Responsibility incorporated

Ethics

Volumn 117, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 171-201

  Pettit, Philip ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33947662939     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/510695     Document Type: Article

References (64)

1. Eric Colvin, "Corporate Personality and Criminal Liability," Criminal Law Forum 6 (1995): 17.
2. Ibid., 18.
3. The point of view that I defend is shared in broad outline, although not always on specific points, with a number of recent authors, in particular with Peter French. See Peter A. French, Collective and Corporate Responsibility (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984);
4. Peter A. French, Jeffrey Nesteruk, and David Risser, Corporations in the Moral Community (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992).
5. See too the papers in Toni Erskine, Can Institutions Have Responsibility? Collective Moral Agency and International Relations (London: Palgrave, 2003).
6. But my argument is original, I think, and in any case the point of view taken remains a minority position. The modern contractualist analysis of the commercial corporation, so it appears, still treats it as little more than "a collective noun for the web of contracts that link the various participants" (Ross Grantham, "The Doctrinal Basis of the Rights of Company Shareholders," Cambridge Law Journal 57 [1998]: 579).
7. This analysis may take a number of forms, whether on the basis of identifying the corporate organization with its chief officers or treating the agent involved as a delegate or imputing vicarious or associative liability. See Peter Cane, Responsibility in Law and Morality (Oxford: Hart, 2002);
8. Larry May, The Morality of Groups: Collective Responsibility, Group-Based Harm, and Corporate Rights (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987).
9. The classic source is P. F. Strawson, "Freedom and Resentment," in Free Will, 2nd ed., ed. Gary Watson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 72-93.
10. R. Jay Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).
11. Some of these conditions may be fulfilled without others, leading to familiar scenarios of partial responsibility.
12. Agents with acquired sociopathy may be in the category. See A. L. Roskies, "Are Ethical Judgments Intrinsically Motivational? Lessons from Acquired Sociopathy," Philosophical Psychology 16 (2003): 51-66.
13. This is important to recognize because discussions in the theory of criminal justice often run the two together, setting up a false contrast between a backward-looking retributivism and a forward-looking consequentialism. Retributivism should be seen as a doctrine that bears primarily on when someone is fit to be held responsible in criminal law; consequentialism, on how someone who is fit to be held responsible should be sanctioned.
14. See, e.g., Colvin, "Corporate Personality and Criminal Liability"; W. S. Laufer, Corporate Bodies and Guilty Minds: The Failure of Corporate Criminal Liability (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
15. See David Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001);
16. see also Philip Pettit, A Theory of Freedom: From the Psychology to the Politics of Agency (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2001), chap. 1.
17. I do not assume that acting on a shared intention is essential for group agency, only that group agency normally involves it, and in any case, I shall concentrate on the cases where it is involved. The line I favor on the analysis of acting on a shared intention is developed further in Philip Pettit and David Schweikard, "Joint Action and Group Agency," Philosophy of the Social Sciences 36 (2006): 18-39.
18. Broadly, it follows Michael Bratman, Faces of Intention: Selected Essays on Intention and Agency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
19. For other influential approaches see Margaret Gilbert, "Collective Preferences, Obligations, and Rational Choice," Economics and Philosophy 17 (2001): 109-20;
20. Raimo Tuomela, The Importance of Us (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995).
21. This applies to the explicit processes of belief formation that must figure in any mental life. Some propositions will have to receive the assent of the group, however, by way of being presupposed in other more explicit patterns. That, in effect, is the lesson of Lewis Carroll, "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles," Mind 4 (1895): 278-80.
22. While the propositions endorsed may be probabilistic, the possibility ruled out is that members might put degrees of belief and desire together, mainlining one another's minds and generating a system of probability and utility for the group as a whole. Assuming that people do each have fine-grained degrees of belief and desire, it is not clear how they could even know what they are, let alone communicate them to one another in the mainlining fashion; such degrees will show up in behavior, particularly in dispositions to accept various gambles, but need not be available to introspection. See Gilbert Harman, Change in View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986).
23. Anthony Quinton, "Social Objects," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 75 (1975): 17.
24. See Pettit, Theory of Freedom, chap. 5,
25. and "Groups with Minds of Their Own," in Socializing Metaphysics, ed. Frederick F. Schmitt (New York: Rowan & Littlefield, 2003), 129-66.
26. The idea of the discursive dilemma is a generalization of the legal idea of a doctrinal paradox. See L. A. Kernhauser and L. G. Sager, "The One and the Many: Adjudication in Collegial Courts," California Law Review 81 (1993): 1-59.
27. For an overview of the topic and of other issues, see Christian List, "The Discursive Dilemma and Public Reason," Ethics 116 (2006): 362-402.
28. On this likelihood see List, "Discursive Dilemma and Public Reason."
29. Philip Pettit, "When to Defer to a Majority - and When Not," Analysis 66 (2006): 179-87.
30. The initial theorem, explicitly focused on generalizing the discursive dilemma, is proved in Christian List and Philip Pettit, "Aggregating Sets of Judgments: An Impossibility Result," Economics and Philosophy 18 (2002): 89-110.
31. For a more recent theorem see Franz Dietrich and Christian List, "Arrow's Theorem in Judgment Aggregation," Social Choice and Welfare (forthcoming);
32. this relates closely to results in Marc Pauly and Martin Van Hees, "Logical Constraints on Judgment Aggregation," Journal of Philosophical Logic (forthcoming).
33. This is the Dietrich-List result. The List-Pettit result varies a little. Assume that a group of individuals has to find a procedure for deriving a set of judgments on propositions that are logically connected, although in a slightly different sense from that in the other case. Take any procedure that treats every individual voter equally (anonymity), giving no one the status of a dictator; that is designed to work for any consistent sets of input judgments (universal domain); and that enables a group to produce complete and consistent judgments over ranges of connected issues. No procedure that satisfies conditions of roughly these kinds will identify a rule or function - majoritarian or nonmajoritarian - whereby the corporate judgment on every issue can be derived from the votes and judgments of members on that issue.
34. Christian List and Philip Pettit, "Group Agency and Supervenience," Southern Journal of Philosophy, suppl., ed. Murray Spindel 44 (2006): 85-104.
35. For an argument that the attitudes of reliable group agents cannot be generated without group-level reasoning, so that autonomy is supported in yet a stronger fashion, see Philip Pettit, "Personal and Sub-personal Reason: The Case of Groups," Dialectica 61 (2007), forthcoming.
36. We sometimes judge that ignorance of evidence was invincible and blameless; sometimes, that it was not: we rule that, however ignorant, the agent still had access to the evidence. While it is hard to say what principles should govern such judgments of evidential access, we need not dwell on the question here, since it arises in the individual case as well as in the case of group agents. See G. Rosen, "Scepticism about Moral Responsibility," Philosophical Perspectives 18 (2004): 295-313.
37. Philip Pettit, The Common Mind: An Essay on Psychology, Society, and Politics (1993; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), chap. 2.
38. Philip Pettit and Michael Smith, "Freedom in Belief and Desire," Journal of Philosophy 93 (1996): 429-49,
39. reprinted in Frank Jackson, Philip Pettit, and Michael Smith, Mind, Morality, and Explanation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004);
40. Pettit, Theory of Freedom.
41. E. H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 305-6.
42. Th. Eschmann, "Studies on the Notion of Society in St. Thomas Aquinas: St. Thomas and the Decretal of Innocent IV, Romana Ecclesia; Ceterum," Medieval Studies 8 (1946): 35. On Aquinas's argument, see 11.
43. T. D. Seeley, "Decision Making in Superorganisms: How Collective Wisdom Arises from the Poorly Informed Masses," in Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox, ed. Gerd Gigerenzer and Reinhard Selten (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).
44. For background see R. A. Wilson, "Group-Level Cognition," Philosophy of Science 68 (2001): 262-73.
45. Jaegwon Kim, Mind in a Physical World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
46. Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit, "Functionalism and Broad Content," Mind 97 (1988): 381-400, and "Program Explanation: A General Perspective," Analysis 50 (1990): 107-17.
47. Both are reprinted in Jackson, Pettit, and Smith, Mind, Morality, and Explanation.
48. Christopher Kutz, Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
49. See Keith Graham, "Morality, Individuals, and Collectives," in Moral Philosophy and Contemporary Problems, ed. J. D. G. Evans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 12.
50. But see Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pt. 1.
51. Frank Jackson, "Group Morality," in Metaphysics and Morality: Essays in Honour of J.J. C. Smart, ed. Philip Pettit, Richard Sylvan, and Jean Norman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 91-110, In the firing-squad case, there is a weak suboptimal equilibrium from which no one can unilaterally depart with moral benefit. In the speeding-car case, there is a strong suboptimal moral equilibrium from which no one can unilaterally depart without doing moral harm.
52. P. A. Werhane and R. E. Freeman, "Corporate Responsibility," in The Oxford Handbook of Practical Ethics, ed. H. LaFolette (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 523-24.
53. See Virginia Held, "Can a Random Collection of Individuals Be Morally Responsible?" Journal of Philosophy 67 (1970): 471-81.
54. Matthew Braham and M. J. Holler ("Distributing Causal Responsibility in Collectivities," in their Economics, Rational Choice, and Normative Philosophy [London: Routledge, 2007]) argue that it is always possible to distribute causal responsibility among the members of a collectivity who together bring about some result. That may be so, but my concern here is with moral responsibility, not causal.
55. Erin Kelly ("The Burdens of Collective Liability," in Ethics and Foreign Intervention, ed. D. K. Chatterjee and D. E. Scheid [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003]) suggests that many theorists emphasize corporate responsibility at a cost to individual enactor responsibility; I hope it is clear that my line is very different.
56. See Pettit, Theory of Freedom, chap. 5.
57. There is a problem of no hands, we might say, rather than the more familiar problem of many hands. See D. F. Thompson, "Moral Responsibility of Public Officials: The Problem of Many Hands," American Political Science Review 74 (1980): 905-16,
58. and Political Ethics and Public Office (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987);
59. M. Bovens, The Quest for Responsibility: Accountability and Citizenship in Complex Organizations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
60. For a distinct but congenial lesson about corporate responsibility, to the effect that the greater powers of institutional agents may occasion more serious obligations in spheres such as that of global justice, see M. J. Green, "Institutional Responsibility for Global Problems," Philosophical Topics 30 (2002): 79-95.
61. For a sampling of the literature on this topic, see Larry May and Stacey Hoffman, eds., Collective Responsibility: Five Decades of Debate in Theoretical and Applied Ethics (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991).
62. See D. P. Tollefsen, "Participant Reactive Attitudes and Collective Responsibility," Philosophical Explorations 6 (2003): 227.
63. Compare D. J. Levinson, "Collective Sanctions," Stanford Law Review 56 (2003): 345-428, for an argument about the beneficial effects of imposing sanctions on all the members of a collection "to motivate them to identify the guilty individuals in their midst" (348).
64. For an argument that corporations can be made more reactive to internal fault and shortfall in this fashion, see Brent Fisse and John Braithwaite, Corporations, Crime, and Accountability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).