Collective and corporate

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a new and interesting article on Collective Responsibility:

The notion of collective responsibility, like that of personal responsibility and shared responsibility, refers to both the causal responsibility of moral agents for harm in the world and the blameworthiness that we ascribe to them for having caused such harm. Hence, it is, like its two more purely individualistic counterparts, almost always a notion of moral, rather than purely causal, responsibility. But, unlike its two more purely individualistic counterparts, it does not associate either causal responsibility or blameworthiness with discrete individuals or locate the source of moral responsibility in the free will of individual moral agents. Instead, it associates both causal responsibility and blameworthiness with groups and locates the source of moral responsibility in the collective actions taken by these groups understood as collectives.

Since the notion of collective responsibility is part of what many contemporary philosophers refer to as group morality, it has undergone a great deal of scrutiny in recent years by methodological and normative individualists alike. Methodological individualists challenge the very possibility of associating moral agency with groups, as distinct from their individual members, and normative individualists argue that collective responsibility violates principles of both individual responsibility and fairness. Defenders of collective responsibility set out to show that the majority of critical arguments made about collective responsibility are unfounded and that collective responsibility, along with its assumptions of group intentions, collective actions, and group blameworthiness, is both coherent as an intellectual construct and fair to ascribe in at least some, if not all, cases.

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I have enormous reservations about collective responsibility absent some clear sign of formally constituted corporate personality. Groups can be held to a moral standard—as well as a legal (companies) or political (states) standard—but this usually means that there are rules that determine how individuals may join together into a group, create a moral, political or legal person, imbue that person with agency and advertise such agency to other groups and individuals so they may treat the new entity accordingly.

It is essential, for instance, in doing business with a company, that you know whether the individual merchant with whom you are doing business will answer for his part of the bargain with his own estate, or whether you will only be allowed to go after the company's goods. There is a difference between a bunch of people pooling their money together to make a purchase or provide a service and a duly constituted company making the same purchase or providing the same service; in each case you are dealing with a different set of "persons" and responsibility falls upon different people.

¶ Throughout, I mean "corporate" in a general sense: a series of individuals who consciously and formally constitute a collective body—and thus incorporate it. Commercial corporations are but one case of this phenomenon.

In this (as in so many other things) the best explanation of corporate personality and taxonomy of groups is given by Hobbes in Chapter XXII of Leviathan.

¶ That said, Hobbes treatment of corporate liability has been superseded by developments in corporate law. It is now possible for an agent to bind the company into debt, as long as he was acting within his delegated power. Still, ultra vires acts are usually the agent's sole responsibility, as in Hobbes's time. Hobbes did identify the crucial element in the limitation of responsibility, however: that those who contract with a corporate body be given notice of the "private Lawes" of the company, i.e. that publicity be ensured.

Now, corporate responsibility is very different from collective responsibility. For one, the former doesn't (necessarily) do away with methodological individualism. Also (and this may be a plus or a minus, depending on one's philosophical predilections) corporate responsibility is also more easily attributed and distributed. The very norms of the corporation (or the state, for that matter) determine who is liable for what, in what circumstances and to what extent. In cases where corporate rules don't cover a case, it is possible to fashion public norms that act as supplementary default provisions. Collective responsibility has none of the safeguards of publicity, which are essential to moral (and political and legal) order. It seems ambiguous, ad hoc.

This may, of course, be a point in its favor. Social life is messy and people may contribute to, and derive benefits from, unjust circumstances that are traceable to group membership without formally constituting a corporate entity. Racism, undoubtedly, is the clearest example of this. But often, as in the case of racism, diverse individuals actually come together in formal bodies to perpetuate their benefits and enforce the injustices of the system. Thus, the Confederacy, the Ku Klux Klan, the whole legal structure of the Jim Crow South have enough formality in their constitution to allow liability to be determined and imposed.

Whether this limits the reach of morality, politics and law to the epiphenomena of social injustice is a valid question, but one that may be answered in two ways: either by accepting an unstable vagueness in our moral language (as in invoking indeterminate notions of incorporate collective responsibility), or by acknowledging that there are limits to the our moral language, limits that require complex strategies and indirect action, but that may better ensure lasting results.