A long-standing and fundamental question in the field of business ethics concerns the status of corporate moral agency. Is it possible for a corporation to constitute a moral agent in the same way as an individual can? Many collectivist theories have attempted to answer this question in the affirmative. An influential contribution to this discussion is made by Christian List and Phillip Pettit in Group Agency: The Possibility, Design and Status of Corporate Agents (2011). In this work, the authors argue for the possibility of corporate moral agency by grounding it in certain rational capacities realizable both by individuals and corporations. Important for their project is the concept of incentive compatibility, taken from the literature on mechanism design. The authors introduce this concept as a desideratum for good organizational design, and as a component for the proper functioning of a corporate moral agent. In this paper, I give an account of and critically examine List and Pettit’s theory. Specifically, I problematize the two strategies presented by the authors in their program to demonstrate how this desideratum might be satisfied. The first strategy encounters problems when faced with impossibility results associated with judgment aggregation, familiar from the literature on social choice. The second strategy is complicated by inconsistencies that arise in connection to the underlying premises in regards to human psychology and rationality, established early on by the authors. This presents significant obstacles for the authors’ larger project. If both strategies fail, and a corporation is unable to reach a state of incentive compatibility, then it also fails to function properly as an agent according to List and Pettit’s own definitions. If an entity is unable to function properly as an agent, then, I argue, there seems to be no reason to attribute agency to it.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-531986 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Litvinov, Luke |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Avdelningen för praktisk filosofi |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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