Abstract
Peter French has argued that conglomerate collectivities such as business corporations are moral persons and that aggregate collectivities such as lynch mobs are not. Two arguments are advanced to show that French's claim is flawed. First, the distinction between aggregates and conglomerates is, at best, a distinction of degree, not kind. Moreover, some aggregates show evidence of moral personhood. Second, French's criterion for distinguishing aggregates and conglomerates is based on inadequate grounds. Application of the criterion to specific cases requires an additional judgment of a pragmatic nature which undermines any attempt to demonstrate French's thesis that actual conglomerates are moral persons and aggregates are not. Thus, French's theory is seriously lacking both empirical basis and empirical relevance.
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References
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Raymond S. Pfeiffer, Ph.D. Washington University, is Professor of Philosophy at Delta College, University Center, Michigan. An islander at heart, he has published articles such as “Is Motivation Management Manipulative?” in Ethical Theory and Business, ed. Beauchamp and Bowie, 1988; “The Meaning and Justification of Collective Moral Responsibility,” Public Affairs Quarterly, 1988; “The Responsibility of Men for the Oppression of Women,” Journal of Applied Philosophy, 1985; “Abortion Policy and the Argument from Uncertainty,” Social Theory and Practice, 1985.
The original draft of this paper was written at a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar on “Varieties of Responsibility” at Trinity University, 1987, and benefitted from comments by the seminar director, Peter French, and members of the seminar.
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Pfeiffer, R.S. The central distinction in the theory of corporate moral personhood. J Bus Ethics 9, 473–480 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00382840
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00382840