The Moral Role Of Corporations

The Moral Role Of Corporations

Introduction

A plethora of questions come to mind when thinking of the moral corporation. How did the economic crisis unfurl? The ethical community predates consumerism so how has consumerism managed to supersede business practitioners' morals? What are the means to eliminate systematic lapses in ethical judgment? Such questions are valid and necessary for a much needed debate on morality in organizations. (Griffith 2000)

A corporation cannot act without some particular person acting on its behalf. That does not exclude it from being a moral person: there is a large range of things that the insane, the comatose, or babes in arms cannot do without some other person acting on their behalf, and people in those classes retain rights. It does, on the other hand, limit the sorts of actions that are open to corporations.  Corporations clearly have interests: it is those interests that the representatives who act for the corporation are supposed to serve. Since corporations have interests and can act, even if they act only through representatives, it at least looks as though they could be prudent or imprudent(French 2009). Prudence is a virtue, so this might provide a move to a wider moral personality than seems to have been allowed for corporations so far. It is not only the buying of bolts that corporations can do only through representatives or the activities of particular people. Decisions, too, must be made by particular people (or groups of people voting according to certain rules) if the corporation is to make any decisions at all, so what is considered in making those decisions will be considered by particular people and not by the corporation in some other form. There is, then, an important sense in which the corporation, as such, cannot think for itself; it can think only through the people who act for it. Hence, a corporation, as such, cannot give proper (or improper) consideration to its own interests. If the representatives of the corporation put the corporation's interests first, that might be selfless devotion rather than prudence on their part(Ford 2006); if they do it because that will further their own personal interests in the long run, then that might be prudence on their part but is not prudence on the part of the corporation. 12 This is a long way short of anything that would allow us to attribute the virtue of prudence to the corporation: the corporation, unlike its representatives, does not care about its interests, and possession of a virtue is a matter of what one cares about. Prudence is a matter of having a proper concern for one's interests; it requires a concern, though a proper concern that puts one's interests in the context of many other things and gives them only their proper importance, Corporations, as such, and as distinct from the people who act for them, have no feelings of that sort. Virtues generally are a matter of caring about certain sorts of things, 13 so there is a general problem about whether a corporation can have any virtues (or any vices) if they cannot really care about things. There might be no problem about whether corporations can behave justly or unjustly, but there is a real problem about whether they can possess the virtue of justice(Ewin ...