The Fallacy of Corporate Moral Agency

ISBN-13: 9789402401462 / Angielski / Miękka / 2016 / 218 str.

David Ronnegard

Opis

It is uncontroversial that corporations are legal agents that can be held legally responsible, but can corporations also be moral agents that are morally responsible? Part one of this book explicates the most prominent theories of corporate moral agency and provides a detailed debunking of why corporate moral agency is a fallacy. This implies that talk of corporate moral responsibilities, beyond the mere metaphorical, is essentially meaningless. Part two takes the fallacy of corporate moral agency as its premise and spells out its implications. It shows how prominent normative theories within Corporate Social Responsibility, such as Stakeholder Theory and Social Contract Theory, rest on an implicit assumption of corporate moral agency. In this metaphysical respect such theories are untenable. In order to provide a more robust metaphysical foundation for corporations the book explicates the developmentof the corporate legal form in the US and UK, which displays how the corporation has come to have its current legal attributes. This historical evolutionshows that the corporation is a legal fiction created by the state in order to serve both public and private goals. The normative implication for corporate accountability is that citizens of democratic states ought to primarily make calls for legal enactments in order to hold the corporate legal instruments accountable to their preferences.

Recenzje

"Anyone interested in the questions of corporate moral and social obligations will find a great deal of value in Fallacy. Among other things, it provides an excellent survey of the many theories of corporate moral agency ... . Fallacy is an interesting, useful addition to both the corporate moral responsibility and the corporate social responsibility literatures, and raises a number of issues that will need to be addressed as those literatures continue to develop." (Kendy M. Hess, Business Ethics Quarterly, Vol. 26 (4), October, 2016)

Spis treści

Introduction.- Part One: The Fallacy of Corporate Moral Agency.- 1.1 The Importance of Corporate Moral Agency.-1.2 Necessary Conditions for Moral Agency.- 1.3 Corporate Intentions.- 1.3.1 Explication of Peter French’s Conception of Corporate Moral Agency.- 1.3.2 The Metaphysics of Intentions and its Moral Relevance.- 1.4 Corporate Actions.- 1.4.1 Are Corporate Agents Autonomous?.- 1.4.2 Free vs. Non-free Agents.- 1.4.3 Emergent Corporate Moral Agency?.- 1.5 Corporate Autonomy.- 1.6 Summary of why Corporate Moral Agency is a Fallacy.- 1.6.1 Autonomy.- 1.6.2 Intention.- 1.6.3 Action.- 1.7 The Reference of Corporate Proper Names and Responsibility Attributions.- 1.8 Corporate Collective Moral Agency.- 1.8.1 Joint/Shared Intentions.- 1.8.2 Group/Corporate Intentions.- 1.8.3 Corporate Collective Intentions.- 1.9 Conclusion: Legitimate and Illegitimate Corporate Moral Responsibility Attributions.- 1.9.1 Moral Responsibility Attribution to a Collective Whole.- 1.9.2 Moral Responsibility Attribution to a Corporate Structure.- 1.9.3 Moral Responsibility Attribution to a Unanimously Intending Collective.- 1.9.4 Elliptical Moral Responsibility Attribution to a Collective Whole.- Part Two: The Role of the Corporation in Society.- 2.1 The Role of the Corporation in Society: The Descriptive View.- 2.1.1 The First Corporations.- 2.1.2 The Legal Debate about the Nature of the Corporation.- 2.1.3 The Shareholder Primacy Norm.- 2.1.4 The Separation of the Corporation from the Shareholders and the Emergence of the Corporate Share as an Autonomous form of Property.- 2.1.5 The Limited Liability of Shareholders.- 2.1.6 The Reification of the Corporation (and the Legal Influence of the Theories about the Nature of the Corporation).- 2.1.7 The Corporation as Socio-economic Instrument.- 2.2 The Role of the Corporation in Society: The Prescriptive View.- 2.2.1 Ought the Corporate Legal Form to be used as an Instrument of the State?.- 2.2.2 The Wrong with the Corporate Social Responsibility Movement.- 2.2.3 The Division between Public and Private Corporate Responsibilities.- 2.2.4 Summary: The Role the Corporation Ought to Play in Society.- Conclusion.- Bibliography.