Corporate Crocodile Tears? On the Reactive Attitudes of Corporate Agents

Abstract

There is a growing literature arguing that certain entities embodied by groups of agents—certain “collectives”—themselves qualify as agents; even, some say, as moral agents.1 These are ambitious claims. To be agents, such entities must be capable of acting on the basis of their own beliefs, desires, and intentions. To be moral agents, subject to moral obligations and accountable for their actions, they should presumably also be capable of acting freely in some relevant sense, and of recognizing and acting on moral considerations, including the respect owed to others. In addition to this, it might seem that to be fully fledged moral agents—fitting targets of a wide range of moral assessments and reactions—they must be capable of certain reactive attitudes, in particular those of guilt and indignation.2 Such agents must be able to understand when they have done wrong, and that they are accountable for their actions. At least in non-parasitic cases, this arguably involves not only grasping that guilt would be a fitting attitude on their part, and indignation a fitting attitude on the part of others, but also a capacity for guilt and indignation.3 Relatedly, one might think that fully morally accountable agents must be capable of holding themselves responsible, which might seem to essentially involve the ability to feel guilty about what one has done.4 While there has been much debate over the possibility that collectives are capable of relevant beliefs and desires, and some about whether they can be appropriately free and responsible,5 there has been little discussion of the possibility that collectives are capable of reactive attitudes. Partly, this might be because the idea that fully fledged moral agency requires a capacity for reactive attitudes is comparatively controversial. But the idea has become widely enough endorsed to raise questions about its consequences for collective moral agency and responsibility. These questions are particularly pressing as the idea seems to straightforwardly rule out fully fledged collective moral agency. For it might seem thoroughly implausible that collectives can feel guilt and in that sense hold themselves responsible, or have the corresponding practical understanding of the demands of morality that we expect from human agents.6 It is of course obvious that the members of a collective can possess reactive attitudes, and that in many cases their reactive attitudes derive from their membership in the collective. Members are often ashamed, proud, or indignant about things their collective has done, or about things that have been done to it, regardless of their own participation or lack thereof in the event.7 Similarly, members might jointly intend or be jointly committed to feel remorse, or to express regret on the part of the collective.8 But our concern is different. If a collective is to qualify as an agent in its own right, it must have its own beliefs, desires, intentions, and free actions; it is not enough that its members are capable of such states and activities. Just so, if a collective is to qualify as a fully fledged moral agent in its own right, and if fully fledged moral agency requires the capacity for reactive attitudes, that collective must be capable of its own reactive attitudes. It must itself be capable of guilt and indignation. We argue below that, contrary to what one might think, at least certain collectives are. Or, more precisely, we argue that if certain collectives are capable of agency, then they are also capable of states sufficiently similar to guilt and indignation to satisfy the requirements of moral agency. Their expressions of indignation need not be mere strategic aggression, and their expressions of guilt and sorrow for what they have done need not be mere crocodile tears. The plan is as follows. In section 2, we explain why one might think that certain collectives—which we designate as “corporate agents”—can have their own equivalents of beliefs, desires, and intentions, distinct from the beliefs, desires, and intentions of their members, and how they might be capable of moral cognition, motivation, and free action on the basis of those intentional states.9 Our purpose here is not to convince the skeptical reader that these corporate agents—typified by the modern corporation—have these capacities; various people have argued at length for this conclusion elsewhere. Rather, we aim to outline the sort of argumentative strategy that we find most promising, as we will argue along very similar lines that corporate agents are also capable of equivalents of reactive attitudes. The strategy, in brief, is to (i) describe beliefs, desires and capacities for agential control and free action in functionalist terms, (ii) argue that it is such functional states that are required for rational agency, and (iii) show that structures with the corresponding functions can be instantiated in entities like corporations. We then apply this strategy to the role of guilt and indignation in moral agency. In section 3 we identify the features associated with such attitudes that seem crucial to fully fledged moral agency, and in section 4 we argue that actual corporations could instantiate structures with such features. Given this, and assuming that the argumentative strategy outlined in section 2 is successful, fully fledged moral agency is within the ken of corporations even if such agency requires the capacity for equivalents of reactive attitudes.10 In section 5, finally, we indicate some further consequences of this conclusion. We acknowledge that some readers might take this as a reductio of a functionalist understanding of moral agency; this in itself has significant implications. For others, however, it raises urgent questions about how moral norms would apply to corporate agents or apply to interactions with such agents, and about the implications for laws governing or protecting them. Begin with some seemingly mundane claims about the contemporary world. Corporations typically adopt positions and goals, and they develop plans by which they pursue those goals in ways consistent with those positions. They often adjust those plans in the face of new information or poor performance, and even abandon old positions and goals and adopt new ones. Most of all, they are sufficiently disciplined that the behavior of the individual members consistently yields corporate actions in line with those corporate plans, positions, and goals regardless of whether individual members share them, or are even aware of them. By various means, corporations can and do adopt goals and plans that do not align with—or that conflict with—the preferences of their members, and they establish mechanisms which ensure that the members implement those plans in pursuit of those goals regardless of member indifference or contrary preferences.11 It is this latter feature, the regular possibility of a stark discontinuity between member commitments and corporate commitments, that most distinguishes corporations from other less disciplined collectives. It is also a feature shared by a variety of entities that are neither legally incorporated nor involved in business: colleges and universities, governments, branches of the military, NGOs, and religious orders. Taking the modern corporation as paradigmatic of this type, we call these entities “corporate agents”.12 For simplicity, we will also speak of corporate agents as “collectives” with “members” who perform actions constituting the behavior of the corporate agent. However, one might accept our main argument while thinking that corporate agents are more or other than just a group of people organized in a certain way.13 We hasten to add that it is not necessary that there be any such stark discontinuity. Member commitments (at every level) will often align with the commitments of the corporate agent to which they belong, because members internalize corporate commitments and because corporations hire people whose commitments roughly match the corporation's. We nonetheless focus on situations where the two conflict because that alignment often creates the illusion of identity: when corporate commitments “match” member commitments—when the corporate agent and the members both believe that x or desire that y—it is harder to see that these remain numerically distinct intentional states, and that the relationship(s) among them can be highly complex. As revealed by the examples discussed here (and in Section 4 below), corporate commitments are distinct from member commitments, and this remains true regardless of whether they conflict or cohere. For a working example of a corporate agent, take the hypothetical Acme, a small(ish) manufacturer of industrial chemicals. Acme is committed to various positions (“producing industrial chemicals is profitable”: “developing new products is a good way to increase profit”) and goals (“be profitable”; “be environmentally responsible”), and Acme's plans to achieve its goals are shaped by its positions. Thus, Acme has just adopted a plan to develop a new product line, because the new product line is expected to be profitable, and Acme will pursue the new line in an environmentally responsible manner. If the environmentally responsible version of the new product line turns out to be wildly expensive, we would not be surprised if Acme modified the plan to weaken or qualify its environmental commitment; if the environmentally responsible version turned out to be wildly popular, generating good will and increased sales, we would not be surprised if Acme started publicizing it and giving it a more central role. In short, Acme will generally act in an instrumentally rational manner, resolve conflicts among its commitments, and tend to give more weight to commitments that cohere with and support Acme's other commitments, much as we expect of a human agent. It is the consistent rationality of such corporate behavior that leads us to speak (at least casually) of corporate agents as agents—as entities whose actions are shaped in rational and predictable ways by their commitments about how the world is, what goals to pursue, and how to act—commitments about fact, value, and norms, we might say. While we described this familiar state of affairs in terms of Acme's commitments, it's obvious that Acme's members have played essential roles in the processes described, and it is possible to give a different description that explicitly acknowledges the contributions of the individual members. We will talk more about member contributions in the remainder of the article. For now, however, it's important to note that whatever the member-level description might look like, it is not necessarily the case that we can simply substitute “Acme's members” for each mention of Acme. The proposition, “Acme has the goal of being profitable and environmentally responsible” is not identical to the proposition, “Acme's members have the goal of being profitable or environmentally responsible”; the propositions have different intensions and extensions. It is possible—even familiar—for a corporate agent like a corporation, a university, or a government to adopt positions and goals that its members neither affirm nor adopt for themselves. Most of us have had the experience of conforming our membership-related behaviors to unwelcome policies; this is hardly rare. So even if certain claims about Acme will entail claims about Acme's members, it will not be a simple one-to-one equivalency; the relationship is more complicated. Nevertheless, as long as Acme's members perform the tasks entailed by these corporate positions and goals—for any reasons, or no reasons at all—Acme will work to develop the new product line, in an environmentally responsible way, in pursuit of profit, regardless of its members' personal opinions about these matters. This much should be generally familiar, and the empirical claims are uncontroversial. However, we think that three radical philosophical points follow from this generally familiar state of affairs—points about intentionality, agency, and ownership. First, Acme's positions, goals, and plans—its commitments about fact and value and how to act on them—are functionally equivalent to beliefs, desires, and intentions as far as rational agency is concerned: “rationally equivalent”, we might say.14 They are commitments about the state of the world and about what matters in the world that are responsive to changes in the world, and they shape Acme's behavior in logical, rational ways. Second, these (and other) commitments of Acme's form a rational, coherent profile. They do not blatantly contradict each other, or necessarily entail mutually impossible actions (though they may tend in different directions, they can be balanced against each other). In short, they form a logically integrated complex of commitments about fact and value that drive corporate action, what Carol Rovane (1998: 23) calls a “rational point of view” (RPV)—“the point of view from which [practical] deliberation proceeds”. Moreover, Acme's RPV will involve a variety of positions concerning Acme's own commitments, options, capacities and relations to various aspects of the world (including other agents)—positions that guide Acme's actions and give it a recognizably first-personal perspective.15 When Acme acts on the basis of this set of commitments, then, Acme does not act randomly or arbitrarily (or at least, no more so than human agents). Instead, it acts in a rational, predictable fashion, pursuing identified goals on the basis of a coherent picture of the empirical situation. (Which, again, just means that when Acme's members act on the basis of Acme's RPV—when their behavior is shaped by it—the collective result is corporate actions that are not random and arbitrary but rational and predictable at the collective level.) Third, these commitments are Acme's. They are not the commitments of the members, of any level. It may be that Acme's members personally agree with these commitments—that profit is essential, the environment matters, product development is likely to be profitable, etc.—or it may be that Acme's members disagree. Most likely there is a messy, incoherent mass of overlapping agreement and disagreement among Acme's many members, and many of them have likely never thought about these issues at all. Regardless, when Acme's members act as members, they will act in ways that are reliably, collectively guided by these corporate commitments. When they do so, Acme acts. It may seem implausible to claim that Acme's commitments could deviate so sharply from the commitments of its members, so it is worth addressing that concern before moving on. Corporate commitments can arise in a number of different ways, all of which are likely to be in play in a corporate agent of any size. We describe one such process here (the most broadly accepted one), then develop it and others in more detail in section four in our examples of a corporate agent developing its own reactive attitudes.16 The process we have in mind is fully explicit: the board votes, the majority wins, the new attitude is incorporated into the functioning of the institution, and the corporation (thus) adopts a new position. While the board members are obviously crucially involved in the process, the resulting position does not necessarily reflect the board members' own preferences for that position. Even in these cases, board members do not necessarily express their own preferences regarding the available options, nor are they supposed to. Instead they make their decisions from the point of view of the corporate agent. Return to Acme's existing commitments to seeking profit, producing industrial chemicals, and being environmentally responsible. Reasoning from these commitments, Acme's board members could easily conclude (and vote) that Acme ought to develop a new product—perhaps steel additives. They could also conclude that this should be done in ways that are protective of the environment, but that Acme's commitments to profit and production are more central to Acme and take priority. In this way Acme develops a new commitment—in effect a desire or intention—to produce steel additives, preferably in an environmentally responsible way, and the work goes forward. None of this requires any personal inputs from the board members about the desirability or value of industrial chemicals, steel additives, or the environment; they just need to be familiar with Acme's RPV and have sufficient knowledge about the world to do the reasoning to further the pursuit of Acme's goals in line with Acme's principles. Should the commitment to environmental responsibility come into conflict with Acme's other commitments, again, the board members may well vote to abandon it despite their own personal commitments to environmental stewardship. This is one process by which Acme could abandon the belief that the environment is important without its members doing so. The members reason from Acme's commitments, not from their own, and Acme's actions thus express its own commitments rather than those of its members.17 In this manner the corporate entity can adopt a new commitment (to make steel additives) or abandon an old one (about the importance of the environment) in ways and for reasons that might have little to do with its members' beliefs and desires regarding those matters. This, then, is what we mean when we suggest that corporate agents can possess their own (rational equivalents of) beliefs and desires, distinct from the beliefs and desires of their members: they possess their own commitments about fact and value, which need have no direct connection to their members' commitments about those same facts and values. When member behavior is guided by these corporate commitments (in normal ways), the corporation acts. Turning from rational to moral agency, it is clear how this story accommodates basic moral cognition and moral motivation. Just as Acme's RPV contains a commitment to be environmentally responsible, it might contain commitments to treat suppliers, customers, partners and employees with proper regard, or more generally to behave in a morally acceptable fashion. Acme will then rely on individual members, committees, or consultants to help determine whether its behaviors accord with these commitments, and act accordingly. In fairly straightforward ways, Acme is thus capable of reasonably sophisticated moral cognition and of action guided by such cognition. Depending on what a corporation's commitments are, its actions can thus express straightforward analogs to good or ill will.18 It is similarly clear how a corporate agent might act freely in ways required for it to be responsible, at least on typical compatibilist conditions. Its actions are responsive to a variety of reasons, including morally relevant reasons, and issue in normal ways from its own well-integrated (rational equivalents of) beliefs, desires and intentions. These states, moreover, “have not been acquired by processes that totally bypass the subject's normal capacities of deliberative or reflective control.”19 Throughout, Acme has had information about its own commitments and, as we have explained, the capacity to decide to act on certain commitments and change others. Because of this, Acme is very much unlike the agent who is confused, compulsive, or directly and involuntarily controlled by outside forces. One might worry, though, that Acme is nevertheless controlled by its members in ways that undermine its responsibility. After all, there is no question that Acme's members played a crucial role in the process by which Acme adopted its new desire and abandoned its old belief. Similarly, there is no question that the members themselves acted freely, choosing to conform their work behavior to the demands of Acme's commitments. But we have already denied that these facts entail that Acme's capacities of deliberative or reflective control are bypassed. It is true that Acme's commitments and actions supervene on and are influenced by, among other things, the actions of its members.20 However, the same can be said of an ordinary human agent: her commitments and actions also supervene on and are influenced by, among other things, sub-personal internal events. This doesn't undermine her control or responsibility as long as the ways in which these events influence her commitments and actions are normally largely and reliably shaped by her commitments and rational processes. Just so, the fact that member actions influence Acme's commitments and actions does not undermine Acme's control or responsibility as long as the way in which they do so is largely and reliably shaped by Acme's own commitments.21 If there is a valid remaining concern here about freedom and autonomy, it would be one that goes beyond typical compatibilist conditions on free will and moral responsibility, and might arise equally when we reflect on ways in which human deliberation and action is shaped by events on a sub-personal level. Since our question here is whether there is anything problematic with corporate responsibility in particular, we set this concern aside. Before turning to the question of corporate reactive attitudes, we do want to address one final sort of natural worry about corporate agency. Even though corporate agents can display rational behavior driven by reliable underlying mechanisms (as described above), agency is often associated not only with rational behavior, but also with phenomenal experiences. But how could there be something “it is like” for a corporate agent to believe, desire or intend? How could there be a phenomenal point of view to accompany the rational point of view described above?22 In addressing this worry, two things should be held in mind. The first is that corporate agents might instantiate various functional properties often associated with phenomenal consciousness. For example, one of the primary roles that consciousness is supposed to play is to facilitate the integration and coordination of information from multiple sources, including the senses. To the extent that this is crucial for sophisticated agency—which it certainly seems to be—we would point out that corporate agents are capable of non-phenomenal analogs. For example, various sorts of information about both internal and external affairs might be broadcast widely, made jointly accessible to various systems governing the corporate agent's actions and priorities according to its prior commitments (cf. Baars' 1988). After all, such information is frequently distributed to and from the board and senior management, and any large organization maintains a relatively steady flow of information among its members about the organization and matters relevant to it.23 The second is that for our purposes, what matters is not whether corporate agents can have a phenomenal point of view, but whether they can have what it takes to be morally responsible.24 Here, we can see how the sort of informational integration associated with consciousness might be necessary for the control and self-integration required for responsibility (cf. Levy 2013, 2014), but we fail to see why purely qualitative aspects of a phenomenal point of view would matter. If corporate agents can do all of the things we've suggested they can—a claim subject to empirical verification—then there is simply no necessary role left for the qualitative aspects to play. However meaningful or significant human agents find these experiences to be in their own practices, they are not necessary for moral agency. In what follows, then, we will assume that to the extent that a “phenomenal” point of view is required for responsibility, it is one that a corporate agent could in principle have. Our main concern is whether, if corporate agents have the agential capacities to act from their own commitments in the ways described here, they can also have the moral capacities associated with reactive attitudes. We have seen why it might be plausible to attribute rational agency to corporations: corporations can be in states rationally equivalent to beliefs, desires and intentions in human agents. We have also seen why one might plausibly think that corporations are capable of basic moral cognition and motivation, including good or ill will, and satisfy uncontroversial conditions for free will: they can act on the basis of their own “motivational springs”. The question now is whether we have similarly strong reasons to attribute capacities associated with reactive attitudes, to the extent that such capacities are required for moral responsibility. In arguing that we have such reasons, our general strategy is to first characterize reactive attitudes in broadly functionalist terms, identifying both the sorts of cognitive processes and behaviors that they characteristically give rise to and the sorts of cognitive processes that characteristically give rise to them, and then to identify aspects of these that might plausibly be seen as necessary for moral responsibility. Given that these aspects can be understood in functionalist terms, and given that corporations can instantiate rational equivalents of beliefs, desires, and intentions, we will suggest that it is at least conceptually possible for corporations to instantiate states relevantly similar to guilt, resentment, and indignation—“moral equivalents” to these latter states.25 To make this plausible is the task of the present section. But the mere conceptual possibility of corporate moral equivalents to reactive attitudes is not enough to make sense of or justify actual practices of holding corporations morally responsible and treating them as fully fledged moral agents. In the next section, we will thus argue that we can expect actual corporations to be capable of instantiating such states. We want to be clear that our task here is not to characterize the nature of the relevant reactive attitudes. Spelling out how reactive attitudes (and states associated with such attitudes) might be necessary for fully fledged moral agency both goes beyond and falls short of that task. On the one hand, some necessary features of guilt and resentment might be irrelevant for moral agency; on the other, some capacities necessary for moral agency might merely be commonly associated with these attitudes, rather than part of their essence. So, for example, it does not matter whether Antonio Damasio (1994: ch. 7) is correct in distinguishing emotions such as anger and fear, understood as certain bodily and cognitive reactions, from feelings of these emotions, understood as experiences of such reactions, or whether the emotions should be identified with those very experiences or not.26 Similarly, it does not matter whether we get the connections between emotions like guilt, shame, fear, sorrow, anger and indignation just right (is guilt an internalized adaption to anger, or a development of sorrow, or both?). What matters for our purposes is whether there are capacities, dispositions or behaviors that are (a) closely associated with reactive attitudes, (b) possibly necessary for fully fledged moral agency, and (c) unavailable to corporations.27 For this purpose, we begin with a list of features that seem closely associated with indignation and guilt, respectively: Indignation: Guilt: Features could perhaps be added to each list, and features on the list refined and related to one another in further detail. However, as explained above, our goal here has not been to provide necessary or sufficient conditions for indignation or guilt, but to identify features related to them that can plausibly be seen as necessary for fully fledged moral agency. What matters for our argument is not whether corporate agents are strictly speaking capable of these emotions, but whether they are capable of moral equivalents of these emotions. As these lists stand, we think that they capture central elements of the roles guilt and indignation play in directing practices of holding others and oneself responsible and responding to violations of moral norms. Moreover, they bring out features of guilt and indignation that have played a particularly important role in recent discussions, from Strawson and onwards. First, expressions of indignation are naturally understood as responses to ill will or lack of proper regard on part of its target. Second, they are naturally understood as demands that the agent respect certain values. Indignation is not only triggered by ill will, but disposes one to various forms of aggressive action (angry rebukes, distancing, non-cooperation, and in extreme cases violence) to the extent that the target has not changed its attitude towards the relevant values or displayed proper regard. Third, guilt and its expressions seem to be exactly what is demanded of the target in expressions of indignation. It non-strategically disposes the guilty party to change its quality of will and take on the costs of its lack of proper regard. This makes direct sense of the requirement that targets of indignation and corresponding practices of holding responsible be capable of guilt: only when the target undergoes guilt can the demands of indignation be met in normal ways.29 Whereas the normal agent who is capable of moral sense will experience and understand reactive sentiments in a way that provides salience and significance to moral considerations, and also provides an internal and independent source of motivation (i.e., as distinct from “external” sanctions) for complying with these demands and expectations, the agent who lacks this general capacity will not be able to employ these resources to govern and guide her conduct. … By way of analogy, I have suggested, agents who are incapacitated in this way are like individuals who lack any capacity to feel f