Comments on Frank’s paper
“Corporate Responsibility and
Judgment Aggregation”
Christian List, LSE
Introduction
• Frank discusses both Pettit and Copp on
corporate responsibility.
• Given time constraints (and my personal
involvement with Pettit’s work), I will here
focus on Frank’s discussion of Pettit’s
arguments.
Pettit’s argument (1)
• In a 2007 article in Ethics, Philip Pettit argues
that corporate agents can be held responsible
over and above their individual members.
• In particular, Pettit suggests, there can be gaps
of responsibility between the individual and the
corporate level, where
(i) the group as a whole bears corporate responsibility
for some action, e.g., some harm done,
(ii) but none of the members are individually responsible
for it.
Pettit’s argument (2)
• One of Pettit’s key pieces of evidence for the
claim that there can be such responsibility gaps
involves a particular discursive dilemma:
=> namely one in which a group, using a premisebased procedure for making its decisions,
comes to reach a conclusion that no group
member individually supports.
Pettit’s argument (3)
• Suppose, for example,
that three premises, p, q
and r, are jointly
necessary and sufficient
for some conclusion c.
• If individual judgments
are as shown, then the
group, through the pbp,
accepts c even though no
individual does.
p
q
r
c
Ind. 1




Ind. 2




Ind. 3




Group




(premisebased)
Pettit’s argument (3)
• If the acceptance of c
by the group now
leads to some harmful Ind. 1
outcome, the question
Ind. 2
is whether any of the
individuals can be
Ind. 3
held responsible.
• After all, they all
individually rejected c.
Group
(premisebased)
p
q
r
c
















Pettit’s argument (4)
• The responsibility gap arises once we
assume, as Pettit seems to do, that
[E] An individual member of an
organization cannot be blamed for a
decision made by that organization if
s/he disagrees with it.
(This is Frank’s formulation.)
• (N.B.: [E] is sufficient, not necessary, for
the occurrence of the responsibility gap.)
Frank’s response (1)
• Now Frank argues that condition [E] (“Pettit’s
excusing condition”) is too broad.
• Instead, he proposes a more restrictive excusing
condition:
[E*] An individual’s disagreement with the
decision of the organization of which s/he is
a member affects the extent to which s/he
can be blamed for that decision only if s/he
disagrees with it for the right reasons.
Frank’s response (2)
• Frank then argues that:
– IF we only have condition [E*] but not [E] as a
sufficient condition for excusing individuals
from responsibility,
– THEN some of Pettit’s examples for the
responsibility gap go away,
and further, the group’s responsibility in the
questionable cases can be distributed back to
the members, using a fairly general recipe.
Some thoughts
•
•
For the present purposes, let me grant most of the
claims in Frank’s detailed analysis, especially his
IF-THEN claim summarized on my previous slide.
Even so, I do not think that it undermines
(a) the thesis that group agents can be held
responsible independently of their members,
and
(b) the thesis that a responsibility gap between
the individual level and the collective level is
a possibility.
(a) Why the claim that group agents can be
held responsible in their own right is unaffected
• The capacity of some groups to be held
responsible in their own right does not depend
on the discursive dilemma.
• Rather, it stems from the fact that, under suitable
conditions, groups can satisfy the conditions for
rational agency, even in a rather complex sense.
• Once we have a sufficiently complex system
satisfying certain conditions of agency, it is an
agent and, if sophisticated enough, it can prima
facie be a candidate for responsibility.
(a) Why the claim that group agents can be
held responsible in their own right is unaffected
• Now the presence of such corporate responsibility leaves
entirely open the question of whether or not corporate
responsibility can be redistributed back to the group members
(and if it can, under what conditions).
• Either answer to the latter question is consistent with the
presence of corporate responsibility.
• So even if Frank could conclusively undermine the possibility
of a responsibility gap, this would not undermine the
possibility of corporate responsibility as such.
• (– Though admittedly corporate responsibility becomes more
interesting and surprising if there can be genuine
responsibility gaps. So let’s briefly turn to responsibility gaps.)
(b) Why responsibility gaps remain a
possibility
• Frank argues that some of Pettit’s
examples for responsibility gaps are a bit
too quick.
• Again, for the sake of argument, let me
grant Frank’s claim that simple discursive
dilemma cases (the so-called
“Disagreement” cases) do not provide
sufficiently compelling instances of
responsibility gaps.
(b) Why responsibility gaps remain a
possibility (ctd.)
•
•
However, I think that the general case for the
possibility of a responsibility gap goes well beyond
simple discursive dilemma examples.
The general claim is that
(i) what a group agent thinks and does supervenes on
what the members think and do,
(ii) however, the supervenience relation can be very
complex and indirect and need not be a simple
propositionwise function, by which the group’s
intentional attitude towards any given proposition is a
straightforward function of the members’ attitudes
towards that proposition.
(b) Why responsibility gaps remain a
possibility (ctd.)
• In particular, it can not only happen that the group
democratically accepts p while I disagree in full awareness (a
simple discursive-dilemma-style Disagreement case as
discussed by Frank).
• But it can also happen that a group agent ventures into
terrains of attitudes and actions (as complex epiphenomena
of large numbers of individual inputs) that no member
individually follows, understands and endorses. (Think of
really large and complex organizations.)
• This is where the possibility of a responsibility gaps arises. It
is a product of dramatic complexity of social organization.
(Simple discursive dilemma examples don’t quite capture this
complexity – and in these simple cases Frank’s strategy for
redistributing responsibility may indeed often work.)
(b) Why responsibility gaps remain a
possibility (ctd.)
• Bear in mind that principle [E] (which Frank rejects)
and principle [E*] (which he accepts) give sufficient,
but not necessary, conditions for excuses from
responsibility on the grounds of disagreement.
• There could still be many other sufficient conditions
for excuses on other grounds, including ignorance
due to complexity, unawareness, lack of influence or
control etc., and those may well kick in in complex
group agents.
My conclusion
• For this reason, I would conclude that:
– Wherever and whenever there are sufficiently
complex group agents, there can be corporate
responsibility, and
– It is ultimately a contingent question whether
in real-world cases of corporate responsibility
redistribution to the level of individuals is
possible, or whether there are real-world
cases of genuine responsibility gaps.
Conceptually, such gaps are possible.