Morality, Ontology, and Corporate Rights

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Walt ◽  
Micah Schwartzman
Keyword(s):  
Moral Status ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Group Behavior ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Philosophical Literature ◽  
Corporate Rights ◽  
Intentional Agent ◽  
Moral Conception ◽  
Hybrid Character ◽  
Intentional Agents

Abstract Does the ontology of corporations matter for corporate rights? Much of the philosophical literature on corporate rights focuses on whether corporations are real entities, aggregations of individuals, or fictions to which rights or other entitlements can be ascribed. We argue that this focus is misplaced. Whether corporations have rights, and the sort of rights they have, is a question of moral theory. It is not fundamentally a matter of ontology, as F.W. Maitland thought, or a matter of legal or moral semantics, as H.L.A. Hart once argued. The going moral theory, not conceptual requirements or explanatory criteria, determines the conditions a corporation must satisfy to have various rights and duties. We argue that this truth is independent of the deontic, consequentialist, or hybrid character of the moral theory. This paper defends three claims. First, the ontological status of a group as an intentional agent is neither necessary nor sufficient for its moral status or entitlements. A moral theory in principle could recognize groups that are not intentional agents, and a group’s existence as an intentional agent does not by itself require moral recognition. A moral commitment to corporate rights and duties is therefore not determined by the indispensability of groups in explaining group behavior. Second, the substantive claims of a moral theory (understood broadly) determine the conditions for assigning rights and duties to corporations. Third, this moral conception of corporate rights has both legal and moral implications for the treatment of corporations.

scholarly journals Group Agency and Artificial Intelligence

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian List
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Moral Status ◽  
Intelligent Systems ◽  
Group Agency ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
Legal Personhood ◽  
The Social ◽  
Intentional Agents ◽  
Regulatory Challenges

AbstractThe aim of this exploratory paper is to review an under-appreciated parallel between group agency and artificial intelligence. As both phenomena involve non-human goal-directed agents that can make a difference to the social world, they raise some similar moral and regulatory challenges, which require us to rethink some of our anthropocentric moral assumptions. Are humans always responsible for those entities’ actions, or could the entities bear responsibility themselves? Could the entities engage in normative reasoning? Could they even have rights and a moral status? I will tentatively defend the (increasingly widely held) view that, under certain conditions, artificial intelligent systems, like corporate entities, might qualify as responsible moral agents and as holders of limited rights and legal personhood. I will further suggest that regulators should permit the use of autonomous artificial systems in high-stakes settings only if they are engineered to function as moral (not just intentional) agents and/or there is some liability-transfer arrangement in place. I will finally raise the possibility that if artificial systems ever became phenomenally conscious, there might be a case for extending a stronger moral status to them, but argue that, as of now, this remains very hypothetical.

Environmental Ethics

2021 ◽  
pp. 147-168
Author(s):  
Thaddeus Metz
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Ethics ◽  
Moral Status ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Moral Consideration ◽  
Intrinsic Properties ◽  
Communal Relationship

This chapter begins Part III, which argues that the relational moral theory of rightness as friendliness is a strong competitor to Western principles in many applied ethical contexts. Chapter 8 articulates and defends a novel, relational account of moral status, according to which an entity is owed moral consideration roughly to the degree that it is capable of being party to a communal relationship. One of its implications is that many animals have a moral status but not one as high as ours, which many readers will find attractive, but which utilitarianism and Kantianism cannot easily accommodate. Relational moral status also grounds a promising response to the ‘argument from marginal cases’ that animals have the same moral status as incapacitated humans: even if two beings have identical intrinsic properties, they can differ in the extent to which they can relate and hence differ in their degree of moral status.

Denying Corporate Rights and Punishing Corporate Wrongs

2015 ◽  
Vol 25 (04) ◽  
pp. 517-534 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy J. Sepinwall
Keyword(s):  
Moral Status ◽  
Moral Rights ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
Corporate Rights ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
Strategy I

ABSTRACT: Scholars addressing the moral status of corporations are motivated by a pair of conflicting anxieties: If corporations are not moral agents, we will be unable to blame them for their wrongs. But if corporations are moral agents, we will have to recognize corporate moral rights, and the legal rights that flow therefrom. In early and under-appreciated work, Tom Donaldson sought to allay both concerns at once: Corporations, he argued, are not moral persons, and so are not eligible for many of the rights that persons enjoy; but they are moral agents, and so ought to bear responsibility in many of the ways that persons do. This article offers a sympathetic critique of the Donaldsonian strategy. I argue that, as it has been elaborated, the strategy necessarily fails. Nonetheless the strategy embodies a worthy aim and so I seek to provide an alternative way to vindicate it.

Ethics, Personal Identity, and Ideals of the Person

1982 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Scheffler
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Side Constraints ◽  
Regulative Principle ◽  
Moral Conception ◽  
Moral Philosophers

It is not uncommon for contemporary moral philosophers to appeal, in support or in criticism of one moral theory or another, to supposed features of or facts about persons. Rawls, for example, maintains that ‘utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons,’ and that since ‘the correct regulative principle for anything depends on the nature of that thing,’ we should not expect utilitarianism to be the correct regulative scheme for human beings. Nozick, in a similar spirit, suggests that the deontological restrictions he calls ‘side constraints’ are desirable components of a moral conception because, without them, a moral scheme is unable to ‘sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that … [each individual] is a separate person,’ unable to take account of the fact that, with respect to each individual, ‘his is the only life he has.’ And Williams, to cite still another example, suggests that utilitarianism is a defective moral theory because ‘it cannot coherently describe the relations between a man's projects and his actions.'

Abortion and Ectogenesis: Moral Compromise

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 93-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Simkulet
Keyword(s):  
Women's Rights ◽  
Moral Status ◽  
Moral Obligation ◽  
Prima Facie ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Philosophical Literature ◽  
Moral Relevance ◽  
Moral Compromise ◽  
Letting Die

The contemporary philosophical literature on abortion primarily revolves around three seemingly intractable debates, concerning the (1) moral status of the fetus, (2) scope of women’s rights and (3) moral relevance of the killing/letting die distinction. The possibility of ectogenesis—technology that would allow a fetus to develop outside of a gestational mother’s womb—presents a unique opportunity for moral compromise. Here, I argue those opposed to abortion have a prima facie moral obligation to pursue ectogenesis technology and provide ectogenesis for disconnected fetuses as part of a moral compromise.

scholarly journals Choosing death: the moral status of suicide

1996 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Femi Oyebode
Keyword(s):  
Moral Status ◽  
Ethical Principles ◽  
Special Importance ◽  
Modem World ◽  
Moral Conception ◽  
Definition Of

Our moral conception of suicide is examined. It is argued that a neutral definition of suicide is difficult to achieve and that how we treat the Question of suicide shows what value we place on the sanctity of Me or on life as a means to other ends. The case is made that autonomy, the principle of self-governance, has acquired special importance in the modem world to me detriment of other ethical principles such as beneficence.

Conditional Obligations

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 365-390
Author(s):  
Tina Rulli ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Research Ethics ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Philosophical Literature

Some obligations are conditional such that act A is morally optional, but if one chooses A, one is required to do act B rather than some other less valuable act C. Such conditional obligations arise frequently in research ethics, in the philosophical literature, and in real life. They are controversial: how does a morally optional act give rise to demanding requirements to do the best? Some think that the fact that a putative obligation has a conditional structure, so defined, is a strike against its being a genuine obligation. I argue that conditional obligations are to be expected in a moral theory that has moral options.

The Paternalistic Argument against Abortion1

Hypatia ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Itzel Mayans ◽  
Moisés Vaca
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Moral Status ◽  
Public Policies ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Soft Or ◽  
Philosophical Literature ◽  
The World ◽  
Abortion Laws ◽  
The Catholic Church

A dominant trend in the philosophical literature on abortion has been concerned with the question of whether the fetus has moral status and how such a status might or might not conflict with women's liberties. However, a new and powerful trend against abortion requires philosophical examination. We refer to this trend as the paternalistic argument (PA). In a nutshell, this argument holds that, insofar as motherhood is a constitutive end of women's well‐being, abortion harms women; thus, abortion is wrong and should be prohibited, restricted, or avoided when possible regardless of the moral status of the fetus. In this article we undertake three tasks. First, we analyze four variations of this reasoning: what we call the Kantian PA, the Aristotelian PA, the Catholic Church PA, and the Psychological PA. Second, we show how some public policies that regulate or prohibit abortion around the world are now in fact following paternalistic justifications and imposing distinctive paternalistic restrictions (hard, soft, or libertarian); we refer to these policies as “the new abortion laws.” Finally, we argue that both the four paternalistic arguments presented and the new abortion laws are at times ill‐intentioned, comprehensive in nature and thus unsuited for guiding public policy, empirically flawed, or else unjustified.

scholarly journals Agencia moral de la empresa: el aporte del análisis causal aristotélico

2006 ◽  
Vol 11 (21) ◽  
pp. 10-24
Author(s):  
María Marta Preziosa ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Moral Status ◽  
Mental Model ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Shared Mental Model ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
External Relations ◽  
Initial Question ◽  
The Common ◽  
Constitutive Principles

The initial question about the ontological status of the corporation precedes the question about its moral status. The Aristotelian causes are constitutive principles of reality that infl uence each other reciprocally and which we apply to the enterprise to design its anatomy’s ontological structure. The corporation’s material cause is the capability its members have to associate. The formal intrinsic cause is its organization for producing and trading the goods man needs. The extrinsic formal or exemplary cause is the shared mental model. And the corporation’s fi nal cause is its mission. And the common good is the mediate end that gives it sense. The corporation is considered as an entity possessing a certain unity based in the order embodied in the plexus of internal-external relations of the corporation.

Reproduction and ethics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosalind Hursthouse
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Insemination ◽  
Moral Status ◽  
Human Embryos ◽  
Philosophical Literature ◽  
Embryo Donation ◽  
Vitro Fertilization ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Conservative View

The first reproductive issue debated extensively by philosophers was abortion. Debates about its morality were, and still are, dominated by the issue of the moral status of the foetus, on which a wide variety of views has been defended. The most ‘conservative’ view is usually associated with very restrictive abortion policies, inconsistent with ‘a woman’s right to choose’ (though the connection has been challenged by Judith Jarvis Thomson). However, all but the most conservative find it hard to ground prevailing moral intuitions concerning the newer issue of using human embryos for research purposes. Embryos, and even gametes, also assume importance in the context of methods for overcoming infertility (artificial insemination by donor (AID), egg and embryo donation involving in vitro fertilization (IVF), surrogacy) where issues about rights and ownership may arise. Considerations of ‘the welfare of the child’, often used to settle surrogacy disputes, also bear on questions of what should, or may, be done to avoid bringing a child with a genetic abnormality into the world. Current philosophical literature on reproductive issues is largely limited to a vocabulary of rights and little attention is paid to the social and familial contexts in which reproductive decisions are usually made

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