Corporate Moral Agency

French's View

A quarter-century ago, Peter French published an influential essay on the metaphysical status of the corporation. He has subsequently defended the core of that view in a series of books and essays. Despite its many critics, French's theory of corporate personhood remains the single most influential account of the metaphysical status of corporations. Corporations, as French noted, are of particular interest in comparison to other sorts of collectives or organizations because of their distinct rules of governance and hierarchical structure. In his early work on the metaphysical status of corporations, French reached three main conclusions. First, corporations exhibit intentionality. Second, corporations are capable of exhibiting rationality regarding their intentions. Third, corporations are capable of altering their intentions and patterns of behavior. As a result, he concluded that corporations are full-fledged moral persons and have the privileges, rights, and duties that are, in the normal course of affairs, accorded to moral persons. This claim [Page 485]received sustained criticism over the years. In particular, critics have argued that French's position is illegitimately anthropomorphic. For example, Richard De George has argued that, unlike human beings, corporations are not ends in themselves. Other critics have argued that it is absurd to suggest that corporate persons have the same emotional status as human persons. Still others have argued that corporations cannot be persons, since all persons have a soul and no corporation has a soul.

Intentionality

In his early defense of corporate personhood, French grounded his arguments in the belief-desire theory of intentionality. He argued that when the corporate act is consistent with an instantiation of established corporate policy, then it is proper to describe it as having been done by a corporate desire coupled with a corporate belief and so as a corporate intention. Critics seized on French's use of the belief-desire theory, arguing that, since he wrongly attributed distinctly human intentionality to corporations, his defense or corporate intentionality failed. For example, Manuel Velasquez argues that all attributions of intentions to corporations must be understood as metaphorical since they are not literal mental states. He denies the possibility of such an argument because he stipulates that intentions must be understood as mental states identical to those present in individual human minds. However, this is not the only way of understanding intentionality. One alternative way of understanding intentions is as commitments to future action. Such a characterization of intentions leaves open the possibility that entities other than conscious biological beings may be properly understood as intentional.

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