Kendy Hess

Firms—business enterprises in all their various forms—occupy an increasingly contested position in contemporary society. Some argue that their proper role is strictly limited to the impersonal provision of goods and services. Others argue that their wealth, power, and position require much more from them vis-à-vis their communities, the environment, and, most relevantly here, their employees. Very little of the debate over the proper behavior of firms has drawn on the collective action literature despite the fact that firms exist and function exclusively as the result of collective action. In this paper, as elsewhere, I show that attending to the collective nature of the firm can help us resolve some of the debated issues.I begin (Sect. 1) by presenting a holist, structuralist account of corporate agents: highly structured collectives that qualify as moral agents in their own right. Almost any functional firm with multiple employees will qualify as a corporate agent and thus, I have argued elsewhere, will be bound by traditional moral obligations. Unlike other accounts, this particular account emphasizes the social aspects of corporate agents and thus of firms. Looking at firms through this lens highlights their nature as communities of people joined together for the purpose of improving their own lives. In short, this account shows that firms are a lot like the Aristotelian polis.In Sect. 2, I draw on Aristotle and recent work in political science to fill a gap in the literature by offering a novel account of a “political community.” In Sect. 3, I show that collectives that qualify as corporate agents will generally qualify as political communities as well. In Sect. 4, I argue that political communities should be governed in accordance with political theory rather than moral theory, i.e., that the governing bodies should draw on normative standards from political theories (liberalism, libertarianism, etc.) rather than from individualistic moral theories (Kantian ethics, virtue ethics, etc.). Section 5 briefly explores the implications for firm governance, most of which are sharply at odds with contemporary practice, but I close with a warning for those who assume that the political nature of the firm wins them a liberal, democratic workplace.

What do firms owe to those around them in terms of consideration, restraint, and active support? This question—which I’ll call the question of “firm responsibility”—first rose to prominence in the modern context in the 1950s. While questions about what one entity owes to others and how it may impose on them are essentially questions about moral responsibility, the debate about firm responsibility has been conducted almost exclusively in terms of social responsibility until quite recently. I argue below that we need a different approach. The paradigm of corporate social responsibility is failing, if it has not already failed, and scholars and practitioners alike should shift to the paradigm of corporate moral responsibility. I begin with a brief discussion of paradigms and how they function in the social sciences, especially regarding the social institutions of government and business (Sect. “Paradigms”). With that established, I outline the paradigm of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and argue that it is failing (Sect. “Corporate Social Responsibility”), then present the paradigm of corporate moral responsibility (CMR) and note the ways in which it compares favorably (Sect. “Corporate Moral Responsibility”). Briefly, CMR is a more coherent and ultimately more familiar paradigm, far better developed with stronger justifications and clearer options for analogous development. Beyond these benefits, I argue in (Sect. “Corporate Political Responsibility”) that the paradigm of CSR both encourages and obscures the intrusion of private firms into arenas traditionally reserved to governmental authority—a move to what would be better described as corporate political responsibility (CPR, sometimes called political CSR). It is highly controversial to allow such an intrusion, much less to claim that it is obligatory, but our reliance on the paradigm of CSR makes it hard to even realize that it is happening, much less to articulate and discuss the concern. In contrast, adopting the paradigm of CMR brings the long-standing distinction between moral and political theory into play. Doing so highlights the radical nature of this intrusion and gives us the language we need to describe it, debate it, and manage it if we choose to pursue it. Further, properly distinguishing between CMR and CPR reveals the possibility of an under-explored field that lies between the two (for both human and corporate moral agents)—what I have here called communal responsibility, for lack of a better term. I conclude by acknowledging the clear parallels between the claims I have developed here and Friedman’s claims in his (in)famous article.

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 claims of agency; if these charges cannot be answered then much of the CA literature collapses.The article begins by outlining the criticisms and a holist account of corporate agents that incorporates and transcends earlier offerings on corporate agency from French, List and Pettit, and others. It then addresses the charge of material failures, demonstrating that the holist corporate agent is a material entity (nothing ‘ghostly,’) and arguing that neither its scattered nature nor its dependency on voluntary participation undermines that status. It closes by addressing the charge of illusion, demonstrating that the common charge of double-counting member intentionality is false. Both charges arise from the same misreading of the holist position, which ignores the metaphysics of the corporate agent.

The various "collective" literatures have generally focused on collectives that are unified and directed by "shared intentions" – mental or intentional states that are (1) possessed by each member of a collective, in some sense, and (2) immediately relevant to the formation and behavior of the collective. Three people moving a couch are unified by the shared intention to move the couch because each has an intention to move the couch and to do so with the other members. There are a number of different ways to theorize these shared intentions, and I am not trying to choose among them. Instead, I would like to recognize them as a group and contrast them with theories of a very different kind of collective: the large, highly organized collectives increasingly identified as "corporate agents.” The literature has often failed to recognize the very different kind of unity that binds the members of a corporate agent, and the failure to recognize this difference has led to unnecessary confusion and implausible claims. I begin by describing this "peculiar unity" in some detail, then turn to the question of whether this unity is sufficiently robust to underwrite claims of material existence. In the absence of consensus on the requirements for material existence, I test my account against popular proposals from Baker (2000) and van Inwagen (1995). I conclude in each case that the corporate agent qualifies as a material object in its own right, and suggest that these successes suggest that it would qualify on other accounts not addressed here.

In this article I explore the question of whether the "socially constituted individual" of communitarian, feminist, and conservative theory is an apt candidate for moral obligation. The ethics of Karl Marx provide a wonderful opportunity to explore just this question. According to Kain's recent interpretation, Marx began and ended his ethical career as a humanist, but the early Marx built his ethical theory around a more-or-less Aristotelian conception of human nature while the later Marx tried to build a similar theory around a conception in which "social relations" had replaced the Aristotelian essence. I conclude that his later efforts to construct a morality for the socially constituted individual failed, and for reasons that have significant implications for modem efforts to do the same.

Does Kantian moral agency require phenomenal consciousness? More to the point, can firms (and other highly organized collectives) 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 (1) act on universalizable principles and treat humanity as an end in itself; (2) give such principlesto themselves,treattheir own‘humanity’ as an end itself, and act out of respect for the law; and (3) to the extent necessary, draw on empathically generated information and insights to inflect their performance, all in the absence of phenomenal consciousness. I close by rejecting two further arguments that phenomenal consciousness is nonetheless conceptually or practically necessary for Kantian moral agency.

"Who's responsible?" has become a pressing question in the wake of the financial crisis. While the answer will obviously be very complicated, the question itself seems relatively simple. But each of the two words comprising the question is importantly ambiguous, and the way we interpret them will have significant implications for the answers we come up with. Here I focus on the complexities of the “who”: does it include collective agents, like firms? If we hold the collective agents responsible, do we thereby hold their members responsible for too much, or too little? How are they responsible at all? There are individualist, collectivist, and holist answers to those questions. The first two approaches refuse to recognize the firms and rely on a distributive approach to moral responsibility that yields implausible results. The holist approach recognizes the firms themselves as potentially responsible, but critics object that this forces us to either blame their members for things they haven’t done or excuse them entirely. I reply that using a suitably robust account of corporate agents and a non-distributive paradigm of moral responsibility (“collateral responsibility”) avoids both outcomes. I close by considering the implications for Countrywide and its members.

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 and no way to evaluate whether proposed efforts toward political reconciliation are moving things in the right direction. Colleen Murphy's A Moral Theory of Political Reconciliation provides exactly such a theory.

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, proud, or indignant about what the agent has done. But just as an entity needs to have its own beliefs, desires, and intentions to qualify as a bona fide agent, the required capacity for reactive attitudes is a capacity to have one’s own reactive attitudes. If fully-fledged moral agency requires reactive attitudes, the corporate agent must itself be capable of guilt and indignation. In this paper, we argue that at least certain corporate agents are. Or, more precisely, we argue that if there are bona fide corporate agents, these agents can have the capacities that are both associated with guilt and indignation and plausibly required for moral agency; in particular certain epistemic and motivational capacities.

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 highly sophisticated moral agency of corporations does not entail the kind of personhood at issue here: to be a person requires a kind of vulnerability that corporations do not have. Additionally, exploring how this is the case reveals a flaw in the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Citizens United.

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 account of corporate moral agency and then demonstrates that, on this account, qualifying corporations do possess free will. Such entities possess and act from their own “actional springs”, in Haji’s :292–308, 2006) phrase, and from their own reasons-responsive mechanisms. When they do so, they act freely and are morally responsible for what they do