How Autonomous Are Collective Agents? Corporate Rights and Normative Individualism

Abstract

Corporate responsibility requires a conception of collective agency on which collective agents are able to form moral judgments and act on them. In spite of claims to the contrary, existing accounts of collective agency fall short of this kind of corporate autonomy, as they fail to explain how collective agents might be responsive to moral reasons. I discuss how a recently proposed conception of shared valuing can be used for developing a solution to this problem. Although the resulting conception of corporate autonomy is useful for making sense of corporate responsibility, it also gives rise to what I call 'the Corporate Autonomy Problem'. Autonomous collective agents are in principle entitled to the same rights as autonomous individual agents. However, at least some individual rights, such as the right to vote, the right to life, and the right not to be enslaved cannot plausibly be attributed to collective agents. This intuition is supported by normative individualism, the position according to which corporate agents are not entitled to nonderivative rights at all. I argue that without a proper solution to this problem-I sketch the available options-saving corporate responsibility requires giving up on normative individualism.Collective agents are often blamed for what they do, and sometimes praised. US President Barack Obama, for instance, praised the Supreme Court for its decision on the Affordable Care Act. 1 In addition to moral responsibility, people often ascribe rights and obligations to collective agents. A controversial case is Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a 2010 ruling of the US Supreme Court. According

Corporate Agency and Possible Futures

“…French 1979;Velasquez 2003;Copp 2007;List and Pettit 2011;Hess 2013;Hindriks 2014; and the other works cited below). I focus here on groups that have both a structure and a decision-making process, as opposed to merely aggregate groups such as 'the people currently in Heathrow Terminal 5'.…”

“…The debate about corporate agency is structured by a tension between two appealing intuitions (Hindriks 2014(Hindriks , p. 1566.…”

“…(e.g. French 1979;Goodpaster and Matthews 1982;List and Pettit 2011;Hindriks 2014Hindriks , p. 1567Hess 2013, p. 319.…”

“…319. ) No one argues, for instance, that corporate groups should enjoy the right to vote, the right to life, or the right not to be owned by other persons 6 (Hindriks 2014(Hindriks , p. 1576 refers to these rights as "the problematic trio"). Minimal collectivism is also not a prominent view.…”

“…For instance, perhaps personhood demands sentience or consciousness, while intentionality or rationality is sufficient for moral agency (e.g. French 1984;List and Pettit 2011;Hindriks 2014Hindriks , p. 1567List 2016). By contrast, individualists often elide agency and personhood, defending similar conditions for both (e.g.…”