Corporations depend on individual decisions

The argument

The argument against corporate moral responsibility begins from how corporate decisions are actually made. A company does not deliberate; the people within it do. Every choice attributed to a corporation was arrived at by identifiable individuals exercising their own judgement, which means that what gets called the company's ethics is in fact the aggregate of the moral virtues and failings of those people. If that is so, proponents argue, then a separate layer of company morality is redundant. Where the conduct is good, it is good because the individuals making the decisions were conscientious; where it is bad, it is bad because they were not. The corporate ethics adds nothing to the explanation, because there is no residue left over once the individual decisions have been accounted for. Individual agency plays so prominent a role in corporate decision-making that the company's morals turn out to be wholly dependent on it, and a dependent thing is not an additional thing. The BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill is offered to show what this means in a concrete case. The moral obligation to prevent the spill did not rest with BP as an entity, on this account, because an entity cannot bear one. It rested with the individual managers who implemented the cost-cutting measures that compromised the safety of the pipeline, people who made particular decisions, at particular points, that they could have made differently. Addressing responsibility to the corporation obscures that, because it names something that made no choice while leaving unnamed the people who did. Ascribing moral responsibility to corporations is therefore not merely unnecessary but a distraction from where responsibility actually lies. Because corporations depend on individual decisions, corporations shouldn't have moral responsibility.

Context

The internal structure of companies means that many important decisions are based on individual agency.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The corporation and the individuals are not the same things. A corporation can adopt a strategy and make decisions against the wishes of senior management or majority shareholders. Therefore, the corporation has its own agency and has the responsibility to adopt its own morals. Corporate decision making is also a messy process. It is not always easy to point to one definitive person that made an ethically dubious decision. Often someone may have planted an idea, someone else signed off on it, someone else implemented it, but no single person can take responsibility for corporate action. In the absence of the individual decision-maker, the company must have its own morals to protect against unethical behaviour.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Companies don't always function through individual decision making.

Framing

Individuals have the moral responsibility to behave in a morally correct manner. This translates into their professional decision making on behalf of a company. If individuals are committed to behaving in a morally correct way, corporate morals become redundant.