Abstract
Certain cases of corporate action seem especially resistant to a shared moral evaluation. Conservatives may argue that if bad intentions cannot be demonstrated, corporations and their managers are not blame-worthy, while liberals may insist that the results of corporate actions were predictable and so somebody must be to blame. Against this background, the theory that sometimes a corporation's moral responsibility cannot be redistributed, even in principle, to the individuals involved, seems quite attractive.
This doctrine of unredistributable corporate moral responsibility (UCMR) is, however, ultimately indefensible. I show this in several steps. After first locating UCMR in the context of the evolving debate about corporate moral agency, the paper reexamines cases cited in defense of UCMR and takes up the attempt to defend it by identifying corporate moral agency with corporate practices. A further section explores the claim that UCMR is a convention distinct from, yet compatible with, traditional “natural” notions of responsibility. The final section develops a notion of combined akratic agency to provide an alternate explanation, compatible with rejection of UCMR, of the phenomena which make the doctrine attractive.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
Bibliography
Center for Business Ethics: 1987, Business Ethics Report: Highlights of Bentley College's Seventh Annual Conference on Business Ethics (Waltham, MA), p. 14.
Donaldson, Thomas: 1982, Corporations and Morality (Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, NJ), p. 126.
Eddy, Paul, Elaine Potter and Bruce Page: 1976, Destination Disaster: From the Tri-Motor to the DC-10: The Risk of Flying (Quadrangle Books, New York).
Feinberg, Joel: 1970, Doing and Deserving (Princeton), pp. 248–249.
French, Peter A.: 1982, ‘What Is Hamlet to McDonnell-Douglas or McDonnell-Douglas to Hamlet: DC-10’, Business and Professional Ethics Journal 1, 12.
French, Peter A.: 1984, Collective and Corporate Responsibility (Columbia University Press, New York).
Galbraith, John Kenneth: 1979, The New Industrial State (Mentor Books, New York), chapters 12–13.
Garrett, Jan Edward: 1988, ‘Persons, Kinds and Corporations’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
Hoffman, W. Michael and Jennifer Moore, eds.: 1984, Business Ethics: Readings and Cases in Corporate Morality (McGraw-Hill, New York).
Inwood, Brad: 1985, The Psychology of Action in Early Stoicism (Oxford University Press, Oxford), pp. 111–126.
MacIntyre, Alasdair: 1981, After Virtue (University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IN), chapter 17.
Molander, Earl A., ed.: 1980, Responsive Capitalism (McGraw-Hill, New York), pp. 56–69.
Thomas Aquinas: 1988, On Politics and Ethics, tr. Paul E. Sigmund (W. W. Norton and Co., New York), pp. 66–69, 71–73.
Velasquez, Manuel: 1982, Business Ethics: Concepts and Cases (Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, NJ).
Velasquez, Manuel: 1983, ‘Why Corporations Are Not Responsible for Anything They Do’, Business and Professional Ethics Journal 2 (Spring 1983).
Werhane, Patricia H.: 1985, Persons, Rights and Corporations (Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, NJ).
Werhane, Patricia H.: 1988, Comments at Central Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Additional information
Jan Edward Garrett is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Western Kentucky University, with major interests in business ethics, the metaphysics of social organizations, and ancient philosophy. He has published on Aristotle's conception of techne (craft) in The Modern Schoolman (1987) and his article “Persons, Kinds and Corporations: An Aristotelian View” has appeared in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. He attended Peter French's NEH Summer Seminar on Corporate Responsibility in 1983.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Garrett, J.E. Unredistributable corporate moral responsibility. J Bus Ethics 8, 535–545 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00382929
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00382929