Abstract
Corporate1 wrongdoing abounds, whether it is the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, India which killed thousands of people and harmed thousands of others, the ruination of the Amazon rainforest by global corporate, political and other interests, or whether it is the Exxon oil spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska which permanently and adversely effected that environment as well as the economic viability of local companies (and workers) the successes of which (and whom) are contingent on the condition of that environment. Many ask just who and/or what is morally responsible (liable) for these and other untoward events or states of affairs of similar magnitude, demanding that those guilty of such wrongs be punished.
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References
Here, as elsewhere in this book, I am concerned with private profit-making corporations, not public or non-profit ones.
Peter French, “The Corporation as a Moral Person,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 16 (1979), pp. 205–15
Peter French, Collective and Corporate Responsibility (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 31–47.
For an account of an agent’s being “at fault,” see Joel Feinberg, Doing and Deserving (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), Chapter 8.
Descriptions of methodological individualism are found in D. E. Cooper, “Collective Responsibility,” Philosophy, 43 (1968), pp. 258–68
J. Angelo Corlett, “Collective Punishment and Public Policy,” Journal of Business Ethics, 11 (1992), pp. 211–12
Michael J. Zimmerman, “Sharing Responsibility,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 22 (1985), pp. 115–22. Zimmerman attributes a methodological individualism to Kurt Baier, “Guilt and Responsibility,” in Peter A. French, Editor, Individual and Collective Responsibility (New York: Schenkman Publishing Company, 1972), pp. 37–61. In Collective and Corporate Responsibility (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984)
Peter French attributes this position to Karl Popper, F. A. Hayek, and J. W. N. Watkins, respectively (pp. 2f.). Larry May ascribes methodological individualism to Watkins [The Morality of Groups (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), pp. 14f. For an assessment of May’s book, see J. Angelo Corlett, “Review of Larry May” The Morality of Groups Journal of Business Ethics, 8 (1989), pp. 772, 792, 816].
A most illuminating discussion of methodological individualism is found in Margaret Gilbert, On Social Facts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 427–36.
The following argument is a revised version of an argument articulated in J. Angelo Corlett, Analyzing Social Knowledge (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), pp. 120–22
The following argument is a revised version of an argument articulated in J. Angelo Corlett, “Collective Punishment” and “Collective Responsibility” in R. Edward Freeman and Patricia H. Werhane, Editors, Dictionary of Business Ethics (London: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), pp. 117–25.
Frege’s law is that “If a declarative sentence S has the very same cognitive information content as a declarative sentence S′, then S is informative (“contains an extension of our knowledge”) if and only if S′ is (does)” [Nathan Salmon, Frege’s Puzzle (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), p. 57].
Ontological versions of holism hold that there are irreducible aspects of collectives, and that collectives exist as real entities “over and above” their respective individual constituent members.
I do not use the term “agent” here in one of its legal senses.
Alvin I. Goldman, A Theory of Human Action (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970).
French, Collective and Corporate Responsibility, Chapters 3–5, 12; May, The Morality of Groups, pp. 65–9. For criticisms of these arguments, see J. Angelo Corlett, “Corporate Responsibility and Punishment,” Public Affairs Quarterly, 2 (1988), pp. 2–3
Victor C. K. Tarn, “May on Corporate Responsibility and Punishment,” Business & Professional Ethics Journal, 8 (1990), pp. 71f.
For more on organizational structures, see Paul Hersey and Kenneth H. Blanchard, Management of Organizational Behavior: Utilizing Human Resources, Third Edition (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1977)
Daniel Katz and Robert L. Kahn, The Social Psychology of Organizations (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1966).
Christopher McMahon, “Managerial Authority,” Ethics, 100 (1989), p. 52.
McMahon, “Managerial Authority,” p. 53.
For an analysis of acting freely, see Harry G. Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), and Chapter 2 above.
There are higher-order compatibilists who argue that the ability to do otherwise is a necessary condition of freedom [Keith Lehrer, Metamind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)]
and there are incompatibilists who arrive at the same conclusion [Peter van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983)].
H. L. A. Hart, Punishment and Responsibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 4–5.
Feinberg, Doing and Deserving, Chapter 5.
French, Corporate and Collective Responsibility, Chapter 14.
J. Angelo Corlett, “French on Corporate Punishment: Some Problems,” Journal of Business Ethics, 7(1988), p.206.
Corlett, “French on Corporate Punishment: Some Problems,” p. 206.
Corlett, “French on Corporate Punishment: Some Problems,” p. 206.
Corlett, “French on Corporate Punishment: Some Problems,” pp. 206–07.
Corlett, “French on Corporate Punishment: Some Problems,” p. 207.
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Corlett, J.A. (2004). Corprate Responsibility and Punishment. In: Responsibility and Punishment. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0421-2_8
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