Zombies Incorporated

Bibliographic Data

ID20142294
AuthorsOlof Leffler (0000-0001-9073-2552, Universität Wien Vienna Austria, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume89
Issue5
Pages640-659
Publication date2023-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTheoria (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0040-5825 • E-ISSN: 1755-2567
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/theo.12484
OpenAlexW4383878290
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited41

How should we understand the relation between corporate agency, corporate moral agency and corporate moral patienthood? For some time, corporations have been treated as increasingly ontologically and morally sophisticated in the literature. To explore the limits of this treatment, I start off by redeveloping and defending a reductio that historically has been aimed at accounts of corporate agency which entail that corporations count as moral patients. More specifically, I argue that standard agents are due a certain type of moral concern, but corporate agents are not due that type of concern, so they are not agents of, at least, the standard type. Diagnosis: because corporations plausibly lack qualia, they are ‘zombie agents’ that mimic real agents. This explains why they are neither standard agents nor standard moral patients: they are not standard agents because they lack mental states, and because they lack experiences, they are, at best, morally notable rather than morally respectable. However, I then argue that we nevertheless have instrumental reasons to include them in our moral responsibility practices, both because that is what notability involves and bluffingly, and both when it comes to treating them as moral agents and as moral patients. Hence, we may treat corporations as part of our moral responsibility practices to a limited extent anyway

Agency (philosophy) · Business · Compatibilism · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Law and economics · Moral agency · Moral responsibility · Morality · Political science · Sociology · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Free Will and Agency · Law · Philosophy · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment

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