•  16
    Re-bunking corporate agency
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    My aim in this article is to rescue the holist position on corporate agency (CA) from indignities heaped upon it by friends and enemies alike. Two general criticisms strike at the core of the position: the charge of ‘material failures’ (that the corporate agent lacks a proper material presence) and the charge of illusion (that the intentionality of the corporate agent consists in the intentionality of the members). Both attack the holist position on metaphysical grounds, logically prior to any c…Read more
  •  2
    The peculiar unity of corporate agents
    In Kendy Hess, Violetta Igneski & Tracy Lynn Isaacs (eds.), Collectivity: Ontology, Ethics, and Social Justice, Rowman & Littlefield International. 2018.
  • Introduction
    In Kendy Hess, Violetta Igneski & Tracy Lynn Isaacs (eds.), Collectivity: Ontology, Ethics, and Social Justice, Rowman & Littlefield International. 2018.
  •  8
    A House upon the Sand
    Philotheos 10 205-215. 2010.
  •  63
    Does the Machine Need a Ghost? Corporate Agents as Nonconscious Kantian Moral Agents
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 4 (1): 67-86. 2018.
    Does Kantian moral agency require phenomenal consciousness? More to the point, can firms be Kantian moral agents—bound by Kantian obligations—in the absence of consciousness? After sketching the mechanics of my account of corporate agents, I consider three increasingly demanding accounts of Kantian moral agency, concluding that corporate agents can meet each successively higher threshold. They can act on universalizable principles and treat humanity as an end in itself; give such principlesto th…Read more
  •  56
  •  16
    Collectivity: Ontology, Ethics, and Social Justice (edited book)
    with Violetta Igneski and Tracy Lynn Isaacs
    Rowman & Littlefield International. 2018.
    This volume explores new and urgent applications of collective action theory, such as global poverty, the race and class politics of urban geography, and culpable conduct in organizational criminal law. It draws attention to new questions about the status of corporate agents and new approaches to collective obligation and responsibility.
  •  70
    Review of Colleen Murphy, A Moral Theory of Political Reconciliation (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2011 (4). 2011.
    In a world rife with civic failure, we've seen an increasing interest in the question of how to restore civic communities after they have failed. Much of that answer must come from the social sciences, of course, but philosophy has an important contribution to make: it can provide a normative theory of political community, one that outlines the characteristics of a good political community. Without such a theory, we have no basis for the claim that reconciliation is desirable in the first place …Read more
  •  39
  •  36
    Shifting the Burden
    Ethics, Policy and Environment 14 (2). 2011.
    Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 14, Issue 2, Page 159-162, June 2011
  •  1065
    Corporate Crocodile Tears? On the Reactive Attitudes of Corporate Agents
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 94 (2). 2017.
    Recently, a number of people have argued that certain entities embodied by groups of agents themselves qualify as agents, with their own beliefs, desires, and intentions; even, some claim, as moral agents. However, others have independently argued that fully-fledged moral agency involves a capacity for reactive attitudes such as guilt and indignation, and these capacities might seem beyond the ken of “collective” or “ corporate ” agents. Individuals embodying such agents can of course be ashamed…Read more
  •  105
    The Modern Corporation as Moral Agent
    Southwest Philosophy Review 26 (1): 61-69. 2010.
  •  131
    I aim to disentangle two very important debates: one about whether corporations can be moral agents (and thus have moral obligations), one about whether corporations are persons (and thus entitled to certain rights and protections). Critics often conflate these two debates, arguing that moral agency entails personhood and then treating that entailment as a kind of reductio for claims of corporate moral agency. My primary purpose is to rebut the claim of entailment, demonstrating that even the hi…Read more
  •  190
    The free will of corporations
    Philosophical Studies 168 (1): 241-260. 2014.
    Moderate holists like French, Copp :369–388, 2007), Hess, Isaacs and List and Pettit argue that certain collectives qualify as moral agents in their own right, often pointing to the corporation as an example of a collective likely to qualify. A common objection is that corporations cannot qualify as moral agents because they lack free will. The concern is that corporations are effectively puppets, dancing on strings controlled by external forces. The article begins by briefly presenting a novel …Read more