Contribution
A compact restatement and extension of Pettit’s case for corporate responsibility. It joins List and Pettit’s group-agency results to an account of avowal and commitment (“conversability”) and to a regulative, non-libertarian account of what holding responsible is.
Key insight
What makes an attitude the corporation’s is not that members hold it. It is that the corporation has made it up, through spokespersons whose words members have authorised and procedures that correct its aggregate. It is then answerable for living up to those words.
Assumptions
- A functional account of agency: reliable representation and action in normal conditions (after List & Pettit 2011, ch. 1).
- That consistency is a minimal requirement on any agent others can do business with.
- That holding responsible is a regulative practice, so a disposition to respond to reasons suffices and contra-causal freedom is not needed.
Key results
Argument, not results:
- Corporations are agents; the “nexus of contracts” objection is a fallacy of composition.
- Spokespersons avow and promise for the corporation, and members’ authorisation makes the words the corporation’s.
- The discursive dilemma (p, q, not p&q by majority) means a conversable corporation must correct its aggregate, so it has “a mind of its own”.
- Three conditions of fitness to be held responsible (grave matter, full knowledge, full consent), all met by conversable agents.
- A corporation cannot coherently claim to lack normative judgment (performative contradiction), nor, over time, the means to act on it.
Claims
| id | claim | strength | support |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | Corporations are agents in the functional sense | moderate | argument from the functional profile; rebuttal of the contracts objection |
| C2 | A corporation that corrects its aggregate has attitudes not fixed by its members’ attitudes on each issue | strong | the discursive dilemma, proved elsewhere (List & Pettit) |
| C3 | Conversable agents are fit to be held responsible without contra-causal freedom | moderate | argued from the regulative point of the practice |
| C4 | Corporations cannot excuse themselves by incapacity over the longer haul | moderate | argued: performative contradiction; capacity to acquire capacity |
Concepts
- conversable agent — one that uses words to form, not merely report, its attitudes, and commits itself by them.
- avowal — expressing an attitude in a way that forgoes the excuse of having misread one’s own mind.
- fitness to be held responsible — grave matter, full knowledge of the guilt, full consent of the will.
Connections
Builds on French’s corporate decision structure, List & Pettit’s group agency and judgment aggregation, Dennett’s intentional stance, and Hobbes (against whom the “mind of its own” claim is aimed). Restates LIT-742.
Bearing on the record
Source of THEORY-139. Its group-agency premise is THEORY-127’s judgment-aggregation result.
For the owner’s essay it addresses two gaps. §7.1 needs corporate endorsement that is not regressive. Pettit grounds ownership in authorised avowal and corrective procedure, not in a higher-order attitude. §8 attributes normative competence to an organization, and Pettit’s condition (2) is that attribution, with an argument. The essay should engage both, and should note that Pettit’s corporations need not be good. Fitness to be held responsible is not legitimacy, which is the distinction the essay draws in §8.5.
Limitations
Brisk by design. It relies on earlier work for the agency premises, and it sets aside deception, a corporation masking its real attitudes, “for the sake of simplicity” (p. 10). It does not address criminal liability.
Open questions
Whether a corporation’s normative judgment is the same capacity as an individual’s or only functionally similar, and what counts as an excusing condition for a corporation.