Responsibility Unincorporated: Corporate Agency and Moral Responsibility

Philosophical Quarterly 69 (275):294-314 (2019)
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Abstract

Those who argue that corporations can be morally responsible for what they do help us to understand how autonomous corporate agency is possible, and those who argue that they cannot be help us maintain distinctive value in human life. Each offers something valuable, but without securing the other's important contribution. I offer an account that secures both. I explain how corporations can be autonomous agents that we can continue to be justified in blaming as responsible agents, but without it also being the case that corporations are morally responsible for anything that they do. The upshot is that we can make sense of the reality of corporate agency and the value that we derive from our sophisticated interactions with them as autonomous agents, while vindicating the idea that they are not members of the moral community.

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Luis Cheng-Guajardo
Santa Clara University

References found in this work

Freedom and Resentment.Peter Strawson - 1962 - Proceedings of the British Academy 48:187-211.
Group agency: the possibility, design, and status of corporate agents.Christian List & Philip Pettit - 2011 - New York: Oxford University Press. Edited by Philip Pettit.
Virtue Ethics.Rosalind Hursthouse & Glen Pettigrove - 2022 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Virtue and Reason.John McDowell - 1979 - The Monist 62 (3):331-50.

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