morally responsible for the earlier event. PRA does not, however, assume that a failure to ‘mend one’s ways’ after being confronted with a harmful outcome of one’s actions is strong presumptive evidence that one had intended that earlier event. Under the appropriate description it was not intentional and nothing subsequent to it can make it intentional at the time it happened. PRA incorporates quite another idea. A refusal to adjust one’s harm-causing ways of behaving has a second-level effect of associating oneself, morally speaking, with the earlier untoward event. ‘Refusal’, as used in this context, is an intentional act or acts, and may take a myriad of forms from practised indifference to blatant repetition. The intuition to which PRA must appeal is that a person’s past actions (even if unintentional) can be (and often are) taken into the scope of the intentions that motivate that person’s present and future actions.

F. H. Bradley wrote, ‘In morality the past is real because it is present in I the will’.Footnote 4 I construe the PRA as providing an expression of this elusive notion. Certain moral considerations, primarily those that stress the integrity of a lifetime, require adjustments in behavior to rectify flaws of character or habits that have actually caused past evils or, on the positive side, to routinize actions that have led to worthy results. Bradley’s idea takes, however, a further reading that exposes the metaphysical foundation of PRA. PRA entails that the intention that motivates a lack of responsive corrective action (or the continuance of offending behavior) affirms, in the sense that it loops back to retrieve, the actions that caused the evil. By the same token, failure to routinize behavior that has been productive of good results divorces the previously unintentional action that had good consequences from one’s ‘moral life’.

Let us try to grasp what this means. Surely, intentions reach forward (like J. L. Austin’s miner’s lamp),Footnote 5 but PRA allows that they also may have a retrograde or retrieval function such that they illuminate past behavior that was unintentional in the relevant moral way. But how can a present intention to do something, or to do it in a certain way, draw a past action into its scope?

Consider Prince’s illegal affair with the girl under sixteen. Suppose after serving his punishment, Prince intentionally, and quite deliberately, seeks out other young girls and makes no special attempt to discern their true ages. (Remember he has a penchant for young teenage girls, a penchant, but not an uncontrollable obsession.) In other words, imagine that Prince decides to take himself down to the local high school and pursue another teenage girt to whom he has taken a fancy. Prince’s intention with regard to this continuation of his behavior with such girls is formed within a personal history that includes his conviction in Regina v. Prince. Prince is aware of his past, indeed, in a Lockean sense, his past behavior and its subsequent punishment is, we should expect, a part of his current consciousness. The memory of those events is coconscious within his mental history and that mental history constitutes, in conjunction with his concerns for his well-being in the future or his life plan, his identity as a person, at least in a relevant moral and legal sense. If, subsequent to the commission of the crime, Prince had taken precautions to insure that he learn the ages of the girls he courts, etc., we would allow his ignorance of the age of the girl in the legal case as an exculpating excuse for moral purposes (although he must bear the punishment for the strict liability offense). But, in our extension of the story, Prince makes no responsive adjustments in his behavior that would have the effect of not putting him in the position of repeating the offense. In fact, he embarks upon a course that could very well lead to another violation of that same law, though whether or not it does is immaterial to PRA. By PRA, we are permitted to claim that Prince’s subsequently manifested intention to continue his romantic pursuits of underage girls constitutes an affirmation of the strict liability violation behavior. In other words, by virtue of a retrieval function in the subsequent intention, Prince may be legitimately held morally responsible for the strict liability offense.

A second example may help to fortify the intuition. Suppose that Sebastian gets drunk and drives his car onto Quincy’s property. Let us assume that Sebastian had no intention of damaging Quincy’s property, or to get drunk. After regaining sobriety and learning of his misadventures, Sebastian, who is not yet an alcoholic, subsequently and quite deliberately returns to the local pub and proceeds to get himself roaring drunk. Again we should say that Sebastian’s past is known to him, at least he is aware of the fact that he got drunk on a certain occasion and destroyed Quincy’s property. Yet, he embarks upon a similar course again. Though we would have excused him from moral responsibility for the damage he did on the first spree had he subsequently modified his behavior, he did not do so and, by PRA, he is making the crucial past behavior, not an out-of-character happenstance, but very much in character and hence something for which, as Aristotle would say, he may be held morally accountable. Seen in this light, PRA captures (at least to some extent) the Aristotelian idea that we do not blame people for unintentionally “slightly deviating from the course of goodness”,Footnote 6 as long as they do not subsequently practice behavior that makes such deviations a matter of character.

PRA insists that moral persons learn from their mistakes. “It was inadvertent or a mistake” will exculpate only if corrective measures are taken to insure nonrepetition.

The most radical element of this analysis surely is that which provides for a retrieval of past unintentional behavior in a present intention to do something. Although this strikes me as quite consistent with common intuitions, a more technical account is surely wanted. That account, however, is easily at hand. Intention, as we know, is an intensional causal notion. As such, it is referentially opaque so that the aspect of the event described makes all the difference with regard to intentionality. We intend under event or action descriptions and we redescribe actions and events as licensed by certain rules. To say that someone intended to do something is to say that there is at least one proper description of some event under which that person acts. Act descriptions have a well-known feature that Joel Feinberg once called the ‘accordion effect’. Like the musical instrument, the description of a simple event can be expanded in different directions to include causal and other related aspects that might themselves be treated as separate events for different purposes. For example, the act of pulling the trigger of a rifle might, through a series of redescriptions, be expanded to the description ‘the killing of the judge’. Accordions, of course, can be drawn apart in both directions. The description of Sebastian’s present act of getting drunk may be associated to his past action by the ordinary relations ‘like yesterday’, ‘as before’ or ‘again’. It is the case that Sebastian, in our story, intends to get drunk again. The action intended under that description dearly retrieves the previous behavior, though it certainly does not make the previous behavior intentional at the time it occurred.

PRA, however, demands a bit more than this because Sebastian could offer the plea that he had not intended to get drunk under such an ‘accordioned’ description at all. He only intended to get drunk simpliciter. We may, however, reject this plea on the grounds that unless he is of diminished mental capacity or suffering from amnesia, etc., his grasp of what he is doing is made within a mental or personal history that is not present-specific. The descriptions of events under which he intends his actions are formed within that history. ‘I intended only to get drunk, not to get drunk again’, is, in this context, unintelligible. There are limits on excludability by appeal to semantic opacity in intension. If Sebastian, quite intentionally makes his way to the pub in order to get roaring drunk, he intentionally goes to get drunk again, or like yesterday, etc., and his doing so affirms the previous episode insofar as it takes it into the description captured in the scope of the intention. That is what PRA requires.

The application of PRA to cases like our imagined extension of Regina v. Prince and drunken Sebastian can be generalized to the position that although a person may not have access to the relevant information at the time of an action that produces a bad or harmful outcome and so could not reasonably be said to have intended that outcome, that person may still be held morally responsible for that outcome if he or she subsequently intentionally acts in ways that can reasonably be said to be likely to cause repetitions of the untoward outcome.

No strict set of temporal closures need be applied to PRA. There is no statute of limitations. For example, ‘moral enlightenment’, many decades after an event, may demand reevaluation of an action or an outcome that was not originally thought to be bad or harmful and PRA will require moral accountability of the perpetrator if, after enlightenment, no behavioral adjustments are made.Footnote 7

PRA has another important intuitively appealing aspect. Suppose that we think of all of those acts for which a person can be morally blamed or morally credited as exhausting that person's moral life, the biography that can be morally judged or evaluated against a standard of worth or virtue, as Aristotle would have it, “in a complete life”. PRA may incorporate originally nonintentional pieces of behavior into a person’s moral life because PRA does not let persons desert their pasts. It forces persons to think of their moral lives as both retrospective and contemporaneous, as cumulative. Moral persons cannot completely escape responsibility for their accidents, inadvertent acts, unintended executive failures, failures to fully appreciate situations, bad habits, etc., simply by proffering standard excuses. PRA, in fact, defines the boundaries of acceptability of pleas of the form “it was unintentional”. If I am right, the ordinary notion of moral responsibility is far grander than usually described. It operates over more than isolated intentional acts considered seriatim. The moral integrity of a person’s life depends upon a moral consistency that is nurtured by PRA.

  1. 10.

    Let us now return to the tragic crash of TE- 901. The Royal Commission reports, as already mentioned, that when Air New Zealand became aware of the crash, it proclaimed the pilot error theory. Its CEO also ordered that only one file be compiled, to be kept in his possession, of all of the airline’s pertinent information regarding TE-901, and all other documents regarding the flight (duplicates, etc.) be shredded. [#338 and 373] This may appear a suspicious move, but it is not indefensible, for the airline wished to avoid trial by the press that could affect future settlements with relatives of the victims. In fact, PRA does not direct immediate attention to those and other seemingly irregular activities of the airline management immediately after the crash. The Royal Commission, I think, is most unkind in its description of the post-accident behavior of the senior executives of Air New Zealand. It refers to the testimony of airline executives as “an orchestrated litany of lies”. [#377] (That finding has, however, been recently overturned by the New Zealand Court of Appeal.)

The crucial question is, “Did Air New Zealand, when fully apprised of the extremely strong case made in the Commission Report, move to make adjustments in its internal administrative systems?” Has Air New Zealand restructured its standard operating procedures, especially in the Flight Operations Division, to correct the deficiencies outlined in the Report? The answer is “No”.

Rather than redesign its policies to incorporate a way to ensure that information within and among the sections of the Flight Operations Division is placed in the proper hands, Air New Zealand has continued in court, interviews, and company documents to defend its old procedures, structure, and verbal communication policy. Rather than accept the findings of the Commission Report, Air New Zealand continues to insist that the primary cause of the disaster was pilot error.Footnote 8 They have, it should be noted, discontinued all flights to the Antarctic, but it is not solely to such nonregular flights that attention should be drawn. Flight Operations still functions just as it did before November 28, 1979 for all scheduled flights.

PRA is brought into the analysis of the moral responsibility for the crash if we (1) substantially accept the findings of the Commission, and, (2) confirm that Air New Zealand has taken no responsive adjustment measures to correct the organizational flaws identified by the Report as “the single effective cause of the crash” [#399], regardless of whether they have not had any more recent serious crashes. On PRA and given a fair reading of the facts, it seems clear that Air New Zealand should be held morally responsible for the Mount Erebus crash. Its post-crash and post-Report behavior manifested the intention to continue its crucially prone-to-defect structural and procedural policies, and that intention retrieves within its scope, the corporate actions (or the actions of corporate personnel in its Flight Operations Division) that “programmed the aircraft to fly directly at Mount Erebus and omitted to tell the aircrew”. [#494] Again the Commission Report is quite explicit. “That mistake is directly attributable, not so much to the persons who made it, but to the incompetent administrative airline procedures which made the mistake possible.” [#393] Air New Zealand’s failure to adjust, on PRA, provides the basis for the justification of an ascription of moral responsibility for the tragic crash to the airline.

  1. 11.

    The Mount Erebus case may be paradigmatic of a large class of cases in which questions of corporate moral responsibility arise, not because it is dramatic and involves great loss of life, but because the focal event is not originally corporate intentional. Although I think that PRA is a basic principle of morality and hence is applicable to all persons, it seems to be particularly appropriate in morally evaluating corporate actions. Corporations, through their standard operating procedures, may actually have a greater capacity for reactive adaptation than do human beings. (But that is only a matter of degree and, I think, not a matter of any consequence.) Often, corporate personnel or subcorporate units at all levels of an organization do things that result in untoward events, and a higher subcorporate unit, or the corporation itself, must decide on a responsive course of action. PRA allows the incorporation of the actions of personnel in the intentions of the corporate body and hence a finding of corporate moral responsibility.Footnote 9 But by the same token, the appropriate corporate internal adjustment in response to the revelation of the unintentional (at least at the corporate or subcorporate unit level) causing of an untoward event preserves corporate moral blamelessness in the event. PRA gives us an explication of the corporate excuse that it was just a foul-up in the organization, or the selfish dealings of an individual, or a misdeed by someone, who, though he may have believed he was acting for the corporation was actually pursuing his idiosyncratic conception of the corporate interests and corporate policies.

Although I have only scratched the surface here, I hope I have provided some good reasons to support the view that the Principle of Responsive Adjustment, Aristotelian in origin, is most comfortably at home in our ordinary idea of moral accountability and should be given more serious consideration by philosophers generally interested in ethics and specifically concerned about the notion of corporate responsibility.