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A Political Account of Corporate Moral Responsibility

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Abstract

Should we conceive of corporations as entities to which moral responsibility can be attributed? This contribution presents what we will call a political account of corporate moral responsibility. We argue that in modern, liberal democratic societies, there is an underlying political need to attribute greater levels of moral responsibility to corporations. Corporate moral responsibility is essential to the maintenance of social coordination that both advances social welfare and protects citizens’ moral entitlements. This political account posits a special capacity of self-governance that corporations can intelligibly be said to possess. Corporations can be said to be “administrators of duty” in that they can voluntarily incorporate moral principles into their decision-making processes about how to conduct business. This account supplements and partly transforms earlier pragmatic accounts of corporate moral responsibility by disentangling responsibility from its conventional linkages with accountability, blame and punishment. It thereby represents a distinctive way to defend corporate moral responsibility and shows how Kantian thinking can be helpful in disentangling the problems surrounding the concept.

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Notes

  1. Our interest in this paper lies with the possibility of attributing moral responsibility to the corporation. The corporation is often interpreted as just another type of collective actor. Philip Pettit (2001: 104–125) is a case in point. In his discussion on the subject he speaks in a general way about “collectivities” and “(social) groups.” Larry May (1987) is another example. He speaks of “collectivities” in a general sense. We conceive of the corporation as a very special collective actor. Because of the special nature of the corporation, the issue of corporate moral responsibility must be taken out of the general discussion on collective moral responsibility. There may be solutions possible in relation to the specific problem of corporate moral responsibility that are not possible in the general discussion on collective moral agency. Hence, we disagree with authors, including Geoff Moore (1999: 329), who state that: “[I]t should be remembered that much of what is said (about moral responsibility of corporations) could be applied equally to collectives in general.”

  2. It can thus be distinguished from the more common debate on “corporate social responsibility” (CSR). That addresses the subsequent question which substantive moral duties we ought to bestow upon the corporation.

  3. We were inspired in our project by Strawson’s (1962) claim that in philosophical debates the basic facts (of human understanding and human society) sometimes get “overintellectualized”. Some parts of the web of human attitudes and feelings are given and neither call for nor permit external “rational” justifications. We take as a basic fact that in common life corporations are conceived of as different from humans. Nobody falls in love with a corporation and we do not speak of corporations “dying”. But we also take as basic facts that there is indeed a political need to attribute moral responsibility to the corporation and that many in today’s culture find it quite natural to speak of the corporation as if it were a moral agent of some sort. We have tried to avoid looking at these facts as incompatible and instead take the possibility of their compatibility as a challenge. Is it possible to construct an interpretation of moral responsibility that allows us to give a meaningful interpretation to the concept of corporate moral responsibility while at the same time acknowledging that there are indeed serious ontological differences between humans and corporations?

  4. Criminal punishment of corporations typically takes the form of fines or other financial penalties. This is instructive in its own right, for it more closely resembles the way that civil judgments are rendered against individuals rather than the way that criminal judgments are rendered against individuals. This may speak against the very idea of criminally punishing corporations but we leave this matter aside in this discussion (see Wolf 1985).

  5. The relation between decision-making and action is actually quite complex within Kantian thought. In this paper we assume that Kant’s morality is only about decision-making. This is not untrue in the sense that in the Kantian view the core of morality is indeed about decision-making. Still, Kant also maintains that we must distinguish between morality in the narrow sense and morality in the wider sense. Morality in the wider sense includes the category of Right, which is, strictly speaking, only about action.

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Correspondence to Wim Dubbink.

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We like to thank two anonymous reviewers as well as Norman Bowie, Herman van Erp, Martin van Hees, Robert Heeger, Frank Hindriks, Luc van Liedekerke, Donald Loose, Maureen Sie and Bert van de Ven for their advice on earlier versions of this essay.

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Dubbink, W., Smith, J. A Political Account of Corporate Moral Responsibility. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 14, 223–246 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-010-9235-x

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