Should corporations have "moral responsibility"?

Encyclopedia of Opinion

Question: Should corporations have "moral responsibility"?
Position1 of 2›: No, corporations shouldn't have moral responsibility
Argument‹4 of 6›: Corporations can’t be punished

If a corporation cannot be punished, then it doesn't make sense for it to define its morally acceptable and unacceptable behaviours.

The argument

The entire debate over whether corporations should have morals exists in order to settle a prior question: who should be held responsible when a corporation behaves in an ethically wrong manner. Read that way, the case for corporate moral responsibility collapses. The argument runs as a chain, and each link is required by the one before it. If we accept that corporations should have morals, then corporations can be blamed for corporate malpractice. If they can be blamed, then they must be punishable, since blame without the possibility of sanction is an expression of disapproval rather than an assignment of responsibility. But corporations cannot be punished — and that is where the chain breaks. The obstacle is not a gap in the law but the nature of the entity. Individuals can be fined or put in prison; a corporation cannot be imprisoned, because there is nothing to imprison. What remains is the fine, and a fine does not stay where it is aimed. The money comes from shareholders and customers, and any punishment imposed on a corporation is in practice passed on to consumers, employees and shareholders — people who did not make the decision being sanctioned and often had no way of knowing about it. A punishment that lands entirely on parties other than the wrongdoer is not a punishment in the sense the moral argument needs. It redistributes a cost rather than holding anyone to account, which means the responsibility the doctrine sets out to assign never actually attaches to anything. Therefore it makes no sense to have corporations adopt morals, because corporations cannot be punished for behaving in ways that contradict them — and a moral responsibility that cannot be enforced against its holder does no work.

Context

The only reason we would want to have corporations adopt morals is to punish an organisation when it fails to live up to its moral responsibility. But corporations cannot be punished. Therefore, forcing them to adopt and implement moral standards is pointless.

Premises

[P1]Assigning morals to corporations is meant to establish who is punished when a corporation acts wrongly. [P2] But a corporation cannot itself be punished — it cannot be imprisoned, and any fine simply passes to its consumers, employees, and shareholders. [P3] Holding a corporation morally responsible is pointless if it can never bear the punishment for breaching that responsibility. [C] Therefore, because corporations can't be punished, corporations shouldn't have moral responsibility.

Counter-arguments

Corporations can be punished. They can have licenses to operate revoked. They can be forced to pay compensation to victims. They can also suffer reputational damage which, while not a formal method of punishment, can be more dangerous for a company than any legal punishment.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] Corporations can be both held to account and punished.

Framing

If corporations had morals, they would have to be punished for behaving in a way that contradicts their moral standards. But corporations cannot be punished. Therefore, it is pointless for corporations to have morals.