Online research in philosophy

Raising the issue of corporate moral agency in our examination of the morality of corporate speech is important for two fundamentalreasons. Each reason suggests we exercise caution in conflating corporations and individuals as the law often does. First, raising the issue of corporate moral agency is important to the aim of providing a framework for ethically evaluating corporate speech. It is tempting to proceed as if the nature of corporate speech is self-evident. But this is hardly the case. Corporations are (...) not natural persons, and we mustn’t assume corporate speech is indistinguishable from human speech. Before we can ethically evaluate corporate speech, we must first clarify what corporate speech is. This requires an understanding of the fundamental nature of the corporate entity, including its moral status. Second, raising the issue of corporate moral agency is important if we wish to promotemorally responsible corporate speech. Any diminished moral capacity on the corporation’s part would suggest a core role for the strong legal reinforcement of any ethical aspirations here. In promoting morally responsible corporate speech, ethical injunctions uncoupled from an effective legal regime may hold only limited promise. (shrink)

The question of legal optimism presupposes the development of a normative stance regarding the law’s evolution. Only with a sense of where the law should be going can one be optimistic—or pessimistic for that matter—regarding its development. Thus, the possibility of legal optimism depends on disclosing the normative stance toward the law’s evolution suggested by the law’s moral creativity. What we need is a legal theory for civil society analogous to our legal theory of the market.

Legal issues have long been a prominent part of the discourse of business ethics. This widespread attention to legal questions within business ethics arises primarily because specific legal issues are as a practical matter often intertwined with prominent ethical issues occurring in the workplace. Many of the central issues of business ethics—issues such as whistle blowing, insider trading, and workplace privacy—have significant legal dimensions.But this widespread attention to specific legal issues obscures a more significant deficiency within business ethics. This deficiency (...) relates to the consideration of law at a much more fundamental level. Business ethics lacks any developed awareness of the images of law within its discourse.Unlike jurisprudence, the field of business ethics has little in the way of fully developed models or concepts of law. Rather, ourunderstanding of the law here exists more at the level of images—general, unreflected-upon depictions of the law, determinate in someaspects, indeterminate in others.Such images are epistemologically potent, containing unexamined assumptions and exerting an often unrecognized influence over the development of our knowledge. As such, they deserve our attention, especially within a newly evolving field such as business ethics. Of particular importance to business ethics is how such images portray the relation of law to ethics. (shrink)

Corporate legal scholarship has failed in fundamental ways to grasp the ethical significance of corporate law and policy. While the broader economic and social consequences of particular legal developments are routinely debated, too little reflection is given to how such developments affect the moral quality of individual lives within the corporate hierarchy. What is needed is a framework for illuminating the interaction between developments in corporate legal doctrine and the ethical choices of corporate managers. The ethical significance of corporate law (...) derives from two key factors. First, the corporation as an organization mediates between individuals in the corporate hierarchy and their ethical responsibilities. Second, the organizational choices and decision-making structure of the corporation are to a significant degree the product of corporate law. (shrink)