Overview
- The first book to focus exclusively on Corporate Moral Agency and its implications
- Provides a broad context for the analysis of corporate social responsibility, covering the disciplines of philosophy, economics and law
- Offers a contrarian perspective in a field that largely endorses corporate moral agency and corporate social responsibility
- Provides reasoned arguments in favor of a legal perspective
Part of the book series: Issues in Business Ethics (IBET, volume 44)
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Table of contents (11 chapters)
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Front Matter
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The Fallacy of Corporate Moral Agency
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Front Matter
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The Role of the Corporation in Society
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
- Attribution To A Corporate Structure
- Attribution To A Unanimously Intending
- Conditions for Moral Agency
- Conglomerate Collectivities And Corporate Moral Agency
- Corporate Internal Decision Structures
- Corporate Moral Agency
- Corporate Moral Agency And Responsibility Attribution
- Corporate Principal And Human Agent
- Corporate Proper Names And Responsibility
- Corporate Responsibility
- Corporate Social Responsibility
- Corporations and CSR
- Descriptive Claims Of The Nexus-Of-Contracts Theory
- Division Between Public And Private Role Responsibilities
- Legitimate And Illegitimate Corporate Moral
- Libertarian Prescription For Absolute Property
- Limited Liability Of Shareholders
- Moral Agency Conditions
- Moral Responsibility Attribution To A Collective Whole
- Peter French & Corporate Moral Agency Conditions
About this book
It is uncontroversial that corporations are legal agents that can be held legally responsible, but can corporations also be moral agents that are morally responsible? Part one of this book explicates the most prominent theories of corporate moral agency and provides a detailed debunking of why corporate moral agency is a fallacy. This implies that talk of corporate moral responsibilities, beyond the mere metaphorical, is essentially meaningless. Part two takes the fallacy of corporate moral agency as its premise and spells out its implications. It shows how prominent normative theories within Corporate Social Responsibility, such as Stakeholder Theory and Social Contract Theory, rest on an implicit assumption of corporate moral agency. In this metaphysical respect such theories are untenable. In order to provide a more robust metaphysical foundation for corporations the book explicates the development of the corporate legal form in the US and UK, which displays how the corporation has come to have its current legal attributes. This historical evolution shows that the corporation is a legal fiction created by the state in order to serve both public and private goals. The normative implication for corporate accountability is that citizens of democratic states ought to primarily make calls for legal enactments in order to hold the corporate legal instruments accountable to their preferences.
Reviews
“Anyone interested in the questions of corporate moral and social obligations will find a great deal of value in Fallacy. Among other things, it provides an excellent survey of the many theories of corporate moral agency … . Fallacy is an interesting, useful addition to both the corporate moral responsibility and the corporate social responsibility literatures, and raises a number of issues that will need to be addressed as those literatures continue to develop.” (Kendy M. Hess, Business Ethics Quarterly, Vol. 26 (4), October, 2016)
Authors and Affiliations
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Fallacy of Corporate Moral Agency
Authors: David Rönnegard
Series Title: Issues in Business Ethics
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9756-6
Publisher: Springer Dordrecht
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, Philosophy and Religion (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
Hardcover ISBN: 978-94-017-9755-9Published: 29 May 2015
Softcover ISBN: 978-94-024-0146-2Published: 29 October 2016
eBook ISBN: 978-94-017-9756-6Published: 12 May 2015
Series ISSN: 0925-6733
Series E-ISSN: 2215-1680
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIV, 218
Number of Illustrations: 7 b/w illustrations
Topics: Ethics, Economic Theory/Quantitative Economics/Mathematical Methods, Theories of Law, Philosophy of Law, Legal History