Manuel G. Velasquez (1983), Business and Professional Ethics Journal 2(3):1–18 — DOI-10.5840/bpej19832349
Key takeaways
Registered, not read. As it is usually reported (not checked here against the text): moral responsibility for an act requires that the act originate in the agent’s own intention and be carried out through a body the agent directly controls. A corporation has neither a mind that forms intentions nor a body of its own; corporate acts originate in, and are carried out by, its members. So the corporation, as distinct from its members, is not morally responsible, and blaming it would fall on members who may be innocent. It is cited as the standing objection to French’s corporate moral personhood (LIT-727), and it is an objection Pettit’s “conversable, responsible corporation” (LIT-718) has to answer. Velasquez returned to the case twenty years later in “Debunking Corporate Moral Responsibility” (LIT-1432).
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-23 at the owner’s request, for the question whether “psychopathic” can be said of a corporation. If Velasquez is right, a corporation is not the kind of thing that could be responsible, so the psychopathy label would have to be a description of how its members act through it, not a diagnosis of the corporation. The accounts it opposes are THEORY-131 (French) and THEORY-139 (Pettit).