Abstract
Much has been written about what corporations owe society and whether it is appropriate to hold them responsible. In contrast, little has been written about whether anything is owed to corporations apart from what is owed to their members. And when this question has been addressed, the answer has always been that corporations are not worthy of any distinct moral consideration. This is even claimed by proponents of corporate agency. In this paper, I argue that proponents of corporate agency should recognize corporations as worthy of moral consideration. Though particular views of moral status are often taken for granted in the literature, corporations can satisfy many views of moral status given the capacities often ascribed to them. They can even meet the conditions of the views assumed. I conclude by suggesting that recognizing the moral status of corporations may not be as drastic or harmful as we might imagine.
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Notes
The literature has focused on whether corporations are persons, but Manning (1984) nicely distinguishes the question of whether the corporation is a moral agent (and so something that has obligations and responsibilities) from the question of whether the corporation is a moral person (which she takes to be things with rights, that are owed, and that we have responsibilities towards). What Manning calls a moral person, however, is often referred to as a moral patient in the literature on moral status. For a classic discussion of moral patiency, see Regan (1983). Seelman (2014) characterizes moral agent/moral patient distinction essentially in just the same way that Manning distinguishes between moral agents and moral persons.
As a final example, Pasternak (2017) has recently argued directly that corporations are moral agents, but they nevertheless are not worthy of moral consideration and should not be granted independent rights. I omit a longer discussion of this work because it argues largely by taking on board directly what is said by List and Pettit and Hess.
Taylor is clearly concerned with things that are alive. I will not comment on whether we ought to consider corporations as ‘alive,’ aside to say first that it would be a stretch of our language to say so. What is important is that corporations seem to share many features with living entities relevant to moral worthiness.
The notion of free will in play is the radical freedom from determination given one’s past, environment, and character make-up. That is a high bar indeed. Even here, however, consider Hess (2014), where Kendy Hess argues that corporations are capable of satisfying at least certain suggested compatibilist conditions for free will.
This apparent lack of qualitative experience is exactly why Haney claims that corporations are not capable of caring. We will see that on this view and other views of moral status, what really does the work in ruling out corporations is an assumption of their lacking necessary qualitative experiences.
See Rupert (2011: 633–634) for a discussion of the state of these arguments from functional similarity more broadly in the literature.
Haney (op. cit.:403-4) argues explicitly that this element is precisely what functionalist accounts of the mind cannot capture.
We may think that something could fail to be consciously aware and yet still have sub-conscious phenomenal experiences that qualify it for moral status. It may more plausible to hold that corporations have subconscious experiences and feelings but not full-blown consciousness. Interestingly, however, List (2016: 5–7) suggests that corporations have conscious awareness but lack phenomenal consciousness. He holds this position because he thinks that awareness can be characterized functionally (and corporations can play those functional roles) whereas conscious experience requires more.
See Schwitzgebel (2015), which argues for that claim that the United States of America is probably conscious (at least, if materialism is true). He recognizes that it would follow from this that corporations might be conscious. Alternatively, see List (op. cit.), which acknowledges that corporations might count as conscious on some views of consciousness, but endorses a particular recent view of consciousness on which he claims corporations will not count as conscious to a high degree. There may be ways around his conclusion even granting that view of consciousness, or we may to reject that view of consciousness, but it’s worth noting that on that view corporations will still count as conscious to some degree. In fact, the view entails that everything is conscious to some degree, and we may think that a proponent of this kind of panpsychism is unlikely to think that consciousness is the sufficient condition for moral consideration.
Although it is hard to imagine having a first-person perspective without being conscious, Hess does claim that these are separable and that corporations can act from a first-person perspective without having conscious experiences. Rovane (1998) also argues at length that group agents can have a first-person perspective without having phenomenological states.
If phenomenal experiences were necessary for the agential features of corporations, then we could directly infer their consciousness. However, we may think that phenomenal experiences do not play any causal role in bringing about our behavior, and that there could be creatures just like us in our behavior but which are not conscious. That is, we may think that philosophical zombies are possible. However, it would be an incredible result to show that philosophical zombies are not only possible but actual, and that corporations are among them.
Schwitzgebel suggests that we in fact are biased against accepting even the existence of things like group agents that are discontinuous. He calls this bias ‘contiguism’ (op. cit.:1699). However, I think the bias goes much deeper for corporate consciousness. It is the fact that corporations are entities that we created, rather than biological entities, that I think is the source of our incredulity about their prospects for consciousness.
Block (2002) argues that, given a theory of consciousness and a being that is functionally equivalent to conscious beings but not counted as conscious by the theory, we have no way of knowing whether our theory is right or if encountering this being shows us that our theory as it is must be mistaken.
See Hasnas (2016), which argues that if corporations have the capacities ascribed to them by proponents of corporate agency, then they should have the right to vote. It is worth noting that Hasnas maintains that these rights follow even if (contra Hess) we take corporations to be neither sentient nor conscious.
This is an important point to emphasize, because it might in part explain our moral intuition that there’s nothing wrong with dissolving a corporation. This just does not seem regrettable in the same way as the death of an animal, and it may not be even if corporations are worthy of some moral consideration, as long as they themselves do not care about persisting.
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Acknowledgements
This paper benefitted tremendously from the feedback of the participants in the Zicklin Center Normative Business Ethics Workshop at the Wharton School in 2017. The author would also like to thank Nicholas Laskowski for emboldening him to pursue this project, and Kendy Hess for comments and encouragement.
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Author Kenneth Silver declares that he has no conflicts of interest.
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Silver, K. Can a Corporation be Worthy of Moral Consideration?. J Bus Ethics 159, 253–265 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-018-3787-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-018-3787-4