The question of corporate moral responsibility – of whether it makes sense to hold an organisation corporately morally responsible for its actions,rather than holding responsible the individuals who contributed to that action – has been debated over a number of years in the business ethics literature. However, it has had little attention in the world of health care ethics. Health care in the United Kingdom(UK) is becoming an increasingly corporate responsibility, so the issue is increasingly relevant in the health care (...) context, and it is worth considering whether the specific nature of health care raises special questions around corporate moral responsibility. For instance, corporate responsibility has usually been considered in the context of private corporations, and the organisations of health care in the UK are mainly state bodies. However, there is enough similarity in relevant respects between state organisations and private corporations, for the question of corporate responsibility to be equally applicable. Also, health care is characterised by professions with their own systems of ethical regulation. However, this feature does not seriously diminish the importance of the corporate responsibility issue, and the importance of the latter is enhanced by recent developments. But there is one major area of difference. Health care, as an activity with an intrinsically moral goal, differs importantly from commercial activities that are essentially a moral, in that it narrows the range of opportunities for corporate wrongdoing, and also makes such organisations more difficult to punish. (shrink)

The question of corporate moral responsibility – whether corporate bodies can be held morally responsible for their actions – has been debated by a number of writers since the 1970s. This discussion is intended to add to that debate, and focuses for that purpose on our understanding of the organisation. Though the integrity of the organisation has been called into question by the postmodern view of organisations, that view does not necessarily rule out the attribution of corporate agency, any more (...) than the postmodern view of the person rules out the attribution of individual agency. The postmodern view is opposed to a reifying, metaphysical view of corporate agency, but a semantic view of corporate agency would seem to sit more comfortably with it. A bigger problem for the idea of corporate moral responsibility arises from the fact that in Kantian terms organisations are not ends in themselves. In that sense they are not like persons, and this must limit their autonomy, and their responsibility. This aspect of organisations also limits their punishability. For these reasons corporate moral responsibility must be seen as more limited than the responsibility of persons. (shrink)

In Australia as is the case elsewhere, ethics is a developing aspect of business behaviour. Many educational institutions and business enterprises have a strong interest in the subject, particularly from the practical viewpoint of creating an ethical culture in business that has substantial practical effects. In this paper, the codes of ethics of five large enterprises are examined. They were selected as being typical of a collection of corporate codes used in Australia held by the Ethics Research Group at the (...) University of Technology, Sydney. Two codes were from international companies: a chemical manufacturing company and a health, beauty and medical manufacturer. The other codes were from an Australian bank, an Australian federal government business agency, and an Australian mining company.Corporate codes of ethics rarely contain operational definitions to direct their addressees on situations of moral hazard and the required response, to achieve a particular desired ethical corporate culture. Consequently, addressees constitute the locus of ethical decision making in enterprises. By contrast, the language used in the corporate codes examined construct an authoritarian position in the writer/reader relationship from the overuse of grammatical structures such as relational clauses, the passive, nominalisation, grammatical metaphor and modality. Collectively, these structures communicate a strong sense of obligation and even powerlessness since a strong authoritarian tone is established which does not give the addressees the possibility of discretionary decision making. (shrink)

This essay provides a critical overview of the debate about corporate moral responsibility. Parties to the debate address whether corporations are the kinds of entities that can be blamed when they cause unjustified harm. Proponents of CMR argue that corporations satisfy the conditions for moral agency and so they are fit for blame. Their opponents respond that corporations lack one or more of the capacities necessary for moral agency. I review the arguments on both sides and conclude ultimately that what (...) divides the two is not so much competing conceptions of the corporation as it is disagreement about what moral agency requires. Homing in on the real site of contention will, it is hoped, allow future participants in the debate to focus their efforts more productively. (shrink)