Moral Responsibility

The previous chapter argued for the claim that if ‘business ethics’ is going to be a meaningful idea then we need to demonstrate how it is different from other kinds of ethical investigation. It then gave initial reasons for thinking that a correct account of moral responsibility in the context of business organisations will be complex and multifaceted, so making the business environment particularly hard to handle from an ethical perspective. In the remaining chapters I expand upon and substantiate this line of argument. The first step to doing this is to get a firm handle on the notion of moral responsibility. This will not be a ‘full’ theory of moral responsibility, but rather a partial theory that focuses on those aspects that are important for the coming arguments.

The first task will be to disambiguate the kind of responsibility in which I am interested from other related ideas, many of which we also refer to through different uses of the word ‘responsibility’. I will focus on what is often termed ‘backward looking’ responsibility, which involves the ascription of moral accountability to someone or something for what has happened in the past. It is investigating how this kind of responsibility is ascribed that will reveal some of the most interesting complexities introduced by the existence of business organisations. The most obvious alternative is often called ‘forward looking responsibility’, where this is synonymous with obligations, or responsibilities, that we have to do things in the future. While I will not address such obligations explicitly, sometimes it will be impossible to disentangle questions of backward and forward looking responsibility. An investigation of backward looking responsibility reveals a further division of questions that might be addressed under that heading. In particular, (1) what kind of properties something must possess in order to be a possible subject of such responsibility ascriptions; (2) the conditions that must be satisfied in order for any particular ascription to be justified; and (3) what follows from a successful ascription of responsibility to an appropriate subject. I will address the second of these questions in this chapter and then use this answer to tackle the first question in the remaining chapters12. I leave question (3) to another time. Business organisations, I will argue,

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Given that my aim in addressing question (2) is to support the answers I develop later to question (1), the account I develop here is not comprehensive but rather focused on the task at hand. To this end, I aim to clarify the relation that someone or something must have with a past event in order for them to be morally responsible for that event. It is not intended to set out all the features of events that generate responsibility of different degrees for their owners.

generate moral responsibility in a number of ways through properties that they possess as collectives. This responsibility accrues both to the organisations as distinct entities, and to the individuals that populate them.

Answering the second question requires an explicit account of what it means to be morally responsible. In the final sections of this chapter I defend an account of backward looking moral responsibility that holds that the basic condition of application is that the subject deserves to be held responsible. This is distinguished from accounts that ascribe responsibility on the basis of the beneficial consequences of doing so. Moreover, to acquire moral desert for an event (action, outcome, etc.) in the past is to have a particular kind of ownership, namely moral ownership, of that event. I set out an account of what it is to have moral ownership of this kind. This account allows me to substantiate the later arguments I offer for why business organisations can be held morally responsible despite not satisfying the strict conditions of moral agency usually thought to be necessary for such ascriptions.

My position can be clarified further in two ways – by outlining some orthodoxies that exist in standard accounts of moral responsibility, and how my position compares to them; and by setting out explicitly those elements of a full theory of moral responsibility that I will not try to address. The first orthodoxy is that ‘moral responsibility’ only refers to ‘backward looking responsibility’, and so a theory of moral responsibility will be limited to an investigation of this concept. While I will focus on backward looking responsibility, it is not obvious that backward looking responsibility should be privileged above other morally relevant uses we normally make of the word ‘responsibility’, and it is also hard to see how a comprehensive

understanding of any of these notions can be achieved without acknowledging the others, and how they are related. A second orthodoxy in treatments of moral responsibility is that only moral agents can be responsible in this way. This assertion I explicitly deny, although I accept that being a moral agent is sufficient for being a suitable subject of moral responsibility. Through my development of the idea of ‘moral ownership’ I show how such ownership can be achieved by business organisations even when they do not satisfy the normal conditions for moral agency that would apply to individual humans. In doing so, I explain how moral ownership is related to the notion of ‘freedom’ which is normally invoked to underpin accounts of what it is to have moral agency. Finally, a full theory of moral responsibility must set out ‘possible objects of responsibility ascriptions (e.g., actions, omissions, consequences, character traits, etc)’ (Eshleman, 2009). This is another area that I will not explicitly address. Of course, an answer to this question will be implicit in what I have to say about organisational

responsibility. I will, in general, talk about responsibility accruing as a result of moral ownership of actions and outcomes. Nothing I say, however, precludes my analysis being extended to omissions or, perhaps, character traits – although both these possibilities introduce further complexities, such as a requirement that the subject of ascriptions has a recognisable ‘character’, and an investigation of these complexities is beyond the scope of the current project.