Moral people (i) have good goals in acting in a challenging situation; and (ii) use their rightly disposed intellectual and voluntary capacities (virtues) and resources to choose a good action in that situation. This requires (iii) sound ethical deliberation and decision-procedures for realising practically the abstract values and principles relevant in the concrete situation. After deliberation about sub-goals and means, they (iv) choose to execute the best particular action plan. They will have canvassed possible outcomes of the intended act, which, (...) when executed, will have a particular result and (v) consequent outcomes for themselves, and for others; and (vi) it will show respect for the wellbeing of the community or wider society, represented by the state, and reflected in state law. A comprehensive third-party moral judgement on the act will encompass the intention and execution of the act in the situation.Part 1, Sections I-IV of this paper argue that organisations can be said to be quasi-persons, personal and moral. As artificial organisational quasi-persons, with a similar structure to natural persons, they can also have analogues of the moral features of natural persons’ moral acts: i)-vi): good goals, rightly disposed capacities and resources, ethical decision procedures, good acts or activities, with good outcomes for others, and respect for society’s norms represented in state law. An ethical acronym, GREAOS, capturing the six dominant features shared with natural persons, is suggested.In Part 2, an application of GREAOS is then made to assess a concrete organisational case, Mondragon Corporation, in order to show how if the analogy between persons and organisations is sound in principle, the acronym’s application can be made to ethically unpack a case. The acronym gives Mondragon Corporation at least a pass on ethics. Although a work in progress, its success in realising ideals of economic democracy can be an exemplar of stakeholder capitalism, an alternative to an unbridled shareholder capitalism, which has had its day. (shrink)

The paper completes a trilogy of papers, under the title: “A Quasi-Personal Alternative to Some Anglo-American Pluralist Models of Organisations: Towards an Analysis of Corporate Self-Governance for Virtuous Organisations”. The first two papers of the three are published in Philosophy of Management, Volumes 10,3 and 11,2. This last paper argues that three dominant Anglo-American organisational theories which see themselves as “business ethics-friendly,” are less so than they seem. It will be argued they present obstacles to collective corporate moral agency. They (...) are: 1) the dominant “soft pluralist” organisational theory of Bolman and Deal, published in 1984 and more recently expressed in Reframing Organisations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership, 5th edition, 2013, which is based on “reframing,” and which we will call reframing theory (RT); 2) the Business Ethics deployment of Stakeholder Management Theory (SMT) associated with R. Edward Freeman, and several colleagues, dominant in the same period (1984-); and 3) to a much lesser degree, an adapted version of SMT in the Integrated Social Contract Theory (ISCT) of Donaldson and Dunfee (Ties That Bind, Harvard Business School Press (1999)). This paper suggests a return, from RT, SMT, and ISCT, to an older “participative-structuralist” Neo-Aristotelian virtue-ethics based account, based on an analogy between “natural” persons, and organisations as “artificial” persons, with natural persons seen as “flat” architectonically related sets of capacity in complementary relation, and organisations as even flatter architectonic hierarchies of groups of incumbents in roles. This quasi-personal model preserves the possibility of corporate moral agency and some hierarchical and lateral order between leadership groups and other functional roles in the ethical governance of the whole corporation, as a collective moral agent. The quasi-person model would make possible assigning degrees of responsibility and a more coherent interface of Ethics, Organisational Ethics, and Management Theory; the reconfiguring of the place of business in society; an alternate ethico-political basis for Corporate Social Responsibility; and a rethinking of the design of the business corporate form, within the practice and institutions of business, but embedded in a state as representing the community. (shrink)