Can anyone explain why companies are not moral agents? I’ve never found a fully satisfying answer. #philq
This question by Bernard Yu prompted a series of comments on the nature of morality and legal obligations in the context of corporations like BP. It’s quite an interesting read
My take is that “moral duty” and “legal obligation” are almost too closely intertwined to make much distinction between the two. Obviously part of being in a corporation is the simple fact that not everything is tied directly to a single person or position.
Ultimately it rests with a single individual (the buck stops here), but the moral and legal responsibilities for any given action (or that action’s consequences) rest with a great deal of people all the way from the day-to-day gruntworkers to the CEO and board members.
In the case of BP, ultimately the legal responsibility for the cleanup goes to the CEO. Not to a particular person, necessarily, but whoever currently occupies that position.
so if all the decision makers in bp left and all joined target as cashiers, would target have the responsibility and bp none?
I think not. Clearly the legal responsibility still lies with BP and its employees. At that point the moral obligation is a wash – if Tony Hayward is working at the local burger joint, he may no longer have a legal duty to do anything about the oil spill that happened while he was at BP, but he certainly has a moral tie to it. However, in our society, moral debts don’t have much actual weight to them. The government can’t force that individual to take care of the situation. If he can’t sleep at night because he has a guilty conscience over the ordeal, then that’s terrific for him but has no effect on BP or their responsibilities.
Say BP goes and cons hires a guy off the street to be the new CEO. The poor schmuck may not have had the slightest thing to do with the oil spill originally, but he’s the new man on top and it’s now his legal responsibility to oversee the consequences.
By the way…
If Hitler survived, but lost his power over Nazi Germany, he is still responsible
Hmm, good to see that Godwin’s Law is still intact.
(I’ll have a lot more to add to this later. I just wanted to get my thoughts down in some format first, before I lost my train of thought. There’s far more to this discussion than I had time to cobble together into this post.)