Corporate Loss of Innocence for the Sake of Accountability

Peter A. French has argued that for individual human actors the “loss of innocence is a prerequisite for membership in the responsible moral community” (French 1992a, 29) Putting aside what French means by this claim for the time being, it is anomalous that he never mentions this criterion in his well-known arguments for the claim that corporations are members equal to individual human actors in the moral community (see French 1979, 1982, 1995). The moral community being constituted of entities that can be appropriately praised or blamed for the moral values of their actions. In his arguments concerning responsibility ascriptions, French applies nothing more than functionalist criteria for what it is to be a decision-maker as grounds for his view that corporations are intentional actors. In addition, French asserts that being an intentional actor is all that is necessary for a corporation to join the moral community. In order to begin to address the above anomaly, we first need to illuminate the criterion of the loss of innocence provided by French, as well as how this illumination impinges on French’s view of corporations as responsible actors. Only following such an analysis, may we even begin to advance to considering how the criterion may effect our conception of the membership of the responsible community vis-à-vis individual persons and corporations. The analysis below will unfold in the following manner. After presenting an outline of French’s familiar view of corporations as moral actors, a more extensive interpretation of French’s criterion of the loss of innocence will be offered. Based on this interpretation, it will be argued that corporations can fulfill one significant element of the loss of innocence. As such, corporations do remain fit subjects of moral evaluation and members of the moral community. In contrast, it will be argued that corporations cannot fulfill another significant element of the criterion that would allow them to be full-blown responsible actors on par with ordinary human individuals. In order to accommodate these results for the purposes of maintaining a coherent picture of responsibility ascription, a simple distinction in understanding membership of the moral community will be proposed. This is a distinction between responsible and accountable actors.