Assignment:
Are corporations moral agents?
Before digging into the stuff below, ask yourself this question: what is agency?
One of the principle concerns of ethics is assigning moral responsibility. If a particular action is immoral, who did it? Why did they do it? Are they responsible for what they did? As chapter 2 makes clear, this problem is exacerbated in business ethics because we are not necessarily dealing with individual agents, but corporate agents. So if a business does something wrong, who or what should be held responsible? An individual or individuals within the business? The business as a whole?
If we are going to allow that corporations have some form of corporate moral agency, this suggests corporations are able to make decisions and have intentions. What are some arguments in favor of or against this idea of corporate moral agency or of corporate agency more generally? How could a corporation as a whole be said to make a decision or have an intention?
Where, on conventional accounts of corporate agency, does agency reside or tend to cluster within a corporation? What kinds of intentions does a corporation tend to have? Do the forms that corporations take, and the interests and intentions that they express, take a single form or is corporate agency more contingent? What is the nature of this contingency?
Do you think that corporations are agents?