THE PHILOSOPHICAL FORUM Volume XXXI, No.

2, Summer 2000

THE PROBLEM OF GROUP AGENCY

EDMUND WALL

Many philosophers assume that the concept of group agency is defensible and that it makes a meaningful contribution to various moral investigations which are said to involve corporations and other social groups. Even those who would argue that social groups cannot be full-fledged moral persons still want to say not only that they can act but that they can be held morally accountable for their actions. They claim that legitimate moral judgments can apply to social groups and to their activities. This essay examines some influential work in defense of the moral agency of social groups. This, in turn, leads to a discussion of the possible nature of social groups. The conclusion is that a closer analysis will not support any of the arguments for the moral agency of social groups. An analysis of some philosophical debates about the possible nature of social groups, as those debates pertain to the conditions of agency, reveals that social groups cannot be agents. In their book, Corporations in the Moral Community, Peter A. French, Jeffrey Nesteruk, David T. Risser, and John Abbarno make a case for the full-fledged moral agency of corporations.1 Much of what is said in that book is an elaboration of Frenchs prominent Collective and Corporate Responsibility.2 Like its predecessor, Corporations in the Moral Community sets out to establish that corporations can properly be considered moral persons and that moral principles, rules, and judgments can apply to them.3 French and his coauthors distinguish social groups which can be moral agents from those which cannot. They find that a rioting mob would not be a moral entity, only an aggregate of persons. We are told that although we may be able to attribute partial responsibility to individuals who comprise the mob, the mob itself cannot be held morally responsible for a riot because, among other things, it has no internal decision structure. In other words, it has no established procedures for making decisions, setting goals, assigning roles, and so on. Each member of the mob could have acted for purely personal reasons (15). 187

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The authors find that corporations can be quite different from mobs. They observe that, for one thing, a corporation may still exist even when its current members leave it for, say, another company. Usually it can sustain a membership loss without thereby ceasing to exist. The authors maintain, however, that after members of a rioting mob disperse, there is no mob (15). The authors support the attribution of moral agency to corporations by arguing that corporations can form intentions and can carry out those intentions. They maintain that actions can only occur when a certain movement is intended, i.e., done to bring about a certain state of affairs or to satisfy certain expectations or desires (16). According to the authors, To say that some entity intended to act in a certain way is to describe its movements as upshots of reasons it had for their occurring (16). Here the authors seem to be suggesting that an intentional action involves movements which somehow result from the reasons supporting the movements, or which at least conform to those reasons. The authors believe that talk about corporate reasons is possible because corporations can have internal decision structures (or, to use Frenchs terminology, corporate internal decision [CID] structures). We are told that a corporations CID structure is the established way in which it makes decisions and converts them into actions (17). A CID structure includes an organizational flowchart that delineates the various stations and levels within a corporation. The structure also embodies various rules that typically reflect corporate policy and that enable us to distinguish corporate decisions from decisions by individuals who occupy positions within the company. French and his collaborators tell us that when a CID structure is operative, it subordinates and synthesizes the intentions and acts of various human beings and mechanisms into a corporate decision (17). For instance, when a corporate official signs orders for more office supplies, the authors would say that this can be a corporate action. Rather than ordering supplies for private use, the official acts within a procedural framework of social rules and expectations. The supplies are ordered for corporate reasons. Both prior to and after signing the supply orders we find an elaborate network of rules and concerted actions that take us far beyond any action done by a single individual on his or her own behalf. Throughout their book, the authors illustrate their points by referring to a fictitious corporation, Liberty Oil. They maintain that even though it may be President Quinn of Liberty Oil who signs an order to close the corporations Galveston plant, Liberty Oil would be closing the plant, not Mr. Quinn himself. This would be the case, we are told, even if Mr. Quinn were to sign the orders for purely personal reasons. How could that be? The authors argue that Liberty Oil has a CID structure and thus any reports on its presidents desk would reflect decisions made by subordinate management and executives, which were subject to peer review and reformation. Moreover, the authors 188

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maintain that in closing the plant, Liberty Oil would be acting intentionally, since the order would reflect corporate policy. We could identify corporate policy by looking at either the rules of the corporations CID structure or the more informal rules of its culture. In this case, despite the fact that President Quinn could be acting for purely personal reasons, Liberty Oil would be acting for corporate reasons (e.g., to increase profits, cut expenses, etc.) (19). These points about CID structures are illuminating. Corporations do appear to have CID structures that integrate various individual decisions and actions to produce what no single individual could produce. And CID structures certainly have played a major role in shaping social relations and in determining the distribution of benefits and burdens in a society. But this is not the same thing as saying that a corporation can act. Here we should distinguish having a decision-making procedure from making a decision. A group of individuals may have a decision-making procedure amongst themselves which, in fact, directs their individual actions so that certain results can be achieved, but that does not imply that there is some entity beyond those individuals which actually makes decisions. The authors continually make reference to corporate reasons, which are said to stem from corporate rules and policies. They also refer in their example to President Quinns reasons for acting. However, the actions of genuine moral agents do not merely conform to certain reasons, that is, agents do more than simply behave in a way that can be justified by reference to some rule or policy. They are also motivated to act in one way or the other. Although an individual can, quite coincidentally, act in a way that is compatible with some rule or policy, that is not the same thing as following the rule as a guide to conduct. Corporations cannot have thoughts, even though they may have rules. Neither do corporations have any motives or desires. It is, therefore, incorrect to say that a corporation acts for certain reasons. The claim that the president of Liberty Oil acted for corporate reasons bears no resemblance to the claim that Liberty Oil acted for corporate reasons. Even if corporations and social groups are actual entities in the world (which has not been established), a corporation lacks the cognitive ability to follow reasons. It cannot act, let alone be considered an agent whose actions can elicit moral praise and blame. In the absence of beliefs and desires, reasons and actions cannot be attributed to an entity. In his earlier book, French does attempt to establish that corporations can have beliefs and desires (and thus intentions). There he maintains that the belief of a corporation is the image or general policy that the company is said to create. According to French, these beliefs, which are supposedly created by corporate decisions, are formed collectively. He says that a corporations policy can be determined by looking at corporate behavior over time. The decisions and actions that high management or personnel accept are said to determine the content 189

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of the policy. When a corporate act is consistent with an instantiation or an implementation of established corporate policy, then, according to French, the act was done for corporate reasons. Since the act appears to be caused by a corporate desire coupled with a corporate belief, French concludes that there is a corporate intention behind the act.4 It is not clear how French is able to identify any corporate desire from his account. We cannot infer its existence from the mere consistency of, say, a corporate vote (i.e., decision) with corporate policy (i.e., belief). The fact that votes and policies are consistent may be a mere coincidence. We also have seen that corporations do not have the cognitive ability to form beliefs. Simply put, a belief is not a policy, and not all of an entitys beliefs (if any) are created by its own decisions, which Frenchs account requires. In the later book, French and his colleagues explain corporate decisionmaking using Kenneth Goodpasters four stages in decision-making: perception, reasoning, coordination, and implementation. The authors tell us that in order for a corporation to be considered a moral agent, it must have a CID structure that is capable of functioning well at each of these four stages. Unfortunately, their discussion of these four stages does not shed any new light on questions about corporate beliefs and desires. With regard to perception, for example, the authors say that corporations and individual human agents can gather information that will enable them to gauge the potential effects of alternative courses of action (100). However, here the authors are already assuming that corporations can gather information (i.e., that they can act). There is no explanation here, or in their description of the other four stages, as to how corporate agency is possible. By examining the four stages, the authors are trying to show how the concept of corporate agency can advance our thinking in business ethics. As such, they are not attempting here to argue for the possibility of group agency. The point, however, is that we will not find answers to our questions about corporate desires and beliefs in the authors account of corporate decision-making. The authors maintain that when corporations do not have departments that are capable of gathering information, or when the communication between those departments is defective, then the corporation has an identifiable structural flaw which leads to misconduct (100). Although the authors are trying to show how their agency theory can account for corporate wrongdoing, one wonders whether a structural flaw in a corporation might actually indicate that it is not a moral agent. Quite some time ago, Thomas Donaldson made some important observations about corporate agency. He argued against what he called the moral person view, which assumes that if a corporation is an agent, it must be a moral agent. The moral person view, which seems to characterize the position taken in both 190

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the earlier book by French as well as in the later book written with his collaborators, is unacceptable to Donaldson, who argues that animals such as cats can legitimately be considered agents. For example, when cats crouch into a hunting position, they are, in Donaldsons estimation, exhibiting intentional behavior, despite the fact that it would be foolish to consider them moral agents. It seems obvious that cats cannot be held morally responsible for their actions.5 In his earlier book, French responded to Donaldsons objection by arguing that animals such as cats can only be considered intentional agents in a very attenuated sense. They can neither appraise the value of their objectives nor deliberately adjust their behavior in light of such evaluations.6 French finds that cats are not intentional agents in the relevant sense and hence their behavior cannot be cited as a convincing counterexample. This response seems to make an important point. Even if cats are intentional actors, their capabilities pale in comparison to those of normal human beings. There is a certain richness and depth to human intentionality. Although Frenchs response was not designed to establish that corporations can have the capabilities associated with adequate intentionality, that response, and the comparisons it invites, serve to emphasize the enormous differences between corporations and humans. For it would seem that human action constitutes the paradigm of intentionality, that the actions of cats are only a dim reflection of this capability, and that corporations are not even analogous to the other two. After all, corporations can have nothing like beliefs and desires. Donaldson does not agree. Although he is not willing to count any corporation as a moral person, he is confident that at least some corporations can be considered moral agents. He finds that corporations cannot be moral persons because they lack certain rights normally attributed to persons, such as a right to vote or to collect Social Security payments.7 However, this does not suggest to Donaldson that corporations cannot be agents.8 To qualify as a moral agent, Donaldson says, a corporation must embody a process of moral decisionmaking. According to him, this process requires that at least two conditions be satisfied: first, that the corporation must have the capacity to use moral reasons to support its decisions; second, that through the decision-making process the corporation must be capable of controlling its overt acts as well as the structure of its policies and rules. Although he finds that some corporations can engage in moral reasoning and can also exercise some control over their decision-making processes, he stresses that corporations are quite unlike human beings with respect to their intentions, moral rights, and moral responsibilities.9 A response can be made to Donaldsons case for corporate agency. Donaldsons rejection of the assumption that all agents must be moral agents may be correct. As he points out, the intentionality of a cat is not to be equated with that of a normal human being. But if a cat cannot be a moral agent, it is 191

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even less likely that a corporation can be one. Cats have a brain, so that attributing beliefs, desires, or intentions to them is not beyond the realm of plausibility. Corporations, however, have nothing approaching these capabilities. Donaldson, French, and others can point to decision-making procedures, processes, or rules, but rules, procedures, and processes cannot form intentions or have desires and beliefs. Throughout his book, Donaldson assumes that corporations exist, that they are actual entities in the world, but, even if that assumption is correct, we have seen that it is one thing for a social group to have a decision-making procedure and quite another for it actually to make a decision. It is very hard to see how an entity that lacks the capacity to have beliefs or desires can be said to act. Donaldson and others not only attribute actions to these entities, but they even hold the entities morally accountable for those actions. If it cannot be demonstrated that corporations can be agents, then how might we account for everyday statements such as the corporation paid its taxes or the corporation is laying off half of its employees? Obviously there is more going on here than can be explained in terms of discrete, individual actions. Surely there is some sense in which individuals work together on joint projects that produce very real consequences. One response to this question attributes agency to corporations and other social groups, but only through their individual members. Larry May has constructed such a position on group agency. Although he rejects the idea that social groups can be moral persons, he believes that they can act vicariously through individuals and thus can be considered moral agents. May contends that, even though corporations and other social groups cannot act in the strict sense of the term, they can act through their individual members. We are told that a corporation can act vicariously because of a formal relationship that exists between the corporation and the entity which caused the action. May finds that this formal relationship is similar to the one between a representative and his or her constituents.10 According to May, only individuals can actually form intentions, have desires, or offer reasons for acting (6970, 12224). He argues that the structure of social groups plays such a significant role in shaping the acts, intentions, and interests of group members that social groups should be granted a moral status separate from that of their individual group members (3). We are told that the structure of a social group is the set of relationships that exists among the groups members. These relationships are said to account for group action because they involve group members influencing and assisting one another in such a way that the members act differently than they could act on their own (2, 45). Although these relationships make for different individual acts, intentions, and interests than would arise outside of the relationships, May believes that the moral status of a social group is not completely separate from its individual 192

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members. He reminds us that the set of relationships which forms the structure of a social group consists of individuals (3, 46). Unlike Donaldson, French, and many others, May believes that groups themselves do not exist in their own right (9). They are not actual entities in the world. We are instead advised to think of them in terms of social relationships. Mays position is that even though the term social group is fictional, it can still be ascribed to the relationships between individuals (13). What about Mays claim that corporations and other social groups can act vicariously? He contends that collective action can be ascribed to a group if each member has agreed to let one or a subgroup of its members act on behalf of the entire group. As May puts it, only through a relationship such as representation will it be possible for a group of persons to act (33). According to May, even though only the actions of individuals can be considered basic, vicarious actions by corporations are possible due to the relationship that exists between the corporation and the representative of the corporation who caused the action. May likens such a relationship to that of a political representative and his or her constituents. In that kind of relationship, the constituents are said to act through their representative (4142). It does not seem, however, that a corporation or other social group can act vicariously through one or more of its representatives. First of all, under the paradigm for our system of government, citizens do not act through their political representatives. Rather, the representatives act on their behalf. The representatives act in an attempt to promote the citizens better interests. However, there is more to be said here about Mays model of group agency. For a social group truly to act through a representative, that representative would have to embody every other members intentions, beliefs, and desires relevant to that particular act. Now, we might say that every member has similar intentions, beliefs, and desires, but certainly not that each of them has the same intentions, beliefs, and desires. Given Mays view that social groups are fictions, the implication must be that each and every member of a social group would be acting through the chosen member(s). One and the same action must be attributed to each and every group member. Since May has taken the position that social groups are fictions (i.e., that they do not exist), it is hard to see how he could ascribe actions or any other attributes to them. It would seem that, given this assumption, any attempt to justify group agency must fail. It is certainly true that relationships shape individual intentions, actions, decisions, etc., but that does nothing toward establishing the existence of genuine group action. May insists that fictional terms ought to be linked in some way to actual structures and relationships in the world (13). He maintains that the term social group can be ascribed to actual relationships. Following this line of reasoning, it seems that relationships have replaced social 193

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groups as actual existing entities. But even if relationships are actual entities in the world (which has not been established), they cannot confer ontological status onto social groups. The ascription of the fictional term social group to certain social relationships will not assist us in an exploration of the possible nature and existence of social groups. Methodological individualists have argued either that social groups do not exist or that all reference to group actions can ultimately be reduced to an analysis of the behavior of the individual members of the group. Metaphysical holists, on the other hand, have argued not only that social groups really do exist but also that they can be the ultimate source of certain actions in the world. Larry May was attempting to carve out a middle path between these two positions. He did not wish to say, along with the holists, that social groups really do exist, but neither did he wish to say, with the individualists, that all ultimate explanations of group action are limited to the activities of individuals. Instead, Mays account emphasized the relationships between individuals.11 He developed an account of these relationships in an attempt to establish group actions and intentions. The other philosophical works we have considered do not share Mays assumption that social groups do not exist. May, of course, contends that they are to be understood in terms of the activities of individuals, activities enmeshed with each other in certain distinctive ways. Despite Mays attempt to steer a middle course between the two positions, everything that he says about group agency seems to be conducive to methodological individualism. We are told that the activities of social groups are to be explained in terms of the activities of individuals, and that such groups do not actually exist. We are also told that the activities of individuals do not occur in isolation from other individuals. The activities have a certain nature. They are directed and shaped by existing communication networks as well as other social and environmental factors. At first glance, it might seem that May and the methodological individualists differ, since May seems to suggest that these networks and relationships have a life of their own. They are said by him to ground collective intentions, interests, rights, and responsibilities. Moreover, May contends that these are truly collective properties, properties to be attributed to the individuals within a social network rather than to the individuals in isolation from each other. However, it is safe to say that no methodological individualist would attempt to explain so-called collective properties in terms of a set of isolated actions by individuals. Methodological individualists include social relationships and other social and empirical factors in their explanations of group actions. And, indeed, some of them allow for collective properties.12 What they refuse to say, however, is that these collective properties are irreducible. The point of methodological individualism is that these very properties are reducible to the activities of individuals, and that these individuals are in a position to alter existing 194

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social networks if they so choose. Although May sometimes appears to be attributing irreducible intentions and other irreducible properties to social groups, he is logically committed to the position that such properties are reducible. After all, he believes that social groups do not exist. Some methodological individualists are willing to grant the existence of social groups. Some will even go so far as to say that there are irreducible collective properties, although these are said to be irreducible only because they would be too complex for any human being to untangle. The properties are still said to be reducible in principle. So, what can be said about group agency? If social groups do not exist, then it would be a mistake to attribute any genuine properties to them. To do so would be philosophically unsound. Nevertheless, people may sometimes find it useful to organize their communication about human activities by employing the language of group action and other fictional group properties. At the public policy level, for example, such fictions can provide a very useful shorthand method for circumventing intricate social relations. On the other hand, if social groups do exist (i.e., if there are metaphysical entities beyond individuals that somehow unite them and their activities), it would be very difficult to attribute intentions, desires, and other properties of agency to them. For, at this point, it seems that the properties would have to be transcendental, when commentators take them to be concrete properties of human relations. The attempt to establish any transcendental properties would be an enormous undertaking, to say the least; and even if such an attempt were successful, it is doubtful that the attempt could satisfy the more concrete demands of moral agency. After all, we cannot locate a corporate brain or central nervous system. We can refer to the activities and relationships between certain individuals within a corporation, each of whom has a brain, but we have seen that a genuine corporate act will have to include more than an agglomeration of disparate mental states. To summarize: We set out to examine the status of group agency and its bearing on moral investigations involving social groups. The case by French and his coauthors for the full-fledged moral agency of corporations was critiqued. We found that it is one thing for a social group to have a decision-making procedure and quite another for it actually to make a decision. In order to make a moral decision, an entity must be able to follow certain rules as guides to conduct. The mere conformity of conduct and rules is not enough. Donaldson, who criticizes the moral person view held by French and others, argues that if something is an intentional agent, it does not necessarily follow that it is a moral agent. A cat is an intentional agent, but not a moral agent. In response to this argument, French distinguishes a being with superficial intentionality from one that possesses intentionality in a deeper sense, which implies moral agency. He believes that the latter best captures corporate intentionality. Donaldson, unlike French, finds that human intentionality is deeper than corporate intentionality, although 195

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he would agree with French that corporate intentions are deeper than feline intentions. Nevertheless, it seems better to say that corporations and cats are not at all analogous when it comes to matters of agency. Although (perhaps) a cat can form intentions in some superficial way, a corporation is clearly unequipped to form any intentions at all. But if corporations cannot be moral agents or even intentional agents, what becomes of our everyday language, which frequently makes reference to various group actions? The response is that even though such language can sometimes be very useful, genuine group actions are not possible. Group action can provide useful shorthand when it is desirable to circumvent the intricacies of individuals and their relations. Public policy-makers, and even private individuals, will sometimes find the language of group action indispensable. Indeed, we saw that May attempted to ground the language of group action in the relationships between individuals. This helpful emphasis on the relationships between individuals was found to be consistent with methodological individualism. However, Mays position that groups can act vicariously through their representatives does not anticipate the distinction between a group acting through a representative and a representative acting on behalf of a group. Only the latter is a genuine possibility. The disparate mental states of each individual in a group would render a genuine group action impossible. Although the language of group action may be quite helpful in certain situations, it is no substitute for a more precise language that captures the rich intentionality of individual human beings in their specific mutual relations. If we are to have any assurance that our moral judgments are legitimate, we must apply them to subjects who are capable of forming beliefs, having desires, and adjusting their behavior in light of their beliefs and desires. Neither cats nor social groups can do these things. East Carolina University NOTES
Portions of this essay originated from revisions of my previous paper, Reification and Deification: The Problem of Justifying Group Rights, presented at an APA Eastern Division Colloquium in 1996. Peter French and Larry May offered helpful criticisms of that paper. 1 Peter A. French, Jeffrey Nesteruk, and David T. Risser, with John Abbarno, Corporations in the Moral Community (Fort Worth, Texas: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers, 1992). 2 Peter A. French, Collective and Corporate Responsibility (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). 3 French et al., Corporations, 12. In this work, French and his collaborators refer more to corporate agency than they do to corporate personhood. In Collective and Corporate Responsibility, French was battling the view that only human beings are candidates for personhood (8485).

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GROUP AGENCY There he maintained that being an intentional agent is sufficient for moral personhood (3233). However, it appears that little, if anything, turns on the distinction between corporate agency and personhood, given that, in the later book, the authors argue that since corporations are intentional agents, they must be full-fledged moral agents (16), and that this is tantamount to their being moral persons (46; see also Preface and 12, 1415). French, Collective and Corporate Responsibility, 43, 62, 44. Thomas Donaldson, Corporations and Morality (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1982), 20, 22. French, Collective and Corporate Responsiblity, 166. Donaldson, Corporations and Morality, 2223. French and others believe that corporations and other groups can be moral persons, but even philosophers who deny that groups can be moral persons seem to allow for group agency. In Organizations as Non-Persons, Journal of Value Inquiry 15:2 (1981), Michael Keeley finds that corporate actions such as joining a cartel may be possible, but he denies that corporate intentions are possible. He believes that corporations can have certain collective properties, but that intention is not one of them (152). Thus Keeley concludes that we cannot ascribe moral responsibility to corporations (154). In Business Ethics: The Pragmatic Path Beyond Principles to Process (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1998), the editors, Rogene A. Buchholz and Sandra B. Rosenthal, maintain that corporations can be moral agents but not moral persons. They argue that the corporation can be a moral agent because it can have a decision-making procedure, but, in their estimation, it cannot have intentions, feelings, or rights (171). In Why Corporations Are Not Morally Responsible for Anything They Do, which is included in Contemporary Issues in Business Ethics, ed. Joseph R. DesJardins and John J. McCall, 2d ed. (Belmont, Ca.: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1990), Manuel G. Velasquez finds that corporations can act, but only through their individual members (117). He does not elaborate on the point, however. He also believes that corporations can have intentions. This is strictly qualified, however, by his view that these corporate intentions do not apply to corporate actions, if such actions are thought to emanate from an entity distinct from its members. According to Velasquez, intentional actions are to be attributed to the individual members of a corporation and not to the corporation itself (119). Donaldson, Corporations and Morality, 30, 32, 12426. Larry May, The Morality of Groups: Collective Responsibility, Group-Based Harm, and Corporate Rights (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1987), 4142, 45, 124. For a brief treatment of human relationships as a middle ground between methodological individualism and metaphysical holism, see Steven Lukes, Methodological Individualism Reconsidered, The Philosophy of Social Explanation, ed. Alan Ryan (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 12829. For thoughtful discussions of the philosophical commitments of methodological individualists and metaphysical holists, see J. W. N. Watkins, Methodological Individualism and Social Tendencies, and May Brodbeck, Methodological Individualisms: Definition and Reduction, in Readings in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, ed. May Brodbeck (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1968), 269303.

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