Corporations are conversable agents

The argument

A corporation is not merely a legal container for the people who work inside it. It speaks. Through advertising, mission statements, annual reports and public positions, a company or brand controls the message it communicates to the public, and that message carries content: values it claims to hold, goals it says it pursues, commitments it invites the public to believe in. This capacity to enter public conversation as a single identifiable speaker is what makes a corporation what proponents of this position call a conversable agent. The significance of that description is that conversability is ordinarily the mark of a moral subject. We hold entities responsible when they can be addressed, asked to account for themselves, and expected to answer — when it makes sense to say to them "you said X, and you did Y". A corporation satisfies that test. It can be questioned about its conduct, it can reply, and its replies are attributable to the corporation itself rather than to whichever employee happened to draft them. The voice in which it answers is genuinely its own, distinct from the voices of its staff: employees come and go, disagree with one another, and hold private views that the corporate message does not reflect, yet the company's stated position persists across those changes of personnel. If the corporate voice is distinct and continuous in this way, then it cannot be reduced to the morality of individual managers or shareholders. Something must govern what that voice may and may not claim on the corporation's behalf. On this argument, the corporation should therefore hold a set of morals that reflects the voice it actually uses in public — and holding morals, being answerable for what one has said and done, is precisely what it means to bear moral responsibility.

Context

Corporations are able to effectively communicate their mission statement and values to the public. This means they are autonomous, conversable agents.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The implications of this is that no individual can be held responsible for ethically dubious behaviour. If the corporation has a message, and that message or voice is not having a positive social or environmental impact, because the corporation is a conversable agent with communicative autonomy, no individual can be held accountable within the corporation. This would make it impossible to punish any individual in a case of corporations breaking the law or committing morally wrong acts

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] If you separate the corporation's voice from that of the individual, you cannot punish individual wrongdoers.

Framing

Entities with their own voice or message autonomy should have morals. Corporations have a voice that is distinct from that of their employees. Therefore, they should have morals.