The responsibility of corporations

In recent years there have been two important studies of collective responsibility which have dealt with business ethics. Peter French’s Collective and Corporate Responsibility (1984) argued that collectivism was superior to methodological individualism as a way of accounting for the responsibility of corporations. According to French, a corporation is a real person, not a fictitious entity; it just happens not to have a physical body like an individual person, but it is still a real person that can be held morally accountable for its decisions. Corporations are moral persons because they possess an internal decision structure which, according to French, means that they can form intentions and act on the basis of these intentions.1 Larry May, in The Morality of Groups (1987), has argued that neither collectivism nor methodological individualism offers a viable account of collective responsibility. May rejects French’s claim that a corporation is a fullfledged moral agent, but he maintains that the internal decision structure of corporations does make them morally responsible for the actions of individuals who are authorized to act on their behalf. However, French’s emphasis on the importance of a collective’s internal decision structure makes him unable to account for the collective responsibility of unorganized groups such as the mob that stormed the Bastille during the French Revolution. According to May, a methodological individualist such as J.W.N.Watkins is likewise unable to explain the behavior of mobs because he cannot account for the relationship of solidarity which unites their individual members and accounts for their ability to function as a group. Building upon Jean-Paul Sartre’s analysis of the mob that stormed the Bastille, May maintains that its behavior was ‘quasi-intentional,’ although he concedes that for many members of the mob the awareness of group solidarity was ‘pre-reflective.’ Watkins in his explanation of the behavior of mobs had posited the existence of ‘anonymous individuals,’ which May criticizes as a departure from the tenets of methodological individualism, but I confess that neither Watkins nor May has advanced my own understanding of mob behavior which remains, I think, a largely unexplained phenomenon.2 In this chapter I shall focus upon May’s analysis of the collective responsibility of business corporations, whose behavior is intelligible largely because, as French and May have pointed out, they possess an internal decision structure.