Björnsson, Gunn & Hess (2017). Corporate Crocodile Tears? On the Reactive Attitudes of Corporate Agents. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 94 (2):273–298.

Björnsson, Gunnar & Hess, Kendy (2017). Corporate Crocodile Tears? On the Reactive Attitudes of Corporate Agents. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 94 (2):273–298.

1. Introduction

There is a growing literature arguing that certain entities embodied by groups of agents—certain “collectives”—themselves qualify as agents; even, some say, as moral agents.1 These are ambitious claims. To be agents, such entities must be capable of act ing on the basis of their own beliefs, desires, and intentions. To be moral agents, subject to moral obligations and accountable for their actions, they should presumably also be capable of acting freely in some relevant sense, and of recognizing and acting on moral considerations, including the respect owed to others. In addition to this, it might seem that to be fully fledged moral agents—fitting targets of a wide range of moral assessments and reactions—they must be capable of certain reactive attitudes, in particular those of guilt and indignation.2 Such agents must be able to understand when they have done wrong, and that they are accountable for their actions. At least in non-parasitic cases, this arguably involves not only grasping that guilt would be a fitting attitude on their part, and indignation a fitting attitude on the part of others, but also a capacity for guilt and indignation.3 Relatedly, one might think that fully morally accountable agents must be capable of holding themselves responsible, which might seem to essentially involve the ability to feel guilty about what one has done.4

While there has been much debate over the possibility that collectives are capable of relevant beliefs and desires, and some about whether they can be appropriately free and responsible,5 there has been little discussion of the possibility that collectives are capable of reactive attitudes. Partly, this might be because the idea that fully fledged moral agency requires a capacity for reactive attitudes is comparatively controversial. But the idea has become widely enough endorsed to raise questions about its consequences for collective moral agency and responsibility.

These questions are particularly pressing as the idea seems to straightforwardly rule out fully fledged collective moral agency. For it might seem thoroughly implausible that collectives can feel guilt and in that sense hold themselves responsible, or have the corre sponding practical understanding of the demands of morality that we expect from human agents.6 It is of course obvious that the members of a collective can possess reactive atti tudes, and that in many cases their reactive attitudes derive from their membership in the collective. Members are often ashamed, proud, or indignant about things their collective has done, or about things that have been done to it, regardless of their own participation or lack thereof in the event.7 Similarly, members might jointly intend or be jointly com mitted to feel remorse, or to express regret on the part of the collective.8

But our concern is different. If a collective is to qualify as an agent in its own right, it must have its own beliefs, desires, intentions, and free actions; it is not enough that its members are capable of such states and activities. Just so, if a collective is to qualify as a fully fledged moral agent in its own right, and if fully fledged moral agency requires the capacity for reactive attitudes, that collective must be capable of its own reactive attitudes. It must itself be capable of guilt and indignation

We argue below that, contrary to what one might think, at least certain collectives are. Or, more precisely, we argue that if certain collectives are capable of agency, then they are also capable of states sufficiently similar to guilt and indignation to satisfy the requirements of moral agency. Their expressions of indignation need not be mere strategic aggression, and their expressions of guilt and sorrow for what they have done need not be mere crocodile tears.

The plan is as follows. In section 2, we explain why one might think that certain col lectives—which we designate as “corporate agents”—can have their own equivalents of beliefs, desires, and intentions, distinct from the beliefs, desires, and intentions of their members, and how they might be capable of moral cognition, motivation, and free action on the basis of those intentional states.9 Our purpose here is not to convince the skepti cal reader that these corporate agents—typified by the modern corporation—have these capacities; various people have argued at length for this conclusion elsewhere. Rather, we aim to outline the sort of argumentative strategy that we find most promising, as we will argue along very similar lines that corporate agents are also capable of equiv alents of reactive attitudes. The strategy, in brief, is to (i) describe beliefs, desires and capacities for agential control and free action in functionalist terms, (ii) argue that it is such functional states that are required for rational agency, and (iii) show that structures with the corresponding functions can be instantiated in entities like corporations. We then apply this strategy to the role of guilt and indignation [분개] in moral agency. In section 3 we identify the features associated with such attitudes that seem crucial to fully fledged moral agency, and in section 4 we argue that actual corporations could instantiate struc tures with such features. Given this, and assuming that the argumentative strategy out lined in section 2 is successful, fully fledged moral agency is within the ken of corporations even if such agency requires the capacity for equivalents of reactive atti tudes.10 In section 5, finally, we indicate some further consequences of this conclusion. We acknowledge that some readers might take this as a reductio of a functionalist under standing of moral agency; this in itself has significant implications. For others, however, it raises urgent questions about how moral norms would apply to corporate agents or apply to interactions with such agents, and about the implications for laws governing or protecting them.

2. Corporate agency, cognition, motivation, and free will

Begin with some seemingly mundane claims about the contemporary world. Corporations typically adopt positions and goals, and they develop plans by which they pursue those goals in ways consistent with those positions. They often adjust those plans in the face of new information or poor performance, and even abandon old positions and goals and adopt new ones.

Most of all, they are sufficiently disciplined that the behavior of the individual members consistently yields corporate actions in line with those corporate plans, positions, and goals regardless of whether individual members share them, or are even aware of them. By various means, corporations can and do adopt goals and plans that do not align with—or that conflict with—the preferences of their members, and they establish mechanisms which ensure that the members implement those plans in pursuit of those goals regardless of member indifference or contrary preferences.11 It is this latter feature, the regular possibility of a stark discontinuity between member commitments and corporate commitments, that most distinguishes corporations from other less disciplined collectives.

It is also a feature shared by a variety of entities that are neither legally incor porated nor involved in business: colleges and universities, governments, branches of the military, NGOs, and religious orders. Taking the modern corporation as paradigmatic of this type, we call these entities “corporate agents”.12 For simplicity, we will also speak of corporate agents as “collectives” with “members” who perform actions constituting the behavior of the corporate agent. However, one might accept our main argument while thinking that corporate agents are more or other than just a group of people organized in a certain way.

We hasten to add that it is not necessary that there be any such stark discontinuity. Member commitments (at every level) will often align with the commitments of the corporate agent to which they belong, because members internalize corporate commit ments and because corporations hire people whose commitments roughly match the cor poration’s.

We nonetheless focus on situations where the two conflict because that alignment often creates the illusion of identity: when corporate commitments “match” member commitments—when the corporate agent and the members both believe that x or desire that y—it is harder to see that these remain numerically distinct intentional states, and that the relationship(s) among them can be highly complex. As revealed by the examples discussed here (and in Section 4 below), corporate commitments are distinct from member commitments, and this remains true regardless of whether they con flict or cohere.

In short, Acme will generally act in an instrumentally rational manner, resolve conflicts among its commitments, and tend to give more weight to commitments that cohere with and support Acme’s other commitments, much as we expect of a human agent. It is the consistent rationality of such corporate behavior that leads us to speak (at least casually) of corporate agents as agents—as entities whose actions are shaped in rational and predictable ways by their commitments about how the world is, what goals to pursue, and how to act—commitments about fact, value, and norms, we might say.

For now, however, it’s important to note that whatever the member-level description might look like, it is not necessarily the case that we can sim ply substitute “Acme’s members” for each mention of Acme. The proposition, “Acme has the goal of being profitable and environmentally responsible” is not identical to the proposition, “Acme’s members have the goal of being profitable or environmentally responsible”; the propositions have different intensions and extensions. It is possible— even familiar—for a corporate agent like a corporation, a university, or a government to adopt positions and goals that its members neither affirm nor adopt for themselves.

① Intentionality: First, Acme’s positions, goals, and plans—its commitments about fact and value and how to act on them—are functionally equivalent to beliefs, desires, and intentions as far as rational agency is concerned: “rationally equivalent”, we might say. They are commitments about the state of the world and about what matters in the world that are responsive to changes in the world, and they shape Acme’s behavior in logical, rational ways.

② Agency: When Acme acts on the basis of this set of commitments, then, Acme does not act randomly or arbitrarily (or at least, no more so than human agents). Instead, it acts in a rational, predictable fashion, pursuing identified goals on the basis of a coherent picture of the empirical situation. (Which, again, just means that when Acme’s members act on the basis of Acme’s RPV—when their behavior is shaped by it—the collective result is corporate actions that are not random and arbitrary but rational and predictable at the collective level.)

③ ownership: Third, these commitments are Acme’s. They are not the commitments of the mem bers, of any level. It may be that Acme’s members personally agree with these com mitments—that profit is essential, the environment matters, product development is likely to be profitable, etc.—or it may be that Acme’s members disagree. Most likely there is a messy, incoherent mass of overlapping agreement and disagreement among Acme’s many members, and many of them have likely never thought about these issues at all. Regardless, when Acme’s members act as members, they will act in ways that are reliably, collectively guided by these corporate commitments. When they do so, Acme acts.

The process we have in mind is fully explicit: the board votes, the majority wins, the new attitude is incorporated into the functioning of the institution, and the corporation (thus) adopts a new position. While the board members are obviously crucially involved in the process, the resulting position does not necessarily reflect the board members’ own preferences for that position. Even in these cases, board members do not necessarily express their own preferences regarding the available options, nor are they supposed to. Instead they make their decisions from the point of view of the corporate agent

In this manner the corporate entity can adopt a new commitment (to make steel additives) or abandon an old one (about the importance of the environment) in ways and for reasons that might have little to do with its members’ beliefs and desires regarding those matters. This, then, is what we mean when we suggest that corporate agents can possess their own (rational equivalents of) beliefs and desires, distinct from the beliefs and desires of their members: they possess their own commitments about fact and value, which need have no direct connection to their members’ commitments about those same facts and values. When member behavior is guided by these corporate commitments (in normal ways), the corporation acts.

One might worry, though, that Acme is nevertheless controlled by its members in ways that undermine its responsibility. After all, there is no question that Acme’s members played a crucial role in the process by which Acme adopted its new desire and abandoned its old belief. Similarly, there is no question that the members themselves acted freely, choosing to conform their work behavior to the demands of Acme’s commitments.

But we have already denied that these facts entail that Acme’s capacities of deliberative or reflective control are bypassed. It is true that Acme’s commitments and actions supervene on and are influenced by, among other things, the actions of its mem bers. However, the same can be said of an ordinary human agent: her commitments and actions also supervene on and are influenced by, among other things, sub-personal internal events. This doesn’t undermine her control or responsibility as long as the ways in which these events influence her commitments and actions are normally largely and reliably shaped by her commitments and rational processes. Just so, the fact that member actions influence Acme’s commitments and actions does not undermine Acme’s control or responsibility as long as the way in which they do so is largely and reliably shaped by Acme’s own commitments.

Before turning to the question of corporate reactive attitudes, we do want to address one final sort of natural worry about corporate agency. Even though corporate agents can display rational behavior driven by reliable underlying mechanisms (as described above), agency is often associated not only with rational behavior, but also with phenomenal experiences. But how could there be something “it is like” for a corporate agent to believe, desire or intend? How could there be a phenomenal point of view to accompany the rational point of view described above?

In addressing this worry, two things should be held in mind.

The first is that corporate agents might instantiate various functional properties often associated with phenomenal consciousness. For example, one of the primary roles that consciousness is supposed to play is to facilitate the integration and coordination of information from multiple sources, includ ing the senses. To the extent that this is crucial for sophisticated agency—which it certainly seems to be—we would point out that corporate agents are capable of non-phenomenal ana logs. For example, various sorts of information about both internal and external affairs might be broadcast widely, made jointly accessible to various systems governing the corporate agent’s actions and priorities according to its prior commitments (cf. Baars’ 1988). After all, such information is frequently distributed to and from the board and senior man agement, and any large organization maintains a relatively steady flow of information among its members about the organization and matters relevant to it.

The second is that for our purposes, what matters is not whether corporate agents can have a phenomenal point of view, but whether they can have what it takes to be morally responsible.24 Here, we can see how the sort of informational integration associated with consciousness might be necessary for the control and self-integration required for responsi bility (cf. Levy 2013, 2014), but we fail to see why purely qualitative aspects of a phenome nal point of view would matter. If corporate agents can do all of the things we’ve suggested they can—a claim subject to empirical verification—then there is simply no necessary role left for the qualitative aspects to play. However meaningful or significant human agents find these experiences to be in their own practices, they are not necessary for moral agency. In what follows, then, we will assume that to the extent that a “phenomenal” point of view is required for responsibility, it is one that a corporate agent could in principle have. Our main concern is whether, if corporate agents have the agential capacities to act from their own commitments in the ways described here, they can also have the moral capacities associated with reactive attitudes.

3. Reactive attitudes: the problem

The question now is whether we have similarly strong reasons to attribute capacities associated with reactive attitudes, to the extent that such capacities are required for moral responsibility.

In arguing that we have such reasons, our general strategy is to first characterize reactive attitudes in broadly functionalist terms, identifying both the sorts of cognitive processes and behaviors that they characteristically give rise to and the sorts of cognitive processes that characteristically give rise to them, and then to identify aspects of these that might plausibly be seen as necessary for moral responsibility. Given that these aspects can be understood in functionalist terms, and given that corporations can instantiate rational equivalents of beliefs, desires, and intentions, we will suggest that it is at least conceptually possible for corporations to instantiate states relevantly similar to guilt, resentment, and indignation—“moral equivalents” to these latter states. To make this plausible is the task of the present section. But the mere conceptual possibility of corpo rate moral equivalents to reactive attitudes is not enough to make sense of or justify actual practices of holding corporations morally responsible and treating them as fully f ledged moral agents. In the next section, we will thus argue that we can expect actual corporations to be capable of instantiating such states.

What matters for our purposes is whether there are capacities, dispositions or behaviors that are (a) closely associated with reactive attitudes, (b) possibly necessary for fully fledged moral agency, and (c) unavailable to corporations.

Indignation:

1. Beli
ef that some agent is responsible and to blame for some bad action, omis sion or outcome because it is the upshot of the agent’s ill will or lack of proper regard.

2. Attention directed at the (believed) responsibility and blameworthiness of the agent in question for the action, omission or outcome in question

3. Anger directed at the agent based on that responsibility, involving cognitive and physiological preparedness for aggressive action (e.g. awareness of possibilities of aggressive action, a certain insensitivity to danger)

4. Disposition to blame and hold the agent responsible based on that responsibility, i.e.:
a. to express the anger, to openly distance oneself from the agent, or to punish, i.e. to treat the agent in (what would otherwise be seen as) disrespectful ways while being open about why,
b. a disposition which tends to be mitigated when the agent expresses guilt and willingness to change, and escalated in the absence of such willing ness

5. Anger and disposition to hold responsible that are
a. felt to be appropriate and justified by the agent’s responsibility, and are
b. at least partly direct and nonstrategic, i.e. not primarily triggered by the instrumental belief that being aggressive would have a certain effect, but by the sense that the agent is responsible for the action, omission, or out come in question.

Guilt:

1. Belief that one is responsible and to blame for some bad action, omission or outcome because it is the upshot of ill will or lack of proper regard

2. Attention directed at one’s (believed) responsibility and blameworthiness for that action, omission or outcome

3. Sadness and regret directed at the object of responsibility, perhaps mixed with anger directed at oneself based on that responsibility, involving tendencies to focus on the bad and one’s responsibility for it, and preparedness for submissive behavior

4. Disposition to blame oneself and hold oneself responsible, i.e.
a. to express anger, sadness, and regret,
b. to accept being treated in (what would otherwise be seen as) disrespectful ways based on responsibility for the action, omission, or outcome in ques tion, and
c. to take on costs of compensating victims, or to undertake forms of penance

5. Disposition to change one’s ways so as to respect the values or norms that one is to blame for ignoring, and a disposition to express this willingness

6. Anger, sadness, regret, and dispositions to blame and hold responsible that are a. felt to be appropriate given one’s responsibility, and b. at least partly direct and nonstrategic

What matters for our argument is not whether corporate agents are strictly speak ingcapable of these emotions, but whether they are capable of moral equivalents of these emotions.

Consider first the role of reactive sentiments in moral motivation. What Russell sug gests is that they uniquely provide a characteristic kind of direct motivation and self-con trol, distinct from merely instrumental or strategic motivation to avoid sanctions and improve one’s standing in the public eye. An agent capable of guilt can accept the justifi cation of indignation towards her not only theoretically, but also emotionally and motiva tionally. An agent without this capacity can perhaps grasp, theoretically, that she is responsible for something bad, but her insight will not have practical implications for her in the way it would for normal fully fledged moral agents (Russell 2004: 298). (Analo gously, a moral judge incapable of indignation will arguably lack a practical understand ing of moral demands.)

One worry, then, is that unlike normal human agents, corporations are incapable of the non-instrumental and nonstrategic motivation and self control characteristically provided by guilt. Corporations, one might think, will never be directly motivated by their own transgressions, only by worries about external sanctions. Suppose that such a calculating agent might behave, on occasion, as one in whom the emotional reaction of guilt plays the normal role, by expressing regret, doing penance, compensating the victim and taking steps to avoid repeating the moral transgression. Even so, this agent seems to lack an important part of the moral capacity of ordinary human agents. Perhaps it can have some degree of moral responsibility and be the suit able object of certain kinds of moral address, but in being incapable of being directly motivated by recognition of its transgressions it seems, at least at a first glance, to fall short of fully fledged moral agency.

Consider next the related epistemic worry. Many philosophers have given moral emo tions a crucial role in helping us focus on morally significant features of a situation, or in weighing the interests of those involved. In paradigmatic cases, judgments of moral wrongness and accompanying guilt and indignation are triggered by direct emotional and motivational reactions to identifying or empathizing with those affected or with other moral judges.31 Moreover, as Russell says, moral sentiments characteristically seem to provide “salience and significance to moral considerations”, keeping our practical reason ing focused on those considerations when other matters compete for attention. The natu ral worry here is that corporations will lack anything sufficiently resembling these epistemic capacities, relevantly informing and structuring their (equivalents of) moral thinking.

The worry is simply that attitudes like guilt and indignation are tied to a certain phenomenology and that corporate agents cannot be subjects of such a phenomenology.

First, guilt and indignation are often understood as feelings and are perhaps more plausibly seen as essentially tied to a certain phenomenology than are beliefs, desires, intentions, and free action.

Second, it might seem that crucial epistemic and motivational work is done exactly by the phenomenology of guilt and indignation: it is the feeling of guilt or indignation that crowds out strategic considerations and keeps the agent focused on the relevant moral considerations.

Third, the unpleasant nat ure of guilt might seem essential to its role in practices of holding responsible. Because of the partly retributive nature of indignation, expressions of indignation seem not to have been properly received unless the guilty party is pained by the recognition of responsibility: recognition of fault and willingness to change and to compensate victims are not enough.

Still, we think that the same response is appropriate here. What matters, fundamentally, is not whether corporate agents can be exactly like human agents, but whether they can have the properties required for fully fledged moral agency. In the previous section, we said that while responsible agency might require that information about the agent and its surroundings be made widely available to systems governing the agent’s actions and priorities, purely qualitative aspects of an agent’s conscious experience are irrelevant. We also suggested that corporate agents are capable of the relevant sort of information broad casting.

The same sort of argument applies here. Though fully fledged moral agency might well require epistemic and motivational capacities and dispositions associated with reactive attitudes and their phenomenal aspects, we see no reason to think that the purely qualitative aspects of the phenomenology of reactive attitudes matter, or that other things than feelings of guilt and indignation might not serve the requisite epistemic or motiva tional functions in corporate agents.

When it comes to the suggestion that guilt must be painful to match the retributive aspect of indignation, finally, we want to deny that it is absolutely necessary for fully f ledged moral agency. An agent who has the relevant motivational and epistemic capaci ties is already an adequate object of indignation. But more can be said once we recognize that pain seems particularly relevant as a goal for retributive indignation because it is both disruptive and something that the agent has a pro tanto desire to avoid. Interest ingly, an organization instantiating the moral equivalent of guilt as outlined above will be thrown into disruptive internal conflict, conflict of a sort that it is motivated to avoid. The reason is simply that the change in values that such an organization is motivated to achieve will come into conflict with commitments and habits previously adopted based in part on those values, a conflict that the organization is necessarily motivated to avoid to the extent that it is committed to changing the values. As far as we can see, this disrup tive and unwanted state of an organization can satisfy the retributive elements of indigna tion as well as pain can.

4. Corporate guilt, corporate indignation

Thus, we see an internal focus on failures and internally directed anger (an official reprimand, not a personal attack), a disposition toward submissive behavior, a move toward compensatory action and penance, and a disposition to change the offending behavior and underlying lack of concern for accidental environmental impacts. In short, at the corporate level, Acme reacts with guilt.

Four things about this flurry of activity: First, all of this can happen without any indi vidual member of Acme believing that she personally did anything wrong, or that Acme itself did anything wrong. Among other possible scenarios, individual members—many of them—may simply think that this is all an error: that Acme did not do what it is has been accused of, or that the actions did not cause the alleged harm, or that the harm does not rise to the level of wrong-doing, or that they themselves (individually) did not con tribute to it. Lacking that initial belief in Acme’s and their own wrong-doing, members will feel neither personal guilt nor guilt on Acme’s behalf, but of course remain fully capable of implementing practices and policies consistent with Acme’s belief in its own guilt. There is no principled difference between acting on this commitment and acting on Acme’s earlier belief that the new product line would be profitable.

Second, however, it is equally possible that many employees will nonetheless unthink ingly alter their work behaviors to be more environmentally responsible. Without neces sarily intending to alter Acme’s behavior (or their own), various members (sensitized by the outcry) simply become more careful. This need not be goal-oriented behavior, or even a conscious choice on anyone’s part; they are simply more aware of potential impacts, more patient with eco-alternatives, more reactive to environmental risks. Impor tantly, other members tolerate or even encourage these tiny shifts as they occur. In this scenario, Acme’s newly cooperative attitude regarding environmental issues arises natu rally, even organically, out of the inner workings of Acme’s existing processes and pro cedures in reaction to events in the world, without any intentions to make Acme more environmentally responsible. The longer these behaviors are tolerated or rewarded the more deeply entrenched they will become, until environmentally responsible behavior becomes something of a norm at Acme—a lasting behavioral change resulting from Acme’s guilt over the destruction of the river.37 Acme has learned its lesson

Third, and independently of the second point, Acme’s reactions might be as direct and non-strategic as ordinary human reactions to guilt. For instance Acme might issue apolo gies and compensate victims because Acme’s position is that this is what one does when one is responsible for harm, even when it incurs some costs. Even if Acme’s general commitment to take responsibility for its actions was once implemented partly with an eye to the preservation of Acme’s image, and even if concerns of image and profit still play a role in shaping the way apologies are communicated and victims compensated, its present commitment and basic impetus for taking responsibility will thus be independent of strategic concerns. Something analogous is true about human beings: even if strategic reasons are part of the fundamental evolutionary or developmental explanation for our commitments to taking responsibility, and even if concerns with image and the like play some role in shaping how we act on such commitments, what is primarily driving an apology or an effort to compensate a victim can still be the mere recognition that we are responsible for the harm. In both cases, it is the recognition of responsibility that directly triggers action on commitments to compensate victims, to adjust behavior and values to prevent repeated wrongdoing, and to issue apologies, not the antecedent recognition that it would be strategically wise. If these actions are governed by feelings of guilt in the human case, they might be governed by any of the mechanisms ensuring that Acme’s other commitments are enacted: explicit policies, assigned tasks, training, and corporate culture.

Finally, throughout these activities, Acme can keep its members focused on morally relevant factors, appropriate action, and inner reform by relying on the same mechanisms that it typically uses to keep its members focused on profit and production: through pro motions, penalties, and policies. Acme can hire (or give more authority to) people with an especially good practical understanding of responsibility and guilt, people who are skilled at identifying situations likely to violate the moral standards Acme has adopted. These members could identify the potential for violations in the same way that other experts can identify the potential for profit or expansion, contributing that information for inclusion in Acme’s general decision-making processes, and thus ensuring that Acme’s actions are guided by Acme’s moral beliefs. Alternatively, Acme can simply codify its commitments in policies, or rely on its culture to shape its actions in the desired manner. By implementing such policies, procedures, and practices, Acme affirms and fortifies its guilt-related capacities.

Above all else, being a member of the moral community requires the possibility of holding and being held responsible, and it may seem that corporate agents are not cap able of this kind of interaction. Blame is of course often explicitly pinned on corporations and other organizations, and it is clear that people can be indignant about various actions from such entities and express such indignation in emails, petitions, and boycotts explic itly directed at these entities, and also clear that corporations respond to such actions in ways that mirror responses by human agents, as in the case of Acme. But one might worry that the real target of such blame, in spite of where it is said to be directed, is nev ertheless in fact some person or group of persons in the corporation. In particular, one might think that the responsibility must lie with the CEO or the board, as these constitute the corporation’s central locus of control.

5. Concluding remarks

The key to this conclusion was our suggestion that what reactive attitudes contribute to fully fledged moral agency is not some purely qualitative experiences, but rather certain motivational and epistemic capacities. Such capacities, we have argued, can be implemented by corporations.

Our main claim here can thus be said to be conditional: If an argument of that sort can show that there is rational corporate agency, then such an argument can also show that corporate agents can have moral equivalents of reactive attitudes.

Readers who find the consequent of this conditional implausible might take our claim to support the rejection of the antecedent—the rejection of basic corporate agency. But if one accepts the antecedent and still wants to reject the consequent, our argument provides a chal lenge: explain why the sort of arguments that support basic corporate agency do not extend to reactive attitudes, in spite of what we have said here.