Abstract
If the agent responsible for an action is to be given praise or blame by the moral community for that action, then accurate responsibility ascriptions must be made. Since the moral community may have to evaluate the actions of corporate agents, care must be taken to insure that the assumption of Methodological Individualism (MI) does not infect that process. Nevertheless, there is no guarantee that accurate responsibility ascriptions will be made in cases connected with corporate action as long as corporate scapegoating may occur. Because corporate scapegoating is a behavior pattern that attempts to falsify correct responsibility ascriptions it will be of interest to the moral theorist. Once I have considered three objections to the idea of corporate scapegoating I shall offer a fictional description of it found in Ayn Rand's work,Atlas Shrugged. Finally, I shall raise a question about its present day use by corporations in our society.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Davidson, A.: 1990,In the Wake of the Exxon Valdez: The Devastating Impact of the Alaska Oil Spill (Sierra Club Books, San Francisco).
Davidson, D.: 1971, ‘Agency’, inAgent Action, and Reason (Binkley, Bronaugh, Marras, Toronto), pp. 43–61.
French, P.: 1979, ‘The Corporation as a Moral Person’,American Philosophical Quarterly 16(3), pp. 207–215.
Rand, A.: 1957,Atlas Shrugged (International Collectors Library, Garden City, NY).
Wilson, P. E.: 1992 (Spring), ‘Barring Corporations from the Moral Community — the Concept and the Cost’,Journal for Social Philosophy 23(1), pp. 74–89.
Wynn, J. C.: 1982,Family Therapy in Pastoral Ministry (Harper & Row, Publishers, San Francisco).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Additional information
P. Eddy Wilson graduated with his Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1989. He taught philosophy full time for two years after graduation at the University of the South, and he was a participant in Peter French's 1990 NEH Summer Seminar. He is currently employed as a member of the Department of Philosophy and Religion of Shaw University to teach philosophy at their High Point CAPE Center in High Point, North Carolina. He is interested in philosophy of religion, process philosophy, and ethics. Two of his articles have been accepted for publication by theJournal of Social Philosophy.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Wilson, P.E. The fiction of corporate scapegoating. J Bus Ethics 12, 779–784 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00881310
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00881310