Manuel Velasquez (2003), Business Ethics Quarterly 13(4):531–562 — DOI-10.5840/beq200313436
Key takeaways
Registered, not read beyond the publisher’s abstract. By the abstract:
- A “core argument” that the corporate organization is a separate moral agent “is based on an unnoticed but elementary mistake deriving from the fallacy of division”.
- Collectivists misunderstand “the nature of intentional causality and of “as-if” intentionality”.
- Velasquez’s two theses: “individual members of an organization are always causally responsible for any corporate act”, and “attributions of intentions to corporations are always either descriptive or prescriptive attributions of “as if” intentionality”.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-23 at the owner’s request, as the developed form of the 1983 objection (LIT-1429). Its second thesis bears directly on the corporate-psychopathy thesis: if a corporation’s intentions are only “as if”, so would be any callousness or lack of remorse ascribed to it. The accounts it opposes are THEORY-131 (French) and THEORY-139 (Pettit).