Philosophy 360: Business Ethics

1. Philosophy 360: Business Ethics Chapter 6

2. Varieties of Responsibility • Causal Responsibility: One is causally responsible for an event when one has caused or taken part in causing the event. • Moral Responsibility: Includes causal responsibility as well as: • Knowingly performing the action • Willingly preforming the action

3. Excusing Conditions: • Actions precluding the possibility of causation • ‘Ought’ implies ‘can’. We are excused from moral responsibility if: • The action in question is impossible to perform • We do not have the required ability • The opportunity for performing the act is absent • The circumstances are beyond our control

4. Excusing Conditions: 2. Conditions Precluding or Diminishing Required Knowledge: • Excusable ignorance: would the average person of goodwill have known or considered the consequences in question? • Invincible ignorance: knowledge that we could not possibly possess.

5. Excusing Conditions: 3. Conditions Precluding or Diminishing Required Freedom • The absence of alternatives • Lack of control • External coercion • Internal coercion

6. Liability and Accountability • Liability and responsibility issues do not map directly onto responsibility, though there are parallels. • There is both a moral and legal sense of ‘liability’ and of ‘accountability’ • To be accountable is to be subject to a request for an accounting of one’s actions • To be liable is to be duty-bound to make good on harm to others.

7. Agent Responsibility • Agent responsibility applies when someone is acting on behalf of or at the direction (as an agent of) another. • Simple: The agent acts in such a way as to directly comply with the wishes of the client. • Fiduciary: The agent is entrusted in an autonomous way with the interests of the client

8. Role Responsibility • Role responsibility is a corollary of assuming a position, function, or role in society or an organization, including membership in a profession, class, or group with special obligations. • For both agent and role responsibility, both the agent and client have a degree of moral responsibility.

9. Feeling responsible vs. Being responsible • The complex relationships in which people find themselves often make it difficult to feel morally responsible for actions for which we are indeed responsible. • Sometimes this is the result of aspects of our psychology to which we ought to pay more attention (consider trolley/fat man case)

10. Corporations and formal organizations • It is clear that corporations and other formal organizations have legal responsibility, but in what sense, if at all, could they be claimed to possess moral responsibility?

11. The organizational view: • This view holds that nations, corporations, boards, etc. are, at most, legal entities, and that any talk of moral responsibility lies with each of its members. • This kind of reductionism is overly simplistic, and we clearly have cause to talk about nations or corporations as such acting badly. • However, we must be careful about how we use our terms when holding organizations responsible, accountable, or liable.

12. The Moral Person view: • This view holds the actions of individuals and all of the responsibilities, liabilities, and accountability apply straightforwardly to organizations. • So what is good for an individual to do is good for a corporation to do, and what is bad for an individual to do is bad for a corporation to do. • This squares with common experience in some sense, but does not adequately answer the extent to which corporate actions are the actions of individuals.

13. The Moral Actor view: • This view acknowledges that organizations are made up of many individuals, but seeks to refer to actions taken collectively by those individuals without regard for who they are. • A boycott, for example, morally criticizes an organization and by extension all of the individuals responsible for the organizational feature targeted by the boycott. • Consider also the language used in saying, “Iraq invaded Kuwait”.

14. The Moral Actor View • Moral responsibility must be assumed my some or all members of an organization. • When an organization is morally criticized, its members may rebut, refuse, reject or ignore the criticism. • Organizational features often psychologically inhibit its members from feeling responsible for actions for which they are responsible. • Organizations are often held responsible though their personnel is in flux.