Other collectives don’t have morals

The argument

The argument proceeds by analogy, and asks what is supposed to make corporations different. A corporation is essentially a collection of individuals, a grouping of people that work together towards a shared goal. That description fits a great many things, and the method here is to test the demand for corporate moral responsibility by applying it to the other cases it would have to cover. The first test case is a crowd. It would be absurd to suggest that a crowd, for example, should have collective morals: nobody asks a crowd to adopt a position, to deliberate about what it owes to others, or to answer as a body for what it does. If a corporation is merely a collection of individuals, in much the same way as a crowd, then the same conclusion should follow for it. The point then generalises across the other groupings people belong to. Any other collection of individuals, be they collected by race, blood (family), or social groups, does not need to adopt and implement their own morals. A family, like a corporation, is a set of people working together towards shared ends over a long period, and no one expects it to declare a moral code or to bear moral responsibility distinct from that of its members. The challenge is then put as a question: if these other collectives don't need shared, publicly-declared morals, why does a corporation? The burden is placed on the other side to name a relevant difference. Without one, treating the corporation as a moral agent means singling out a single kind of group for a demand made of no comparable group, and the responsibility belongs where it does in all the other cases, with the individuals who make up the collection.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Corporations are not like any other grouping of individuals. They differ because of their shared access to information and the level of control they have over their employees. For example, consider a crowd. A crowd does not need morals because it lacks control over the individuals within the collective, and it lacks access to information. If someone gets trampled to death in a crowd, the crowd could not be accused of collective responsibility because, in all likelihood, only those around the victim knew the incident was occurring, and they were almost certainly powerless to stop it. In a case of corporate immorality, like the Volkswagen emissions scandal, the company knew what was happening, and had the power to stop it. This means it meets different criteria and should have its own values.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] A corporation is more than a collection of individuals.

Framing

A corporation is nothing beyond a collective of individuals working towards a shared goal. Other collectives of individuals don’t require morals. If other similar entities don’t need publicly-declared morals, then corporations shouldn’t.