ABSTRACT
The debate about whether we may blame corporations for their transgressions has been subject to longstanding, heated, and seemingly intractable debate. In this chapter, I trace the impasse to confusion about the relationship between moral agency and blameworthiness. On a widespread understanding of moral responsibility, if one satisfies the criteria for moral agency then one is appropriately liable to blame for one’s wrongdoing. I seek to pull apart the concepts of moral agency and blameworthiness. I argue that even if the corporation is a moral agent, it lacks an additional capacity necessary to make a moral agent an appropriate target of blame – namely, the capacity to experience guilt. I argue that only a being with affect can experience guilt and, because corporations have no affect, it follows that corporations cannot be blameworthy in their own right for their wrongs. But whom, then, should we blame for corporate wrongdoing? I end by arguing that we should assign blame directly to the corporation’s members – executives in particular – irrespective of whether they were at fault and instead in a manner befitting the shared nature of responsibility in hierarchical institutional settings.
