Corporate responsibility and corporate personhood

In his 2007 Ethics article, ''Responsibility Incorporated,'' Philip Pettit argued that corporations qualify as morally responsible agents because they possess autonomy, normative judgment, and the capacity for selfcontrol. Although there is ongoing debate over whether corporations have these capacities, both proponents and opponents of corporate moral agency appear to agree that Pettit correctly identified the requirements for moral agency. In this article, I do not take issue with either the claim that autonomy, normative judgment, and self-control are the requirements for moral agency or the claim that corporations possess them. I claim that if both of these claims are correct, then corporate moral agency entails that, in a liberal democracy, corporations should have the right to vote. I show that under the conception of democracy supported by most liberal political theorists, all parties subject to the law are entitled to the right to vote, and all parties that possess autonomy, normative judgment, and self-control are subject to the law. Therefore, if the proponents of corporate moral agency are correct, then corporations satisfy the requirements for the right to vote. I then consider potential objections to this argument. I show that the strongest objection to the corporate right to vote is undermined by Pettit's own argument for corporate autonomy. I then show that objections derived from other arguments for limiting the rights of corporations are equally unavailing. I conclude with some observations about the implications of my argument for the question of corporate speech rights.

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Should Corporations Have the Right to Vote? A Paradox in the Theory of Corporate Moral Agency

Hasnas

2016

“…As discussed later in this article, many corporate leaders have long sought for corporations the legal rights and legal status of a human. Corporate efforts to achieve legal personhood have been very successful but controversial, as empowering large, wealthy, longlived, artificial entities with the legal rights of humans has ethical implications (Iyer, 2006;Manning, 1984;Pfeiffer, 1990). In 2009, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor contributed to the corporation personhood controversy in arguments of a case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.…”

Section: S Douglas Beetsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Critical Events in the Ethics of U.S. Corporation History

Beets

2011

“…French modified his position in response to criticism from Manuel Velasquez (1983), Rita Manning (1984), and a series of exchanges with Larry May (e.g., 1983May (e.g., , 1987May (e.g., , 1992. In general, the criticism focused on whether corporations were sufficiently like persons to be moral.…”

Section: Traditional Approaches To Corporate Responsibilitymentioning

confidence: 98%

Toward an Intermediate Position on Corporate Moral Personhood

Gibson

2011

Models of moral responsibility rely on foundational views about moral agency. Many scholars believe that only humans can be moral agents, and therefore business needs to create models that foster greater receptivity to others through ethical dialog. This view leads to a difficulty if no specific person is the sole causal agent for an act, or if something comes about through aggregated action in a corporate setting. An alternate approach suggests that corporations are moral agents sufficiently like humans to be treated as persons, which leads to questions of intentionality and the organizational structure required to support the claim. In this article, I make an intermediate claim combining Goodpaster and Matthews' (60:132-141, 1982) view that a corporation may have a moral culture which affects subjective choices, with those of PainterMorland (17(3):515-534, 2007) who points out that we should move from a model that posits discrete persons acting on each other to one where morality comes about through shared experience between agents who participate in each other's lives. I argue that the discussion has been trapped in traditional dichotomies, and is better served by language that more accurately represents the dynamic interplay between organization and individual. I underwrite this claim by looking at recent changes in British and American legal approaches to corporate responsibility. These provide greater incentives for owners and business leaders to encourage employees to discuss the reflexive nature of legal and moral responsibility in business, facilitate workers to voice their moral concerns, and create structures and processes that allow those concerns to be heard.