Source
French (1979), LIT-727, read in NOTE-568.
What was actually shown
French argues it in “The Corporation as a Moral Person” (LIT-727) in three steps.
- Moral persons are accountable agents. A moral person is anything that can be a non-eliminable subject of a responsibility ascription of the second type, one that says the subject is accountable. Such an ascription asserts that the subject caused the event and that the act was intended. So a moral person must be a “Davidsonian agent”. A mob is not: it has no identity beyond the sum of its members’.
- The CID Structure makes corporate intentions. Attributing intentions to a corporation must not be shorthand for attributing them to its board. The CID Structure, a responsibility chart plus recognition rules, works like a constitutive rule and licenses redescribing an event (three officers voting) as a corporate act. Procedure alone makes the act only procedurally corporate. When it also implements established policy, it is done for corporate reasons and is corporate intentional.
- The conclusion. “Corporate agency resides in the possibility of CID Structure licensed redescription of events as corporate intentional” (p. 215). Since French holds Davidsonian agency necessary and sufficient for moral personhood, corporations are moral persons. He says he “cannot further argue that position here” (p. 215).
What could have come out otherwise: the corporation–mob contrast. If a corporation’s acts could always be redescribed without loss as its members’ acts, the account would fail; French argues that policy-based corporate reasons are not so reducible, using the bribed director whose private reason differs from the corporation’s.
What this does not say
- Not that members are excused. The bribed director is responsible for his act, and the corporation’s responsibility is a separate question.
- Not that every organization is a moral person. Only corporations with a functioning CID Structure and established policy. Informal or contested organizations are not treated.
- Not a causal claim. French says corporate and individual acts “have different causal ancestors though they are causally inseparable” (p. 212), and promises to show this, but the paper does not.
- Not about what morality requires of corporations. The paper is about the criteria of moral personhood, not the content of morality.
Connections
- Pettit (THEORY-139). Pettit argues that corporations are fit to be held responsible because they are conversable agents that must correct their members’ aggregated judgments. In the record’s reading the two accounts agree that organizational procedure makes corporate attitudes, and disagree on what the conclusion is: Pettit’s is fitness to be held responsible, French’s moral personhood. No relation is declared.
- List & Pettit (THEORY-127). Their result that robustly rational group judgments cannot be fixed proposition by proposition gives a reason why a corporation’s judgment can differ from its members’ on the same question. French reaches a similar separation by another route: policy, not aggregation, makes the reason corporate.
- List & Menzies (THEORY-133). French offers no test of whether the corporate level is a cause in its own right. Realization-insensitivity is one: whether the corporate act would survive different people in the stations.
- The owner’s essay. For §7.1, French gives a non-regressive ground for what a corporation wills: its established policy. For the unwilling corporation that ground is a difficulty, since in his account a radical change of policy makes a new corporation.
Note of 2026-10-29: what holds it back
Kept Proposed by the eleventh status review. Read in full (NOTE-568), but the title states French’s conclusion, which the paper reaches by licensed redescription with no test. The record’s nearest case, CASE-151, does not meet the promote_when’s first half. There conduct persisted through some 5,300 firings and was traced to the sales model, but it broke the bank’s own rules, so on French’s criterion it was not a corporate intentional act. The classic objection, Velasquez’s (LIT-1429, LIT-1432), is registered and unread, so it is unanswered.