Abstract
If the agent responsible for an action is to be given praise or blame by the moral community for that action, then accurate responsibility ascriptions must be made. Since the moral community may have to evaluate the actions of corporate agents, care must be taken to insure that the assumption of Methodological Individualism (MI) does not infect that process. Nevertheless, there is no guarantee that accurate responsibility ascriptions will be made in cases connected with corporate action as long as corporate scapegoating may occur. Because corporate scapegoating is a behavior pattern that attempts to falsify correct responsibility ascriptions it will be of interest to the moral theorist. Once I have considered three objections to the idea of corporate scapegoating I shall offer a fictional description of it found in Ayn Rand's work,Atlas Shrugged. Finally, I shall raise a question about its present day use by corporations in our society.
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P. Eddy Wilson graduated with his Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1989. He taught philosophy full time for two years after graduation at the University of the South, and he was a participant in Peter French's 1990 NEH Summer Seminar. He is currently employed as a member of the Department of Philosophy and Religion of Shaw University to teach philosophy at their High Point CAPE Center in High Point, North Carolina. He is interested in philosophy of religion, process philosophy, and ethics. Two of his articles have been accepted for publication by theJournal of Social Philosophy.
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Wilson, P.E. The fiction of corporate scapegoating. J Bus Ethics 12, 779–784 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00881310
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00881310