Collective Moral Responsibility

As a social practice, as well as a topic for philosophical analysis,
moral responsibility has been reserved primarily for actions occurring
in the scope of interpersonal relationships, such as those between
friends, family members, co-workers, professionals and their clients,
and neighbors. Consequently, the harm or injury at issue is private
harm sustained by an individual and resulting from the actions or
inactions of another individual. There is growing concern in
contemporary societies about locating moral responsibility for
widespread or collective harms affecting large numbers of people or
even entire communities. An oil spill, the manufacture of a defective
product, corruption in a government agency, or the unethical and/or
illegal manipulation of elected officials by interest groups, are
examples of circumstances in which harm can be extremely widespread.
It is infrequent that harm can be clearly attributed to the particular
actions or inactions of specific individuals in such cases.

1. Feinberg's Typology of Collective Moral Responsibility Arrangements

Collective responsibility extends moral accountability beyond the
relatively narrow scope of interpersonal relationships, but it remains
a contested topic in moral philosophy. Joel Feinberg (1968) describes
and compares four distinct and logically possible types of collective
or group moral responsibility arrangements. These are: group liability
without fault, group liability with noncontributory fault,
contributory group fault: collective and distributive, and
contributory group fault: collective but not distributive. It is the
fourth of these types that has attracted the most attention from
scholars during the past several decades, and it is this type that is
the most relevant for addressing widespread or collective harms where
no culpable individual or individuals are identifiable. Thus, it is
this fourth arrangement that will be the subject of the subsequent
sections of this essay.

Feinberg first describes the collective responsibility arrangement,
group liability without fault. According to this conception, a whole
group is held morally responsible for the actions of one or several of
its members. This type of collective responsibility usually involves a
significant degree of solidarity among group members. This sort of
solidarity is increasingly difficult to find in modern,
technologically advanced, mass societies. The ascendancy of
individualism as a primary factor in the way in which people perceive
themselves and their relationships with others has been a dominant
trend, at least in the West, since the Reformation and later the
Enlightenment. Feinberg notes that since liability, as well as shame,
guilt, and the effects of any punishment directed at the group, will
be borne by each and every member as a result of the wrongdoing of one
or a few, the liability of all of the others will be vicarious.

Vicarious liability, whether in ethics or the law, is a responsibility
arrangement in which the party held to be liable to punishment or
other responsive measures is not the party that performed the morally
or legally faulty action that caused some harm or other untoward
consequence. An example of vicarious liability applied to individuals
is the assumption in some organizational settings that the person at
the top of the hierarchy of authority is ultimately liable for the
actions of the organization and its members. In military settings, for
instance, the commanding officer on whose "watch" harm or wrongdoing
occurred is held liable independently of any liability ascribed to
some lower ranking soldier(s) whose behavior actually caused the harm
in question. If the commanding officer has not engaged in any
substandard behavior that contributed to the harm, then his/her
liability is purely vicarious. In some cases under the law, parents
are held liable for the actions of their minor children. But in many
such cases, the parents do properly bear at least partial
responsibility for their children's wrong or harmful behavior, along
with vicarious liability, due to negligent or otherwise morally faulty
parenting.

For the most part, group liability without fault is an arrangement
that goes directly against contemporary moral intuitions and the
principles of individual agency and personal responsibility. Clearly
there have been situations and there continue to be places in which a
group's solidarity and common sense of identity and purpose, which
this arrangement both depends upon and reinforces, can be in the
interest of a group's survival. Thus, for example, in parts of Africa
and central Asia where life is difficult, the physical environment is
challenging, and tribe and clan remain the primary social units, it is
accepted practice for a family, a tribe, or a clan to be held liable
and punished for wrongdoing perpetrated by one of its members. In
1914, Austria held Serbia collectively responsible for the
assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by an individual Serb whose
actions had no connection to the Serbian government.

In Feinberg's second collective responsibility arrangement, a group is
said to bear liability with noncontributory fault when an entire group
is held to be responsible for the morally faulty behavior of every
member of the group, although it is only the faulty behavior of some
or a few which ultimately results in harm or injury to others. The
practice of drinking alcohol and driving is an example of this second
arrangement. This risky behavior fortunately causes harm less often
than it occurs. Persons who drink to the point of impairment or beyond
and drive, but do not cause an accident as a result, are lucky. From a
moral perspective, since it is only luck that separates members of the
drinking drivers group who cause harm from members who do not, each
member bears some degree of guilt and moral taint. It is the
willingness of every one of the drinking-drivers to engage in behavior
likely to cause harm that justifies liability for the whole group, and
this group liability is independent of the additional individual
liability of alcohol-impaired drivers whose risky behavior actually
results in harm.

According to Feinberg's third arrangement, contributory group fault:
collective and distributive, group responsibility is the sum of all
individual responsibility. Once the blameworthiness of each individual
involved in causing harm or acting wrongly is aggregated, there is no
remainder whatsoever that is ascribable to the group, independently of
its members. Unlike the first arrangement, there is no vicarious
liability involved, because each individual is responsible for the
harm or wrongdoing in question. In most cases of this type, degrees of
individual responsibility will vary and will depend on the degree and
kind of contribution each member of the group made to the untoward
outcome. Feinberg uses an example of one thousand experienced swimmers
relaxing on a beach as a man in the water begins to shout for help.
There is no lifeguard on duty, the shouts for help are audible to all,
but not one of the swimmers on the beach responds to help the man.
This is a case of contributory group fault that is collective and
distributive. For group responsibility to be of this type, the group
must lack an identity, internal solidarity, or any kind of formal or
informal structure and cohesiveness. Groups (more correctly referred
to as organizations) that do possess these characteristics fall under
Feinberg's fourth and final type of collective responsibility. In this
third type, moral responsibility is aggregated individual
responsibility, not the responsibility of the whole group as an
entity, independent of individual members. Groups often referred to as
random collectives, such as mobs or crowds, are those appropriate for
the application of this third arrangement.

The final type of collective responsibility is the only one of the
four in which culpability is not reducible. This fourth type,
contributory group fault: collective but not distributive, is an
arrangement which provides for group moral responsibility that is
independent of any responsibility or moral fault ascribable to all or
any of its individual members. It is the group itself that is at fault
and the group's moral responsibility is not equivalent to the sum of
the responsibilities of its members. Group moral responsibility of
this type is a concept that allows the entire issue of widespread harm
associated with organizational activities to be treated differently in
many respects from the approach that has been dominant. More
individualistic assumptions have tended to prevail in both morality
and the law, and these assumptions have informed social practice in
cases of widespread harm involving large organizations. Also, as
mentioned above, the whole focus of questions of moral responsibility,
blameworthiness, and punishment has been primarily on individual
actions in the context of interpersonal relationships. In modern
societies, the tremendous power of large formal organizations, when
exercised negligently or recklessly, not only presents the potential
for widespread harm, but the very nature of bureaucratic organization,
whether public or private, obscures the specific contributions of
individual group members to harm or wrongdoing. Group moral
responsibility and the related notion of group moral agency have
probably received the considerable amount of scholarly attention they
have because this fourth type is considered more controversial than
the other three of Feinberg's collective moral responsibility
arrangements. If a group, separate from its members, can be morally
responsible and liable to punishment, concerns regarding the moral
status of such groups are raised, including what similarities and
differences in moral status exist between groups and individual human
agents. Further, if groups can be morally responsible agents, regarded
as entities distinct from their members, questions about their
ontological status are also raised. Although such metaphysical
questions are beyond the scope of this essay, issues regarding the
moral status of groups will be addressed in the next section.
2. Positions For and Against Organizational Moral Responsibility

As the debate concerning the moral status of groups, and in
particular, formal organizations and especially corporations, has
evolved, three broad positions have been developed. First, there are
various versions of methodological individualism, all of which imply
that formal organizations cannot be held morally responsible, and that
they have no moral status beyond their individual members. Second,
there is the position that such organizations are full-fledged moral
persons capable of being held morally responsible and of possessing
the same rights and privileges as any other (e.g. human) members of
the moral community. Finally, there are a number of related positions
that fall somewhere between these first two, i.e. individualism and
moral personhood.

Methodological or atomistic individualism holds that all statements
and explanations referring to organizations, organizational actions,
intentions, motives, beliefs, or the like, can be restated with no
loss of meaning using terms referring only to individual humans.
Consequently, only individuals, not organizations, have a metaphysical
status that qualifies them as morally responsible agents. It is
necessary that organizations be entities whose actions, as well as the
intentions, beliefs, interests, or goals upon which these actions are
predicated are not reducible to human actions and predicates in order
for them to bear ascriptions of responsibility and blame.

Manuel Velasquez (1983), focusing specifically on corporations,
presents a fairly straightforward individualistic viewpoint. A
corporation, in spite of its organizational complexity, is ultimately
a group of human beings engaged among themselves in various specific
occupational/professional relationships that each believes to be in
his/her self-interest. Corporate actions result from policies and
procedures intentionally designed by members of the corporation to
achieve specific goals. When harm or wrongdoing occurs, individual
members are morally responsible in proportion to the degree each
participated in policy formulation, implementation, or oversight.
Velasquez does support vicarious liability for corporations in cases
in which punishable humans are absent and/or in the interest of
compensating the victims of corporate malfeasance.

An interesting version of the individualistic challenge to corporate
collective or organizational moral responsibility has been presented
by the agency theory of Michael Keeley (1981) and has its ideological
roots in classical liberalism and the economic theory of F.A. Hayek. A
corporation, for Keeley, is a contractual nexus, representing mutually
self interested human contractors. Central to this nexus, shareholders
hire managers and directors in order to maximize their financial
investments, and these agents for the shareholders are themselves also
motivated by various, chiefly financial, incentives. Viewing a
corporation as nothing more than the context or the arena for the
voluntary, self-interested dealings of various individual human
actors, renders questions concerning the nature of a corporation as
some sort of independent entity, simply irrelevant. For Keeley, the
only intentions are individual human intentions. The goals that guide
corporate actions and the various functions of its members are an
inseparable admixture of overlapping individual goals.

John Ladd (1970) has described formal organizations as "machines" in
order to emphasize the constraints on their options for action. Even
the most complex machine is only capable of performing those functions
that it has been designed or programmed to undertake. An organization
must be capable of non-programmed behavior, such as responding
constructively to moral blame or disapprobation, to qualify as a
morally responsible agent. According to Ladd, non-programmed action is
not in the repertoire of either an organization or a machine. In his
view, organizations have neither moral responsibilities nor moral
rights. Ironically, with the advances in artificial intelligence since
Ladd proposed the analogy between organizations and machines, it is
now, more than ever, a matter of debate whether computers are capable
of the kind of thinking upon which non programmed actions are
predicated.

Meir Dan-Cohen (1986) has proposed a thought experiment in which all
the employees of a corporation, including management, are replaced by
computers that are responsible, in addition to more mundane functions,
for all planning and decision making. He believes that such a
development is both conceivable and credible, and that the replacement
of humans by computers would have little effect on the actual
operations of the firm. The point of Dan-Cohen's "personless
corporation" thought experiment is to present the metaphor of an
intelligent machine as a heuristic device that he believes is better
suited for understanding the unique nature of formal organizations
than alternatives, such as Ladd's metaphor of a non-thinking machine.
Ladd's metaphor suggests that organizations are incapable of the kinds
of considerations, decision making, and non-programmed responses to
moral evaluation necessary for an entity to qualify as a morally
responsible agent. Of course, the choice of a metaphor for
organizations is more likely to reflect one's already formed
conception of organizations than it is to provide a basis for
developing an alternative one.

The individualist elements in liberal political culture have strongly
influenced the ways in which both philosophers and social scientists,
working in the Anglo-American tradition, have understood the nature of
corporations and other formal organizations. They also help to explain
why the notion of collective moral responsibility applied to
organizations has not been as widely accepted as might otherwise be
the case. Until modern organizational theory emerged in the 1960's and
70's, the aggregationist or reductionist approach to organizations
dominated both the empirical and normative perspectives. It has become
increasingly evident to many students of organizational behavior that
a view that explains organizations completely in terms of the actions
and the interactions of individual humans is incapable of fully and
accurately describing important organizational properties.

Individualistic positions, such as those of Velasquez, Keeley, and
Ladd, fail in at least two ways to adequately account for important
organizational features. First, the relation between an organization
and its members is a purely contingent, rather than a necessary one.
Members may join and leave an organization, but the organization
persists. Usually, an organization predates the membership of any
particular individual, and therefore new members are socialized to
conform to an already existing structure. Second, while it is true
that an organization (with the exception of ones, such as Dan-Cohen's
fictional "personless corporation") can only take action if its
individual human members take actions, it is not the case that the
reasons that organizations have for what they do are reducible to the
reasons and motives of their members. An individualistic view, i.e.,
one that conceives of formal organizations as ultimately being
socially complex aggregates of individuals, is unable to account for
the distinctive normative features that organizations possess.

Increasingly, organizations are being viewed as something greater than
the sum of those individuals who are their members at a particular
point in time. An organization is an entity that is not equivalent to
any determinate set of individuals. A holistic (as opposed to
atomistic) conception of organizations as distinct and distinctive
social entities makes possible an appreciation of moral dimensions
that were previously obscured.

The position staked out by Peter French (1979) on the status of
corporations has been particularly influential and is widely cited in
the relevant literature. Although French's theoretical focus is
chiefly on corporations, he notes that the elements of his position
apply to formal organizations in general. The heart of his position is
the claim that corporations are intentional agents that are morally
responsible for the consequences of both their actions and omissions.
Additionally, he asserts that they are "full-fledged" moral persons.
French obviously represents the second of the three broad positions on
organizational moral status outlined at the outset of this section,
and he claims specifically that as full-fledged moral persons,
corporations have all the same rights, duties, and privileges as human
members of the moral community. It is this claim that is the most
controversial feature of his position. The core of French's argument
is the possession by a corporation or other formal organization of a
functioning internal decision structure (IDS). It is this structure
that makes corporate decisions and actions possible by coordinating,
subordinating, and synthesizing the actions and intentions of various
individual human members of the organization and by transforming them
into a corporate action taken for truly corporate reasons. An IDS is
the feature that makes it possible for a corporation to adjust and
respond constructively to moral blame, censure, or taint. French
describes an IDS as being composed of two elements: an organizational
or responsibility flow chart that delineates stations and levels
within the formal corporate power structure and rules, usually
contained in corporate policy statements, that guarantee the
recognizability of decisions as authentic corporate decisions. It is
such a decision structure that provides continuity in the identity of
an organization as changes in individual membership are constantly
occurring. In direct opposition to the ontology of methodological
individualism, this conception of formal organizations presents them
as entities whose actions and intentions are not reducible to the
actions and intentions of individuals. It is important to note that
French makes it clear that he believes that holding a whole
corporation morally responsible in no way prevents or obscures
ascriptions of individual responsibility, aimed at all or several
individual corporate employees, for any harm or wrongdoing in
question.

It can be objected to French's position that his definition of a
corporation's IDS is overly formalistic and places too great an
emphasis on those features that make it logically valid to attribute
actions and moral responsibility to the corporate entity. In
particular, his emphasis on corporate recognition rules, whether
embedded in policies or in procedures, may be taken to imply that the
rules that authorize the description of a particular decision or
action as corporate are anterior to the decision or action. Such an
account risks lending support to Ladd's account of corporations as
structurally constrained, complex, non-thinking machines which lack
moral status. A more sociologically realistic, less logically
formalistic description of the IDS would make it more clear how, in
the ongoing process of corporate decision making, standard operating
procedures and corporate policy are themselves modified and often
changed greatly. In corporations, as in legislative bodies or
administrative agencies, negotiations over the "rules" by which things
are done in the name of the whole organization are most often at the
heart of the issues in which individual organization members consider
themselves to have the most at stake. An action is a collective rather
than an individual one, not because it conforms to a rule, but because
it is the outcome of individuals acting in various roles within the
formal and informal aspects of the organizational power structure, and
because the action is capable of generating consensus among members of
the organization that it is consistent with the organization's goals
and needs.

The most serious objection to French's position challenges his claim
that corporations and other relevantly similar organizations are
full-fledged moral persons with the same rights and privileges as
individual humans. This claim is controversial indeed. Being
responsible and possessing rights are not correlative moral
attributes. In fact, French describes corporations as human inventions
whose primary purpose is to meet human needs more efficiently and
plentifully than economic arrangements that preceded them. Such a
description underscores the instrumental nature of corporations and
the priority of human over organizational interests. This description
also does not seem to support an equality of moral rights for
corporate and individual agents.

Finally, a third set of positions rejects both a strict
individualistic interpretation of organizations at one end of the
spectrum, as well as rejecting moral personhood at the other end.
Thomas Donaldson (1982), discussing the moral status of corporations
specifically, presents a very significant distinction between moral
agency and moral personhood. He believes that corporations (and formal
organizations generally) are moral agents capable of bearing
ascriptions of responsibility, but unlike humans, are not moral
persons or full fledged members of the moral community as French
asserts. Donaldson specifies two conditions required to qualify an
entity as a moral agent: (1) the capacity to include moral
considerations in its decision making and (2) the capacity to maintain
and modify its IDS in order to maximize its likelihood of achieving
its goals. Donaldson conceives of corporations as having obligations
of two classes: direct and indirect. Direct obligations are formal,
explicit, and are often contained in written contracts, such as
collective bargaining agreements or legal statutes. Indirect corporate
moral obligations are less straightforward and unambiguous than direct
ones. A firm's indirect obligations are those owed to constituencies,
such as the members of a community in which the firm operates and
conducts business, or to the citizens of foreign countries where it
might also operate and do business. In some foreign locations,
relevant legal and regulatory guidelines may often be lax, poorly
enforced, or even nonexistent. Such circumstances require a
corporation to exercise independent moral decision making that fall
within the purview of indirect obligations. Donaldson proposes the
idea of a social contract between business firms and society as a
useful way of supporting better organizational decision making on
diverse issues that arise under the heading of a corporation's
indirect moral obligations.

David Risser (1996) calls his approach organizational moral
responsibility, because corporations are only one kind of formal
organization capable of bearing ascriptions of moral responsibility. A
key element in his position, as it is in Donaldson's and French's, is
the notion of an IDS and the manner in which they function in
organizations. The IDSs of most corporations, for example, tend to be
hierarchical and provide a highly unequal distribution of power among
employees. As an example of a very different kind of organization, a
democratic legislative body will have a comparatively flat IDS that
distributes power among members more equally than in most other
organizations, whether business, cultural, or political in nature.
Risser's definition of the IDS emphasizes those features that explain
how it functions to transform individual actions and motives into
organizational actions taken in pursuit of organizational goals. This
contrasts with French's conception of the IDS, which as discussed
above, gives primary emphasis to the way in which it makes possible
the logically valid redescription of the actions of the various
members of the organization as an organizational action.

Risser's position elaborates on French's argument that holding an
organization morally responsible as an entity, independent of its
members, in no way prevents holding individual members responsible for
the harm or wrongdoing in question. Two factors need to be assessed in
determining whether and to what degree an individual bears some share
of moral responsibility for group-caused harm. First, the extent of an
individual's actual participation in the harmful/wrong action,
including participation in the decision process leading to the action,
must be determined. Generally speaking, the power to participate in
organizational decisions will be a function of a person's position in
the IDS. Harm caused by organizations is usually the result of
negligence or recklessness, rather than purposeful or knowing conduct.
The second factor required for determining individual moral
responsibility is the level of knowledge a member had or should have
had concerning those organizational activities that caused harm.
Usually, the level of knowledge that it is reasonable to expect of an
organizational member will vary according to that employee's position
in the IDS. Individuals at the top of the decision hierarchy are
generally in the best location to gain information about the
organization and its activities and thus, are more likely to bear
moral responsibility when things go wrong.

Risser's position asserts a different moral status for corporations
and other formal organizations than for humans. Following Donaldson,
he classifies organizations as moral agents, but not as moral persons,
as does French. Although organizations are morally responsible agents,
they do not possess moral rights. This claim is based on the premise
that the goals that organizations pursue are in the service,
ultimately, of human interests. Organizations are human inventions,
and although they have interests that are not reducible to the
interests of their members, their existence, in the last analysis, is
justified by their service to individual human goals and/or to the
common interests of society. Organizations can and have been granted
legal rights, but such rights are justifiable only on grounds of
social utility.

The positions of Donaldson and Risser have received criticism from
both the methodological individualists, as well as from those
theorists who agree with French that formal organizations are
full-fledged moral persons. For the individualists, only individual
humans can be morally responsible. For individualists, holding
organizations, such as corporations, legally responsible is an
application of vicarious liability made possible by the fiction of
organizational personhood in the law. For French, organizational moral
responsibility implies full moral personhood and with regard to moral
rights, equivalent status for corporations, other relevantly similar
organizations, and humans. Those who agree with the full moral
personhood view will disagree with Donaldson and Risser, for both of
their positions imply a moral community in which the status of humans
and of organizations are quite different.
3. Punishment and the Regulation of Organizational Conduct

It is harm or injury caused by corporations that usually comes to mind
when one thinks about organizational misconduct. During the 1980's,
one of the highest profile cases of corporation-caused harm was the
oil spill in Alaska from the tanker, Exxon-Valdez. At the dawn of the
21st century, the financial malfeasance, such as represented by the
cases of the Enron and Tyco corporations, has come to be synonymous
for many with corporate wrongdoing. Thousands of employees,
particularly in the case of the now bankrupt Enron, lost their jobs
and their company pensions as it became clear that Enron and Worldcom
had intentionally misrepresented their true financial conditions by
submitting false and misleading accounting statements. It has been
troubling that most of the high-ranking executives who were
individually culpable for the accounting malfeasance at these
companies have been able to avoid legal punishment, but the collective
or corporate dimension of the wrongdoing is equally important to
address. Both individual executives and the corporations themselves
bear moral responsibility for submitting false financial information
with the intent of misleading investors, directors, regulators, and
others. In such cases, it is important that individuals in the
organization who are responsible for wrongdoing are punished, but it
is equally important that the whole organization itself be punished.

Moral responsibility implies liability to punishment or other
responsive behavior. In both legal and moral contexts, an individual
human being is the model on which punishment is based. Organizations,
such as corporations, are obviously very different entities from
humans. In the famous words of Edward, First Baron Thurlow, Lord
Chancellor of England: "Did you ever expect a corporation to have a
conscience, when it has no soul to be damned, and no body to be
kicked?" Until relatively recently, the unique features of
organizations have not been taken into account in developing
punishments for them. Traditional punishments have usually included
some sort of fine. Often, such fines are of an insignificant amount
given a corporation's financial resources and can simply be included
in its costs of doing business. Fines of more significant amounts can
rather easily be passed onto consumers. Newer strategies for corporate
punishment are receiving attention from moral philosophers and legal
practitioners.

Christopher Stone (1975) has made the case regarding corporate
punishments, that traditional punishments, such as fines, do not
address a firm's inner processes, and thus miss what is needed to
change future conduct. Stone argues that what is required are
sanctions which bring about changes in a culpable corporation's IDS.
An organization's IDS makes truly collective decisions and actions
possible, and it is during the decision making process that principles
and ethical values enter the various stages of organizational
deliberation. The organizational punishments most likely to deter
future misconduct are those designed to directly or indirectly affect
changes in the IDS of a culpable group. Stone asserts that traditional
organizational sanctions, such as fines, are particularly ineffective
in this respect. Traditional sanctions only bolster the view that the
inner workings of a corporation are a "black box", beyond the reach of
organizational punishments. Newer interventionist approaches have been
proposed and several have been used in the sentencing of corporations.

One proposal, an IDS warning system (Risser 1989), has the goal of
preventing harm or wrongdoing from occurring in the first place. An
IDS is the "character" of an organization, and as character faults in
an individual can help to explain morally substandard behavior in
humans, faults in an organization's IDS are essential in understanding
the sources of corporate malfeasance. As French observes, corporate
IDSs are epistemically transparent. Corporate goals, policies, and
standard operating procedures, as well as organizational flow charts,
and the formal steps in reaching a truly collective decision, are open
for examination, review, and evaluation. Of course, informal lines of
communication and relationships of power do develop to some extent in
all organizations. Such informal lines of communication and power can
be quite influential in an organization and attach themselves to an
IDS in a manner analogous to a vine growing on a garden trellis.
Students of organizational behavior can gain a sophisticated
understanding of both formal and informal aspects of the decision
making process in an organization. They can also become expert at
discovering the kinds of structural faults that increase the
likelihood of morally flawed decisions and harmful actions. Often,
bureaucrats in public regulatory agencies, who work closely with
particular corporations on a regular basis, are in ideal positions to
notice structural flaws. For example, one level of a firm
manufacturing medical equipment may place an unrealistic deadline on
the unit responsible for completing a product's design so that actual
product assembly can commence as soon as possible. Under overly strict
time constraints, the design team has tacit, subtle incentives to cut
corners, suppress negative information, and underestimate any
potential safety risks presented by the new product. Behavior of this
kind ultimately threatens the quality and integrity of the final
product. A knowledgeable outside observer can often easily recognize
the inherent danger such organizational circumstances create. It
should not be difficult to institutionalize the issuance of IDS
warnings. It would then be left up to corporations, motivated by both
moral duty and self interest, to voluntarily make appropriate
structural changes.

Social audits are a way which corporations concerned with socially
responsible conduct can receive objective assessments of their ethical
performance, and there has been significant growth among companies
offering social audit services. On a yearly, or perhaps more frequent
basis, the audit firm, using various research techniques, will rate
the corporation being audited on a number of important dimensions,
such as truth in advertising, commitment to environmentally-protective
operations, or an established record of treating employees fairly.
Neither IDS warnings nor social audits are punishments, although a
court, following criminal or civil adjudication, could require a firm
to undergo a social audit and perhaps even to publicize the results.

Corporate adverse publicity campaigns are another form of
organizational punishment. This approach was first proposed in Great
Britain in the 19th century. Peter French's updated version, the
"Hester Prynne Sanction"(1985), requires a corporation to undertake
the effort and financial burden of advertising, i.e. publicizing its
wrongdoing. The sentencing court would have the final authority over
the length and content of this sort of negative publicity campaign.
For French, the adverse publicity sanction is grounded in a
shame-based moral perspective (as opposed to the guilt-based
perspective that grounds much of Western morality). French believes
that the motivation to expiate shame through constructive response at
the corporate level will increase the likelihood of socially
responsible behavior in the future. Regardless of the role shame may
play, corporations place tremendous economic and symbolic value on
good images and will frequently institute structural changes aimed at
regaining their reputations.

Finally, changes in corporate governance, either court imposed or
voluntary, can significantly affect corporate conduct. Changing the
size of the board of directors in order to be able to add "outside"
directors has received a good deal of attention in theory and in
practice. Because such a change does reach into the corporation's
inner workings at an important level, Christopher Stone has been a
strong advocate of this approach. An outside director is a director
who is neither a manager nor a shareholder in the corporation.
Ideally, the board of directors exercises an important oversight
function for a firm, a function analogous to that which the conscience
serves in an individual human. In fact, many if not most boards are
rather passive and routinely authorize all of the decisions and the
policies which top management proposes with little or no scrutiny. The
addition of outside directors may help to encourage a more active and
socially responsible role for directors. Since outside directors come
from the same business environment as well as the same educational and
social backgrounds as "inside" directors, it has been suggested that
outside directors be drawn from constituencies, such as employees, the
community at large, or groups concerned with the well-being of the
environment.

A 1975 case involving the Northrop Corporation provides an example of
court-imposed corporate restructuring. A suit initiated by a Northrop
shareholder and the Center for Law in the Public Interest revealed a
13-year pattern of illegal political contributions and payoffs, both
in the U.S. and abroad, by the firm. Among the terms of the agreement
reached between Northrop and the plaintiffs was a requirement that the
board of directors be enlarged and that four new outside directors,
subject to judicial approval, be elected. In a further measure, also
aimed at preventing similar illegal actions by Northrop, the agreement
mandated restructuring and strengthening the social audit committee of
its board of directors.

Stone (1975) presents his own detailed proposal for creating two types
of public directorships: general public directorships and special
public directorships. The first type would be the more common of the
two and would apply to all U.S. corporations beyond a certain asset
threshold. In short, general public directors would be responsible for
collecting all relevant information necessary to anticipate and deal
with any moral and/or legal problems that arose. These directors would
also have responsibility for helping to identify and repair flaws in
the IDS that might lead to illegal or immoral conduct. Special public
directors would be added to a board in cases where a corporation has a
history of malfeasant conduct or cases in which there has been a
particularly intractable problem associated with corporate harm and
wrongdoing.

The dominant liberal democratic model of society is one containing two
distinct entities: a multitude of individual rights-bearing human
beings on one hand and the state on the other. Meir Dan-Cohen argues
that this model fails to recognize the distinctiveness and importance
of large organizations. Legal theory and practice have developed in a
way that recognizes the significance of organizations to a greater
degree than liberal democratic political thought does. For example,
according to the American Law Institute's Model Penal Code,
corporations, independent of their employees, are subject to criminal
charges (as they are to civil charges under tort and regulatory law).
The Code makes it clear that corporate criminal liability is not
merely a form of vicarious liability, and it supports the principle
that corporate liability does not protect individual corporate
employees from legal liability. Anglo American case law has also
developed in a direction that is supportive of the theory of
organizational moral responsibility. One of the more well known cases
of a corporation as a criminal defendant occurred in 1978, the year
that Ford Motor Co. was indicted on three counts of reckless homicide
by the state of Indiana.

The 1991 U.S. Sentencing Guidelines mandated ethics compliance
programs for all organizations found to be legally culpable. The
components of legal compliance programs are designed to influence an
organization's IDS and its future conduct. Measures, such as codes of
conduct, compliance officers, ethics training for employees, and
internal reporting systems that allow employees to report violations
and other ethically questionable activities without fear of
retribution, make it more likely that organizational decision making
will be morally and legally sound.

Organizational moral responsibility has important implications for
democratic theory and practice. Holding political officials and the
public bureaucracies they manage morally responsible for harm or
wrongdoing is as significant a mechanism for maintaining the
accountability of a government to its citizens as are free speech,
press, and democratic elections. Indeed, citizens have a duty to
assist in exercising such mechanisms. The corrupt or negligent
administration of a government program, the lax or tainted enforcement
of standards by an environmental protection agency or by an agency
empowered by Congress to protect consumers are examples of
organizational malfeasance in the political arena. It has been
suggested that the citizens of a representative democracy are
themselves ultimately morally responsible for the actions of their
governments. Elizabeth Wolgast (1992) has turned this position on its
head and has argued, as suggested above, that a representative
government requires the moral accountability of elected and appointed
officials to its citizens. Among the difficulties inherent in
establishing democratic accountability, is the challenging problem of
formulating mechanisms that integrate individual public officials and
governmental organizations into the legal system of a democratic
political system.

When society is seen as composed of individuals and organizations, and
the state is no longer conceived of as a monolithic structure, a more
sociologically accurate description of the state can emerge. The state
is actually a complex coalition of more or less independent
organizations (branches of government, agencies, departments,
commissions, etc.), each with its own IDS. Cases involving workers at
several nuclear weapons plants, run by the former Atomic Energy
Commission, whose health and safety were knowingly endangered by their
public sector employer have come to light over the years. During the
Clinton administration, a proposal was announced for Congress to
compensate thousands of nuclear defense workers who became ill due to
radiation and toxic chemical exposure. The compensation plan involved
3,000 workers who were negligently and in some cases, recklessly
exposed to dangerous nuclear and chemical ordnance components at
former bomb-making facilities in ten states.

The infamous Tuskegee syphilis study begun in 1932 by the U.S. Public
Health Service provides an example of harm caused knowingly (rather
than merely negligently or recklessly) to study subjects.
Approximately 700 African-American men in Tuskegee Alabama were
divided into two groups. One group was composed of men who were
infected with syphilis and the members of the other, the control
group, were not. Members of both groups were regularly monitored, but
none of the men with syphilis received appropriate medical treatment.
The ostensible goal of this study was to examine the natural course of
untreated syphilis. The subjects of the study were neither informed of
the nature of their illness, nor of the possible medical treatment
options. A class action suit, filed in the 1970's on behalf of the
survivors, resulted in no new law and avoided the issue of government
responsibility for the injuries and deaths that resulted from the
study. Each survivor received a settlement of about $40,000.

Until the U.S. Congress adopted the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) in
1946, civil actions against the federal government got nowhere in
court. The doctrine of sovereign immunity had meant that in the
strictest legal sense, the government simply could not commit a tort,
because no law recognized that possibility. The FTCA creates liability
for the government as a separate legal entity, but it creates no
individual liability applicable to public officials themselves. A
number of fairly recent Supreme Court cases have interpreted the FTCA
rather narrowly, and for the most part, the principle of sovereign
immunity continues to dominate the legal relationship of citizens to
their government. Dennis Thompson (1987) has outlined several very
strong arguments against the doctrine of sovereign immunity, and he
argues that legal liability and most importantly for him, the criminal
liability of individual public officials, is an essential component of
any approach to holding democratic governments accountable.
4. Conclusion

This essay has presented the four collective moral responsibility
arrangements outlined by Joel Feinberg, but it has discussed primarily
the last of these arrangements in which a group may be morally
responsible as a separate entity, independent of any of its members.
This type of collective responsibility has generated both controversy
and various objections. Its supporters, for the most part, see formal
organizations, such as corporations, as among the best examples of
whole groups that are morally responsible agents. Three fundamental,
but competing, positions on the moral status of organizations have
been discussed. This essay has examined some newer approaches to the
control and regulation of organizational, and particularly of
corporate conduct, which are based on the position that some types of
groups are morally responsible as entities separate from their
memberships. It has also suggested the applicability of Feinberg's
fourth arrangement, which has been called organizational moral
responsibility, to various political entities in a democratic system
of government. This possible application of collective moral
responsibility has, thus far, been discussed and debated to a much
lesser degree than its application to business corporations has.

The development of large, formal organizations and their evolution as
a means to more effectively further human interests represents a
distinctive and significant historical achievement. Many aspects of
modern life around the globe are dominated by powerful organizations.
In order to protect the rights and values of individual humans,
societies must develop moral and legal practices and mechanisms that
are suited to hold organizations accountable, particularly when they
cause widespread harm. Further, because organizational moral
responsibility also involves distinguishing the liability of the group
as a whole for harm caused from the liability of individual group
members, it is a conception that helps in framing and maintaining
normative distinctions that are necessary in order to preserve a
realistic sense of individual merit and responsibility in a world
increasingly dominated by organizations.
5. References and Further Reading
Arendt, Hannah, "Collective Responsibility", in Amor Mundi, ed. J.W.
Bernaver (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers (1987), p. 50.
Copp, David, "Collective Actions and Secondary Actions", American
Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 16 (1979), pp. 177–86.
Curtler, Hugh, Shame, Responsibility, and the Corporation (New York:
Haven Publications, 1986).
Dan Cohen, Meir, Rights, Persons, and Organizations (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1986).
Donaldson, Thomas, Corporations and Morality (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice Hall, 1982).
Feinberg, Joel, "Collective Responsibility", Journal of Philosophy,
vol. LXV, no. 21 (November 1968), pp. 222–51.
Fisse, Brent and Peter A. French, eds., Corrigible Corporations and
Unruly Law (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1985).
French, Peter A., ed., Individual and Collective Responsibility
(Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1973).
French, Peter A., Collective and Corporate Responsibility (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1984).
French, Peter A., "The Hester Prynne Sanction", Business and
Professional Ethics Journal, vol. 4, no. 2 (Winter 1985).
Goodpaster, Kenneth, "Morality and Organizations", in Ethical Issues
in Business (2nd ed.) eds., Thomas Donaldson and Patricia Werhane
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1983).
Jackall, Robert, Moral Mazes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
Keeley, Michael, "Organizations as Non Persons", Journal of Value
Inquiry, 15 (1981), pp. 149–55.
Ladd, John, "Morality and the Ideal of Rationality in Formal
Organizations", Monist, vol. 54, no. 1 (October 1970), pp. 488–516.
Ladd, John, "Corporate Mythology and Individual Responsibility",
International Journal of Applied Philosophy, vol. 2, no. 1 (Spring
1984).
May, Larry and Stacey Hoffman, eds., Collective Responsibility
(Savage: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991).
May, Larry, The Morality of Groups (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University
Press, 1987).
Risser, David T., "The Social Dimension of Moral Responsibility:
Taking Organizations Seriously", Journal of Social Philosophy, vol.
27, no. 1 (Spring 1996), pp. 189–207.
Risser, David T. (with co-authors: Peter A. French and Jeffrey
Nesteruk), Corporations in the Moral Community (Fort Worth: Harcourt
Brace College Publishers, 1992).
Risser, David T., "Punishing Corporations: A Proposal", Business and
Professional Ethics Journal, vol. 8, no. 3 (Fall 1989), pp. 83-92.
Sigler, Joy and Joseph Murphy, Interactive Corporate Compliance
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988).
Stone, Christopher, Where the Law Ends: The Social Control of
Corporate Behavior (New York: Harper and Row, 1975).
Thompson, Dennis, Political Ethics and Public Office (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987).
Velasquez, Manuel, "Why Corporations Are Not Morally Responsible for
Anything They Do", Business and Professional Ethics Journal, vol. 2,
no. 3 (Fall 1983).
Werhane, Patricia, "Formal Organizations, Economic Freedom and Moral
Agency", Journal of Value Inquiry, 14 (1980), pp. 43-50.
Wolgast, Elizabeth, Ethics of an Artificial Person: Lost
Responsibility in Professions and Organizations, (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 1992).