The debate over corporate moral responsibility has become a fixture in business ethics research and teaching. Only rarely, however, does the sizable literature on that question consider whether the debate has important practical implications. This article examines that question from a corporate control perspective. After assuming corporate moral responsibility’s existence for purposes of argument, the article concludes that such responsibility makes a difference in cases where it is present but personal responsibility is absent. Then the article tries to identify the (...) forces that diminish personal responsibility when corporate responsibility exists. The most important such forces, it concludes, spring from the socialization processes people undergo when they enter groups. One example is the well-known phenomenon of groupthink, which can exculpate individuals by rendering them justifiably ignorant of foreseeable risks of harm. (shrink)

I address three topics. First, I argue that the issue of corporate moral responsibility is an important one for business ethics.Second, I examine a core argument for the claim that the corporate organization is a separate moral agent and show it is based on anunnoticed but elementary mistake deriving from the fallacy of division. Third, I examine the assumptions collectivists make about whatit means to say that organizations act and that they act intentionally and show that these assumptions are mistaken (...) in their failure to understand the nature of intentional causality and of “as-if” intentionality. In exposing these mistakes I set out my own view in the form oftwo theses, the first of which states that individual members of an organization are always causally responsible for any corporate act,and the second of which states that attributions of intentions to corporations are always either descriptive or prescriptive attributionsof “as if” intentionality. (shrink)

We shall formulate an analysis of the ordinary notion of intentional action that clarifies a commonsense distinction between intentional and nonintentional action. Our analysis will build on some typically neglected considerations about relations between lucky action and intentional action. It will highlight the often- overlooked role of evidential considerations in intentional action, thus identifying the key role of certain epistemological considerations in action theory. We shall also explain why some vagueness is indispensable in a characterization of intentional action as ordinarily (...) understood. (shrink)

For more than two decades, Peter French has been arguing in books, articles and symposia that corporations are genuine actors in the moral universe. Like adult human beings, they can and should take moral responsibility for their actions and be held accountable by the other actors in this universe. I have always argued with my students that the position is both metaphysically incorrect and practically harmful. Now (1995) French has redeveloped his position through 380 pages in Corporate Ethics, probably the (...) most challenging and original Business Ethics textbook yet to appear. It is a work of intellectual sophistication with real world applications. Using the metaphor invaders throughout the book, French argues not only that corporations are moral agents, but also that their moral agency has made the business world of the late twentieth century and of the coming century different from anything of preceding epochs. It is, in his argument, an agency of great potential danger and of great potential benefit, one in terms of which we can address every ethical problem of business. In the essay, I explore Corporate Ethics both on the metaphysical and the practical level. (shrink)