Responsibility Incorporated

Speaker: Philip Pettit, Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values

Summary by Rahul Sagar, Graduate Fellow in Ethics 2005-2006

In this age of corporate scandals, Philip Pettit presented a much anticipated lecture on how a corporate entity can be held responsible for doing something in a manner analogous to the way individuals are held responsible. Pettit started the lecture by highlighting a particular example, namely the sinking of "The Herald of Free Enterprise’, a ship owned by P&O European Ferries, in Zeebrugge, Belgium on March 6, 1997. In this instance the ferry’s bow doors had been left open after departure and water flooded the car decks, thus causing the ferry to capsize. Subsequently, a public inquiry into the disaster led by Lord Justice Sheen concluded that ‘the body corporate was infected with the disease of sloppiness’. But when P&O eventually faced charges of ‘corporate manslaughter’ in 1989, the prosecution’s case failed because no senior member of the management team was found to have been ‘reckless’. It is this disconnect between individual and collective or corporate responsibility that served as the focus of Pettit’s lecture.

The thesis that Pettit sought to defend was that corporate agencies can be held autonomously responsible for their actions and decisions and that in such cases the members of the agency will inherit what he termed ‘member responsibility’ (as distinct from their individual ‘enactor’ responsibility). His particular concern was to identify the criteria that produce this ‘discontinuity’ between enactor and member responsibility. Toward this end, Pettit outlined three criteria of responsibility that corporations must satisfy in order to allow this distinction to be made.

The first criterion is ‘agent-plus-choice’, which lists the features a corporation is required to bear in order to be considered an ‘agent’. In particular, to be embodied with group agency, a corporation of Pettit’s view must endorse a constitution, which provides the group with a new ‘intentional center’ when faced with situations demanding choice and decision-making. The second criterion for corporate responsibility is ‘judgment-plus-evidence’, which comes into play when corporations cannot not merely aggregate the preferences of individual members due to the presence of dilemmas of social or collective choice and decision-making. In such instances of what Pettit termed ‘discursive dilemmas’, corporations must in fact create a new and distinct capacity for producing collective judgments. The third and final criterion is that this corporation, now endowed with agency and judgment, must also have ‘control-plus-reason’. That is, the corporate body must be in control of final choices and have the capacity to reason about the pros and cons of different choices.

Having outlined the criteria associated with identifying corporate responsibility, Pettit concluded by showing how utilizing these criteria can make sense of events such as the sinking of ‘The Herald of Free Enterprise’. In that case, a ‘responsibility gap’ opened up when a collectivity or corporation made a series of bad judgments that could not be ascribed to specific individuals. According to Pettit, this ‘gap’ is only filled by providing the above account of collective responsibility, which explains how a problem of ‘few’ or ‘no hands’ can make corporations rather than individuals responsible for choices and decisions and their respective outcomes.

Rahul Sagar, Graduate Fellow 2005-06