Are public officials morally justified in threatening violence, engaging in deception, or forcing citizens to act for their own good? Can individual officials be held morally accountable for the wrongs that governments commit? Dennis Thompson addresses these questions by developing a conception of political ethics that respects the demands of both morality and politics. He criticizes conventional conceptions for failing to appreciate the difference democracy makes, and for ascribing responsibility only to isolated leaders or to impersonal organizations. His book seeks (...) to recapture the sense that men and women, acting for us and together with us in a democratic process, make the moral choices that govern our public life. Thompson surveys ethical conflicts of public officials over a range of political issues, including nuclear deterrence, foreign intervention, undercover investigation, bureaucratic negligence, campaign finance, the privacy of officials, health care, welfare paternalism, drug and safety regulation, and social experimentation. He views these conflicts from the perspectives of many different kinds of public officials - elected and appointed executives at several levels of government, administrators, judges, legislators, governmental advisers, and even doctors, lawyers, social workers, and journalists whose professional roles often thrust them into public life. In clarifying the ethical problems faced by officials, Thompson combines theoretical analysis with practical prescription, and begins to define a field of inquiry for which many have said there is a need but to which few have yet contributed. Philosophers, political scientists, policy analysts, sociologists, lawyers, and other professionals interested in ethics in government will gain insight from this book. (shrink)

Properly speaking, the corporation, considered as an entity distinct from its members, cannot be morally responsible for wrongful corporate acts. Setting aside (in this abstract) acts brought about through negligence or omissions, we may say that moral responsibility for an act attaches to that agent (or agents) in whom the act "originates" in this sense: (1) the agent formed the (mental) intention or plan to bring about that act (possibly with the help of others) and (2) the act was intentionally (...) brought about through bodily movements over which that agent had direct control (i.e. the kind of direct mental control that I have over the body I refer to as "my" body) and through which the agent carried out his (mental) intention or plan. Corporate acts do not thus originate in some corporate entity distinct from its members because the corporation has neither a mind to form intentions nor a body it directly controls: it lacks the proper mind/body unity. Instead, corporate acts originate in individual autonomous human beings who make up the corporation and who intentionally bring about corporate acts through their own bodily movements. Such human individuals, and not "the corporation," are morally responsible for corporate acts. Moreover, to say that an entity is "morally responsible" for a wrongful act is to say that the entity is liable to blame and punishment. But it is not possible to impose blame and punishment on a corporation without inflicting it on corporate members. Thus, to say that a corporation (as an entity distinct from its members) is "morally responsible" for a wrongful corporate act is to imply that a (possibly innocent) corporate member legitimately may be punished for something for which another entity was morally responsible. This violates the moral principles that underlie blame and punishment. To hold that the corporation can be morally responsible for its acts is to adopt a dangerous organicism. (shrink)