The Ontological and Moral Status of Organizations

Christopher McMahon

Business Ethics Quarterly, 1995, vol. 5, issue 3, 541-554

Abstract: The paper has two parts. The first considers the debate about whether social entities should be regarded as objects distinct from their members and concludes that we should let the answer to this question be determined by the theories that social science finds to have the most explanatory power. The second part argues that even if the theory with the most explanatory power regards social entities such as organizations as persons in their own right, we should not accord them citizenship in the moral realm. Rather we should accept moral individualism, the thesis that only individual humans can have rights and duties. The moral status of corporations and other organizations is often thought to depend on their ontological status. In particular, it is thought to depend on whether they can be said to exist as distinct entities, and especially as persons distinct from the individuals who are their members. In this article I argue that the two questions are actually independent of each other. No matter what the ontological status of organizations, they should not be accorded citizenship in the moral realm in their own right.

Date: 1995
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:buetqu:v:5:y:1995:i:03:p:541-554_01

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Business Ethics Quarterly from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().