Corporate Moral Agency, Positive Duties, and Purpose

A long-standing question in business ethics is whether business enterprises are themselves moral agents with distinct moral responsibilities. To date, the debate about corporate moral agency has focused on responsibility for past wrongdoing that involves violating negative duties (i.e., duties to refrain from certain actions). In this chapter, I explore what we can learn by focusing on positive duties to engage in specific actions, including rescue (e.g., aiding victims of natural disaster), beneficence (e.g., donating medicines), and justice (e.g., strengthening weak legal regimes). The aims of the chapter are twofold. The first is to advance the debate about corporate moral agency by broadening it to include questions about positive duties. The second is examine the case for justifying these sorts of positive duties by attributing moral agency to business enterprises. Such duties are controversial because they may require activities that come at the expense of profits. Attributing moral agency to business enterprises may be thought to avoid this controversy given that most theories of morality recognize positive duties on the part of all moral agents to help others even if at some cost to their own projects. In the end, I conclude that rather than defend such duties by way of assigning moral agency to business enterprises, we would do better to provide an account of the purpose of the for-profit business enterprises that is not simply about the pursuit of profit.