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Moral Entanglement in Group Decision-Making: Explaining an Odd Rule in Corporate Criminal Liability

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Abstract

Acting as part of a corporation may allow an individual more easily to rationalize participating in a harmful act, but there are countervailing forces in corporate action that increase moral oversight and accountability. Making use of group agency to explain membership as a special feature of some corporate agents, I argue that when someone becomes a member of an organized group like a company, their own moral responsibility becomes entangled with the decisions of other members of the company, whether or not they intend this effect. This moral entanglement in corporate decision-making explains why individuals have a moral obligation to act in their role as a corporate officer when they would not have an obligation to act in a personal capacity even if they had identical knowledge. The entanglement affects the individual’s own moral status and the moral status of the company itself. Moral entanglement of corporate decision-makers provides a principled explanation for a rule that is present in corporate criminal law that corporate officers with knowledge that another employee is about to commit a crime must actively intervene, and cannot rely on their status as bystanders.

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Notes

  1. See e.g. Elizabeth Wolgast, Ethics of an Artificial Person: Lost Responsibility in Professions and.

    Organizations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); David Luban, Alan Strudler & David Wasserman, “Moral Responsibility in the Age of Bureaucracy”, Michigan Law Review 90(8) (1992): pp. 2348-2392. For an opposite view, see Gregory Mellema, “Shared Responsibility and Ethical Dilutionism”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 63(2) (1985): pp. 177-187.

  2. See e.g. Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (Viking, 2004).

  3. See Cristina de Maglie, “Models of Corporate Criminal Liability in Comparative Law”, Washington University Global Studies Law Review, 4(3) 2005: pp. 547-566.

  4. Henry S. Richardson, “Moral Entanglements: Ad Hoc Intimacies and Ancillary Duties of Care”, Journal of Moral Philosophy 9(3) (2012): pp. 376-409; Henry S. Richardson, Moral Entanglements: The Ancillary-Care Obligations of Medical Researchers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

  5. Beatrice Jauregui, “Dirty Anthropology: Epistemologies of Violence and Ethical Entanglements in Police Ethnography”, in William Garriott (ed.), Policing and Contemporary Governance: The Anthropology of Police in Practice (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), pp. 125-153.

  6. Trystan S. Goetze, “Moral Entanglement: Taking Responsibility and Vicarious Responsibility”, The Monist 104(2) (2008): pp. 210-223.

  7. Possibly a failure to accede to one’s moral responsibility in this situation would result in what some have called “moral taint” though the present argument does not rely on moral taint as generative of responsibility: see e.g. Marina A. L. Oshana, “Moral Taint”, Metaphilosophy 37(3-4) (2006): pp. 353-375; Jasmine Hébert, Steven Bittle & Steve Tombs, “Obscuring Corporate Violence: Corporate Manslaughter in Action”, The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice 58(4) (2019): pp. 554-579.

  8. See Leora Dahan Katz, “Response Retributivism: Defending the Duty to Punish”, Law and Philosophy 40(6) (2021): pp. 585-615, pp.593-594.

  9. Jeremy Waldron, “A Right to Do Wrong”, Ethics 92(1) (1981): pp. 21-39.

  10. Ibid, p. 21.

  11. Ibid, p. 29.

  12. Ibid, p. 30.

  13. Matravers explaining R.A. Duff: Matt Matravers, “Duff on Hard Treatment”, in Rowan Cruft, Matthew H. Kramer & Mark R. Reiff (eds), Crime, Punishment, and Responsibility: The Jurisprudence of Antony Duff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 68-83, p. 74.

  14. For an example of this position see Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 166.

  15. Katz, supra note 8, p. 592.

  16. Ibid.

  17. For instance, Stuart Green writes about white-collar crime: “in a surprisingly large number of cases, there is a genuine doubt as to whether what the defendant was alleged to have done was in fact morally wrong”: Stuart P. Green, “Moral Ambiguity in White Collar Criminal Law”, Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy 18 (2004): pp. 501-520, p. 502.

  18. See Christian List & Philip Pettit, Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 19-80; Raimo Tuomela, Social Ontology: Collective Intentionality and Group Agents (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

  19. Goetze, supra note 6, p. 220.

  20. Christopher Kutz, Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age (Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 1-11.

  21. Ibid, p. 157.

  22. Tracy Isaacs, Moral Responsibility in Collective Contexts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 114.

  23. This is particularly true in larger companies: see Nicola Lacey, “‘Philosophical Foundations of the Common Law’: Social not Metaphysical”, in Jeremy Horder (ed.), Oxford Essays in Jurisprudence, Fourth Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 17-39, p. 31.

  24. Kutz, supra note 20, pp. 143-144.

  25. See List & Pettit, supra note 18, pp. 65-66.

  26. Ibid.

  27. Writers on corporate crime often construe many shareholders as uninvolved with corporate decisions: see e.g. W. Robert Thomas, “The Conventional Problem with Corporate Sentencing (and One Unconventional Solution)”, New Criminal Law Review 24(3) (2021): pp. 397-432, p. 418.

  28. List and Pettit, supra note 17, p. 36.

  29. Ibid.

  30. See Kutz, supra note 20, p. 162, on shipping clerks as responsible parties in a corporation’s activities; also Mark Dsouza, “The Corporate Agent in Criminal Law – An Argument for Comprehensive Identification”, Cambridge Law Journal 79(1) 2020: pp. 91-119, pp. 107-108.

  31. See e.g. Tesco Supermarkets Ltd. v. Nattrass, A.C. 153 (1972) [Nattrass].

  32. On the role of normalization in reducing the blameworthiness of wrongful conduct, see Cheshire Calhoun, “Responsibility and Reproach”, Ethics 99(2) (1989): pp. 389-406.

  33. Cristina de Maglie, supra note 3, p. 549.

  34. Mihailis E. Diamantis, “Corporate Criminal Minds”, Notre Dame Law Review 91(5) (2016): pp. 2049-2090, p. 2052.

  35. On mens rea, see ibid. as well as Pamela H. Bucy, “Corporate Ethos: A Standard for Imposing Corporate Criminal Liability”, Minnesota Law Review 75(4) (1990): pp. 1095-1184; G. R. Sullivan, “The Attribution of Culpability to Limited Companies”, The Cambridge Law Journal 55(3) (1996): pp. 515-546; Dsouza, supra note 30. On defences, see Sylvia Rich, “Can Corporate Agents Experience Duress? An Examination of Emotion-Based Excuses and Group Agents”, Criminal Law and Philosophy 13(1) (2018): pp. 149-163; Mihailis E. Diamantis, “The Corporate Insanity Defense”, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 111(1) (2021): pp. 1-92; Jeremy Horder, Excusing Crime (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 237-276. On punishment theory and sentencing, see Thomas, supra note 27; Samuel W. Buell, “The Blaming Function of Entity Criminal Liability”, Indiana Law Journal 81 (2006): p. 473-538; Sylvia Rich, “Corporate Criminals and Punishment Theory”, Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 29(1) (2016): pp. 97-118; J. Angelo Corlett, Responsibility and Punishment (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), pp. 101-113.

  36. Christopher R. Green, “Punishing Corporations: The Food-Chain Schizophrenia in Punitive Damages and Criminal Law”, Nebraska Law Review 87(1) (2008): pp. 197-269, pp. 205-206; Richard S. Gruner, Corporate Criminal Liability and Prevention (New York: Law Journal Press, 2005), pp. 7-19.

  37. Geraldine Szott Moohr, “Of Bad Apples and Bad Trees: Considering Fault-based Liability for the Complicit Corporation”, American Criminal Law Review 44 (2007): pp. 1343-1364, p. 1360.

  38. Todd Archibald, Kenneth Jull & Kent Roach, “The Changed Face of Corporate Criminal Liability”, Criminal Law Quarterly 48 (2003): pp. 367-396, p. 380.

  39. Lacey, supra note 23.

  40. Criminal Code s. 2.

  41. R. v. Pétroles Global Inc, 4262 Q.C.C.S. (2013), para 211.

  42. Moohr, supra note 38.

  43. Green, supra note 36, p. 205; Gruner, supra note 36.

  44. See Kutz, supra note 20, p. 162, on shipping clerks as responsible parties in a corporation’s activities.

  45. Nattrass, supra note 31.

  46. Criminal Code s. 21.1(b).

  47. Dunlop and Sylvester v. The Queen, 2 S.C.R. 881 (1979).

  48. Kathleen M. Ridolfi, “Law, Ethics, and the Good Samaritan: Should There Be a Duty to Rescue Symposium: Good Samaritan Statutes: Introduction”, Santa Clara Law Review 40(4) (1999): p. 959; Marcia M. Ziegler, “Nonfeasance and the Duty to Assist: The American Seinfeld Syndrome Comment”, Dickinson Law Review 104(3) (1999): pp. 525-560.

  49. See Christopher Kutz, “Causeless complicity”, Criminal Law and Philosophy 1(3) (2007): pp. 289-305 especially at p. 295.

  50. Model Penal Code s. 2.07 (1962); Criminal Code ss. 22.1-22.2.

  51. Criminal Code s. 22.2(c); see also Todd Archibald, Ken Jull & Kent Roach, “Corporate Criminal Liability: Myriad Complexity in the Scope of Senior Officer”, Criminal Law Quarterly 60(3) (2013): pp. 386-413, pp. 398-399.

  52. Green, supra note 36, p. 204.

  53. As long as the passivity includes an intent, at least in part, to benefit the organization – Criminal Code s. 22.2.

  54. Criminal Code s. 215.

  55. I thank Alan Brudner for pushing me to clarify this point.

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  1. Faculty of Law, Common Law Section, University of Ottawa, Fauteux Hall 57 Louis-Pasteur Private, K1N 9A7, Ottawa, ON, Canada

    Sylvia Rich

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Rich, S. Moral Entanglement in Group Decision-Making: Explaining an Odd Rule in Corporate Criminal Liability. Criminal Law, Philosophy 18, 1–17 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-023-09661-z

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