When a tiger takes a small child, people usually don't consider it to be an evil being. It's doing what tigers do. Animals are not moral agents; only people are. By the same token, while organizations may have agency, they are not moral agents. It’s an error to think of them as good or evil. (For a contrary view asserting that artificial agents, primarily computer systems but also organizations, can be moral agents in some sense, see Floridi & Sanders, 2004.) (References at the end.)
Context
Dale Hatfield recently sponsored a dinner conversation for a dozen of us about the intersection of tech and mythology at the Greenbriar Inn. Mark Gross generously covered the drinks. Dale and I subsequently had a fascinating email exchange. This note tries to summarize one of our threads. Any misrepresentations, errors, and omissions are mine.
Demonizing corporations
Towards the end of the lively discussion at the Greenbriar, Dale said it bothered him that people so used the term “corporation” as a dirty word. He was puzzled by why companies are demonized, given that many of them bring good to the world
He has a point. In some circles, particularly on the Left, corporations—meaning large, for-profit companies—are routinely described as evil. Why do we do this? First, corporations do indeed harm people and a big corporation can harm more people than a small one. As one of the dinner guests pointed out, we feel we’re at their mercy. Justice Louis Brandeis, a fierce critic of monopolies and large corporations, talked about “the curse of bigness.” The visibility of big corporations also lead to salience bias.
Second, and more interesting to me, demonizing corporations implies we think of them as moral agents.
Bad actors beyond big companies
Both these reasons are misguided. First, while a big company can harm more people than a small one, almost all companies are small. According to data from the Small Business Administration, small businesses (defined as those with fewer than 500 employees) account for 44% of GDP and employ 45% of American workers. The aggregate harm caused by all small companies is therefore presumably of a similar scale to the harm caused by all large ones. However, news coverage of the harm caused by small companies is usually local and therefore less salient than the national coverage of harms caused by large corporations.
Small companies can cause real harm. Dale recalled a case in Boulder where a tiny service firm run by a husband and wife reportedly cut a salesperson’s commissions and redirected the savings into buying themselves a luxury vehicle. The psychological toll on the salesperson was so profound that he took his own life. Clearly, ethical failures aren’t limited to large-scale entities. Sometimes the harm is intimate, invisible, and inflicted without institutional buffers.
My argument may be futile because, in practice, people overwhelmingly view large corporations negatively and small businesses positively. In a January 2024 Pew study of Americans’ views of different national institutions, 86% of respondents said small businesses have a positive effect on the ways things are going these days (with 12% negative) and 68% said large corporations had a negative effect (29% positive).
It is also not just for-profit companies that cause harm. Non-profits like charities and religious organizations can also injure people, like large scale sexual abuse, toxic workplace culture, and misappropriating funds.
Dale suggested that we need to use fine-grained distinctions to properly explore how organizations behave in morally freighted ways. The term corporation covers a wide spectrum, including for-profit corporations (public, private, or close), non-profit corporations (public benefit, mutual benefit, and religious), state-owned enterprises, hybrid corporations like B corps and social enterprises, professional corporations like law firms, cooperatives, holding companies, shell companies, and municipal corporations. Even the boards of for-profit companies not limited to only seeking short-term gain; they can consider broader impacts when those are tied to long-term value. B Corps are built to explicitly consider environmental and social goals. There are also powerful organizations that are not corporations, from universities to government agencies to states. All of them can potentially cause harm on a large scale.
Susan Tonkin observed (after reading a draft) that Dale’s suggestion points to an empirical question: Which kinds of organization cause what kinds of harm, and how much? Are important categories not being regulated? (Many harms have been legislated for, including the abuse of monopoly power, fraud, invasion of privacy, and pollution.)
Corporations are not moral agents
As for the second reason, thinking of corporations as moral agents: While organizations of all kinds, especially large enough ones, can behave like agents, they are no more moral agents than tigers are. Even though agentic organizations contain people, they are not themselves human.
We can and should hold people morally accountable for corporate harms (though only to the extent that they were directly responsible for it, for instance as knowing, willing, and uncoerced actors, as authorizers, or as organizational designers, cf. List 2021).
We should also hold organizations to account, even if moral judgments aren’t appropriate. If we give in to our propensity to look for moral agents, we may focus too much on punishing people and not enough on disciplining organizations. Vilifying reprehensible leaders is necessary but it shouldn’t stop us imposing penalties on their organizations, too.
Coda: Animals as moral agents
Returning to the opening example, most people don’t consider tigers to be morally responsible, though they may demand that it is destroyed if it kills people (CSMonitor). Susan Tonkin suggested the term moral innocent to describe agents who are not moral agents. (This concept differs from moral innocence, see e.g. Goldberg, 2015.)
It gets more complicated with animals we live with, like dogs. We might consider a dog that harms a child to be evil, or one that rescues a child as noble; we might even put a pig on trial. I suspect that familiarity and proximity of these animal agents make it more likely that we treat them as moral agents, because through anthropomorphism, we come to think of them as somehow human. However, I suspect that on calm reflection, most people would agree that even household animals are not moral agents.
References
Floridi, L., & Sanders, J. W. (2004). On the Morality of Artificial Agents. Minds and Machines, 14(3), 349–379. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:MIND.0000035461.63578.9d
Goldberg, Z. J. (2015). Moral Innocence as Illusion and Inability. Philosophia, 43(2), 355–366. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-014-9580-4
List, C. (2021). Group agency and artificial intelligence. Philosophy and Technology, 34(4), Article 4. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-021-00454-7
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