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LIT-727: The Corporation as a Moral Person

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StatusActive — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-568): in full, from a scanned JSTOR copy in a Brooklyn College instructor's readings folder. Worth reading as the founding statement of the claim that corporations are moral persons. French rests it on the Corporate Internal Decision (CID) Structure: an organizational chart plus recognition rules embedded in corporate policy. It licenses redescribing members' acts as corporate intentional acts. Limits: he asserts, and says he cannot here argue, that intentional agency suffices for moral personhood, and the paper offers no test of corporate intentionality beyond the redescription itself.
Tagssocial-ontology, personhood, agency
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-568 — The Corporation as a Moral Person
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-131 — A corporation whose Corporate Internal Decision (CID) Structure, an organizational chart of stations plus recognition rules embedded in corporate policy, licenses redescribing its members' acts as done for corporate reasons is a non-eliminable intentional agent, unlike a mob; and if intentional agency suffices for moral personhood, which French asserts but here says he cannot further argue, such a corporation is a full-fledged moral person

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Peter A. French (1979), “The Corporation as a Moral Person”, American Philosophical Quarterly 16(3):207–215 (University of Illinois Press for North American Philosophical Publications)

Key takeaways

  • The thesis. “corporations can be full-fledged moral persons and have whatever privileges, rights and duties as are, in the normal course of affairs, accorded to moral persons” (p. 207).
  • Legal personhood does not settle it (pp. 208–210). On the Fiction, Aggregate and Reality theories alike, corporate legal personhood is “virtually useless for moral purposes”. Moral personhood needs the attributes of an administrator of rights, not merely a subject of them.
  • A moral person is a non-eliminable subject of accountability (pp. 210–211). Ascribing responsibility in the accountability sense says that the subject caused the event and that it intended the act. So “If corporations are moral persons, they will be non-eliminatable Davidsonian agents.” A mob fails: it has no identity beyond the sum of its members’.
  • The CID Structure does the work (pp. 211–214). An organizational or responsibility chart gives the “grammar” of corporate decision; recognition rules give its “logic”. Procedure alone makes an act only procedurally corporate. When the act also implements established corporate policy, it is done for corporate reasons and is corporate intentional.
  • Corporate and member reasons come apart (p. 214). A director bribed to vote for joining a cartel still produces a corporate decision whose reason is the corporation’s: to reduce competition. Whether the corporation is responsible turns on issues “that may be unrelated” to the bribe.
  • The sufficiency premise is not argued. French says Davidsonian agency is necessary and sufficient for moral personhood and that he “cannot further argue that position here” (p. 215).

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-05 at the owner’s request, as a supplement to the essay on organizational will. It is an older and stronger claim than Pettit’s (LIT-718). Pettit argues that corporations are fit to be held responsible, which the record’s account of him (THEORY-139) keeps apart from moral standing; French argues that they are moral persons. For §7.1 it offers a ground for corporate endorsement: policy, not a higher-order attitude, is what makes a reason the corporation’s. The account is THEORY-131.

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