Blame, Emotion, and the Corporation

Moral Agency in Charities and Business Corporations: Exploring the Constraints of Law and Regulation

“…They conclude that it cannot, because 'there is no sense in which a procedure is aware of its choice' (ibid.). Furthermore, Sepinwall (2017) explores the place of emotion in holding an agent to be an appropriate target for blame. The conclusion is again that organisations are deficient in this respect: 'it makes sense to blame only those who can experience guilt, affect is required to experience guilt, corporations have no capacity for affect, and so it makes no sense to blame corporations' (p. 144).…”

Corporate Moral Responsibility

“…Here too, however, we encounter difficulties in interpreting the target of our reactions (Sepinwall, ‘Guilty by Proxy’). It may be that sometimes we exhaust our emotional responses to a corporation's wrongdoing by aiming these responses only at the corporation.…”

“…The feeling one feels when motivated isn't a mere appendage to motivation, an experience that just happens to go along with being motivated. Instead, it is constitutive of motivation – feeling that feeling is part and parcel of what it is to be motivated (Sepinwall, ‘Corporate Piety’). More generally, and as Roger Scruton contends, ‘A corporation cannot possess mental states which must be “felt” or “experienced” if they are to be possessed at all’ (253).…”

“…If the functionalist account of moral agency is compelling, then the corporation should count as a moral agent. But, if one cannot be morally responsible unless one can judge the moral nature of one's acts in the way that we do, and one feels responsible in the way that we do, then the corporation's moral agency should be deemed considerably diminished (Sepinwall, ‘Unemotional’).…”

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero, by Tyler Cowen. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2019. 272 pp.

“…According to him, there is a fundamental disconnect between how we affectively regard businesses and what they are. This follows a line of critical argument on the propriety of our blaming practices against affectless corporations that only recently appeared in our own field's debate around corporate moral agency (Sepinwall 2017). For Cowen, when we suffer at the hands of a corporation, "we feel a personalized emotional sting" instead of "pondering the larger benefits of the impersonal corporate order" (203).…”