Reference no: EM133171697

Businesses as Ethical Persons

• Peter French, a twentieth-century American philosopher, wants to hold businesses morally responsible for the things that they do.
• The business itself is responsible for wrongdoing: not just the people who work there.
• Businesses cannot have social (or moral) responsibilities: only people have moral responsibilities.
• According to the LA theory of corporate personhood, corporations are like umbrellas for biological persons, or human beings.
• The morally significant thing about a corporation is the people inside the corporation, not the corporation inside of which they are all working. If a group of thieves robs a bank while standing under an umbrella, the thieves-not the umbrella-are held morally responsible.
• French objects to this conception of corporate personhood. He claims that the LA model fails to distinguish between corporations and mobs.
• French feels that corporations and mobs have an important difference, which the LA theory fails to acknowledge. This difference is part of what makes corporations more orderly than mobs.
• That important difference is that corporations, but not mobs, are guided by a corporate internal decision-making structure (CID).
• The CID is first of all an employment hierarchy: it explains which supervisors make the decisions for which groups of employees.
• The CID explains how to resolve disputes among people at the same level of the employment hierarchy.
• French's view is called the fiction theory, in this sense, because it understands personhood as itself being fictional: whatever we decide it is.
• The kinds of personhood, French discusses are legal personhood, moral personhood, and metaphysical personhood.
• A moral person is a member of the moral community.
• Moral persons are defined, for French, as being accountable for their actions.
• They can be blamed for their bad actions and praised for their good actions.  

Businesses as Collective Persons

• Altman's criticisms of ethical theories that can evaluate only the actions of individual agents.
• Altman argues that corporations are not morally responsible from a Kantian perspective.
• He argues that Kant also struggles to attribute moral responsibility to the individual people who work in corporations.
• The diffusion of responsibility in corporations. The diffusion of responsibility in corporations means that responsibility is spread throughout the corporation in such a way that it is impossible to attach it to anyone in particular.
• Altman feels that ethical theories must be able to attribute collective responsibility if they are to be useful in business ethics
• Collective responsibility means that a group of people is responsible for a particular action-rather than individuals within that group.
• Moral theories can use collective responsibility to hold a group of people morally responsible for an action when it would have been impossible for any of them to have done that action on their own.

QUESTION:

1. How does French's view help to evaluate the case?
2. Do you agree with Altman that Kantian ethics cannot account for collective actions? Raise an objection to Altman's view and consider his response.