The moral responsibilities of companies Chapple, Chris

We regularly encounter companies in everyday life that have harmful and beneficial effects. When considering responsibility for these effects, we appear to have two intuitions: a 'holist' intuition that a company is a suitable object of praise or blame, and an 'individualist' intuition that all actions are fundamentally reducible to actions of individuals. From a philosophical perspective, the 'problem of corporate responsibility' is how to allocate moral responsibility in the context of an attachment to these two conflicting intuitions. The Moral Responsibilities of Companies is a timely philosophical analysis of whether companies can be held morally responsible for the harms they create, how we balance the benefits of corporate activity against its social costs, and what implications this has on the moral position of individuals. The book draws on a range of ethical and metaphysical literature to develop an ambitious new account of corporate and individual morality, and applies this to a range of real-life examples.
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