Responsibility, Accountability and Corporate Activity

Philosophers who model corporate responsibility on individual responsibility appeal to conceptions of action and intention. Corporate acts and intentions embody the acts and intentions of members of the corporation. The main problem facing this account of corporate moral responsibility lies in the dependence of corporate moral identity on individual agency. Even if corporations embody the intentions of their members it does not necessarily follow that corporations rather than their members are morally responsible.  It begs the question whether corporations perform acts, or only their members do, and leaves us with difficulties in ascribing moral responsibility.

Accountability and corporate activity

Whether we are concerned with individual or collective members of corporations acting in their corporate roles, or with corporations understood as distinct entities, the idea that corporate activity generates moral responsibilities makes sense. Given that corporations have moral responsibilities, they are proper subjects for praise and blame. So, corporate activity satisfies the grounds of accountability. Corporations can be held to account. They should meet demands that they justify their actions in terms of responsibilities, and be willing to acknowledge failure to fulfil their responsibilities.

Once we accept this, the demand for an account of corporate moral agency becomes less pressing. Considering that corporate roles and acts are in general not reducible to ones occupied and performed by individuals, and that corporations can be held to account, we can accept that corporate activities are morally assessable without being committed to corporations somehow having intentions or other mental states.

I argued earlier that accountability presupposes the capacity to recognise and to respond to moral reasons. Individuals who lack a capacity for rational decision-making cannot be held morally responsible for their actions. Supporters of the view that the idea of corporate responsibility has to derive from analysis of agency might want to challenge the approach I advocate. How can I argue that corporations are accountable without saying how corporations can make rational decisions?

First, and perhaps a little facetiously, I recommend you look at some corporate mission statements. They invariably mention the corporation’s aims, commitments, and activities. They talk as if the corporation has the properties required for rational decision-making. Second, we describe systems and processes as rational in cases where no individual or collective could have produced the outcome. Third, allowing that only the members of corporations have the required capacity, corporate accountability might emerge from individual capacity, without being reducible to it. The idea that corporations are accountable doesn’t require a theory of corporate agency, but rather a causal history. Fourth, corporations satisfy whatever is required to meet the demands of legal accountability, so we already have a sense of corporate accountability.

Fifth, and finally, a corporation can be morally accountable for some state of affairs without having the capacity for rational-decision making, as long as people who possess that capacity can meet the demands of accountability on behalf of the corporation. Those people may themselves not be morally responsible for the relevant state of affairs. Because accountability is detachable from responsibility, a corporation can fulfil its accountability duties without complex philosophical issues about responsibility being resolved, or even establishing just which of its members did what.