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Responsibility with No Alternatives, in Loss of Innocence, and Collective Affectivity: Some Thoughts on the Papers by Haji, McKenna, and Tollefsen

Peter A. French
Arizona State University

I am honored by having been selected by the editors of the APA Newsletter on Philosophy and Law as the featured philosopher for this edition. I am especially honored that three exceptional philosophers have written papers based on my work. Their papers are important additions to the literature on responsibility to which I have been attempting to make useful contributions for over forty years. It is noteworthy that the papers of mine that provoked their insightful work here were collected in Responsibility Matters and were not papers from that volume that has received the most notice over the years. They are, however, favorites of mine and it is gratifying to discover that they still warrant some attention among philosophers.

I will offer my thoughts prompted by each of the contributions of my commentators.

I

Professor Ishtiyaque Haji rightly notes that in my paper on “Fate and Responsibility” I was, in part, trying to show that Frankfurt-type examples provide persuasive reasons for both compatibilists and libertarians to reject the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP). My point in doing so was not to add another nail to the incompatibilist’s coffin, but to offer a plausible explanation for some remarks made to me by a middle-aged Irish woman in the west country of Ireland at the height of the “Troubles” in Ulster. I was intrigued by her claim that she was both a fatalist and that she believed firmly that people are morally responsible for many of their actions. I was tempted to tell her that to make her point, she could be agnostic about fatalism and just embrace an anti-PAPist position. Noting the Celtic cross hung on a chain around her neck and seeing her fondling rosary beads that suggestion did not seem to be a felicitous way to continue our conversation. After a few minutes of talking with her, I dismissed the notion that she was confused about what she believed. She had a solid philosophical understanding of what fatalism involved and gave me a precise, if somewhat colloquial, account, that could have been written by Richard Taylor or Steven Cahn, of the logical basis for fatalism in the concept of truth and the law of the excluded middle. For good measure, she tossed in a fatalist’s defense of petitionary prayers that something not have happened in cases when one is ignorant of the particulars of past events, in her case, whether a relative in the IRA had been killed by British troops in a raid on a farmhouse on the Antrim Road the day before we met.

I considered attacking her fatalism with the standard arguments that date back to Aristotle and the sea battle tomorrow, but I was far more interested in her defense of holding people morally responsible when they could not have done other than what they did. It is at this point in that paper that Professor Haji engages with me and expands upon my argument in compelling ways.

As Professor Haji points out, I constructed something like a Frankfurt-type case based on a story the Irish woman told me, that purports to show that someone can be held morally responsible even if that person could not have done otherwise, that there were no possible alternative courses of action open to the agent in the circumstances. Whatever happened had to happen, as the Irish woman said. In brief, the story is that a woman (I called her Mary after Mary Nellis who in the 1970s organized the “blanket protest” that brought about the end of the cruel treatment of Irish prisoners by the British in the infamous H-Block) decides for her own reasons to protest the treatment of the prisoners though she was the target of a credible threat by the IRA that they will make her protest should she decide not to do so. She protests, and our intuitions tell us that she is morally responsible for doing so, that she deserves moral credit and praise for doing so. In effect, whatever the IRA would have done to close off all of her other action options actually plays no role in her choosing to organize the protest. I should point out, though Professor Haji kindly does not, that I exaggerated the power of what I designate as the overdetermination factor in my story for the dramatic effect of making it consistent with some IRA tactics of the time. Mine is not really a full-fledged Frankfurt-type case. For a genuine match to a Frankfurt-type case I need something far more determined than IRA threats to the agent or her kin. Such duress may well eliminate options for rational actors, but it does not overdetermine Mary’s action choice. For a Frankfurt-type case, I need a reliable brain-scanner and unavoidable choice-implanter, so that, when operated by an IRA member, if it detects the brain events that signal that Mary will decide not to protest, it will kick in the choice-implanter and Mary will have to choose to protest and will act accordingly. In any event, the test case situation we want is that had Mary decided not to protest, she still would have protested. The story needs to be that she could not have done other than protest but she protested because that is what she chose to do. Consequently we hold her morally responsible (praiseworthy) for doing so. The IRA intervener who can remove any alternate possible courses of action other than protesting for Mary, aptly described by Professor Haji as “an IRA operative who has the power to read and control Mary’s mind,” of course, never intervenes and this provides a strong prima facie reason to believe that the only thing that matters to holding people morally responsible for what they do is the explanation of why they did it. Of note, the Irish woman’s fatalism only holds that whatever happens had to happen, it does not tell us why it happens. That it was unavoidable, that it had to happen, may not enter at all into that explanation, as it doesn’t in Mary’s case, so unavoidability in her case is irrelevant to the determination of the justifiability of an ascription of moral responsibility. She deserves moral praise. If fatalism includes or entails the view that we cannot avoid doing what we do, as the Irish woman maintained, fatalism is not incompatible with moral responsibility.

Professor Haji points out that Frankfurt-type cases have met with an avalanche of objections in the philosophical literature since Frankfurt first unleashed them in his landmark paper, “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,” in 1969.[1] Professor Haji attacks one of the popular anti-Frankfurt responses, the Dilemma Objection, by offering what I believe is an original way of resisting the first horn of the dilemma identified in the Objection. That horn maintains that if there is an infallible sign that can be identified by the intervener that Mary will protest, so the intervener does not have to intervene, “it can only be so because states of the agent (Mary) prior to the occurrence of the supposedly free choice (or action) are causally sufficient for this choice (and the sign indicates this).” But that would mean that a deterministic relation obtains between the sign and Mary’s choice and that will beg the question against the incompatibilist’s position. To respond to this objection, Professor Haji develops an elaborate Frankfurt-type case that involves two causal routes to the agent’s action, one of which is causally deterministic. To get his point, we should imagine that Mary indeterministically decides to protest and also that there is a deterministic mechanism functioning in her that will cause her to arrive at the same decision at the same time. If the two causal routes to her action were to diverge, the deterministic one will override the indeterministic one, so she will decide to protest and she will protest no matter what. Our intuitions, however, should tell us that if they do not diverge and she protests, that she should be morally praised for doing so. She is morally responsible for her choice even though she could not have chosen otherwise. The reason we would morally praise her is because were the second, the deterministic, causal sequence to be totally absent, we would praise her and its presence plays no role in her deciding to protest.

Professor Haji, after persuasively beating back various incompatibilist challenges to his position, agrees with my view that the Irish woman was not holding incompatible beliefs. People can be held morally responsible for some of the things they do even if we are convinced that they can never avoid doing what they do and that whatever happened had to have happened.

Would an anti-fatalist agree that the notion of doing something for one’s own reasons, even though one could not do otherwise, is consistent with a fatalist’s conception of the way things are? What appears to be necessary for moral responsibility in the Frankfurt-type cases is that the agent must have ultimate control over the decision to act, and ultimate control may be understood, depending on whether one is a compatibilist or an incompatibilist in one way rather than another. On my account Mary has such control because the cause of her protesting is internal to her and issues from her. That she has no alternatives in the circumstances (because an IRA operative is monitoring her brain) does not diminish her responsibility-grounding control. But is the cause of her protesting agent-causal? As Professor Haji points out, that is not a relevant condition for moral responsibility. However, the anti-fatalist may argue that on the fatalist’s account Mary’s choices could not be otherwise than they are, and worry that Mary does not have the sort of control of her choices that would make them responsibility grounding, that they are causally determined themselves. Professor Haji, it seems to me, provides a persuasive rejoinder to this objection. Importantly, he reminds us that one does not have to be partly responsible for everything that is a sufficient cause of one’s choices for those choices to be responsibility grounding. Of course, what the Irish woman needs to secure her contention that her fatalism is compatible with her sometimes holding people morally responsible for what they do is an account of what we should mean when we say that the cause of what someone did was her decision to do it. Convinced, as I am, that not being able to do otherwise is no barrier to moral responsibility, I still need a plausible account of a decision being mine (in the sense relevant to moral responsibility grounding) even if I were fated to make it, that is, if all of its causally sufficient antecedents (including those internal to me and issuing from me) could not have been otherwise. I am inclined to hold a position, noted by Professor Haji as Frankfurt’s account, that maintains that what is needed for ownership of actions in the responsibility grounding sense is that one’s first-order desires align with one’s second order desires or second order volitions.[2] In other words, that the choice or action is appropriately identified as one’s will regardless of whether or not one could have done otherwise.

II

Professor Michael McKenna takes up what he calls my “controversial thesis that we morally competent adults have an obligation to usher innocents from their moral condition, and this involves opening children up to the possibility of evil.” He remarks that he admires my paper on “Losing Innocence for the Sake of Responsibility” but there are questions that need to be addressed in order to take seriously the crux of the thesis: that we should facilitate the loss of innocence process in children. I should note that though Professor McKenna gives me considerable credit for exploring the issue of loss of innocence, I learned a great deal, as I note in that paper, from the earlier work on the subject by Herbert Morris.[3]

I maintain, as Professor McKenna rightly summarizes, that loss of innocence must include learning to redescribe actions and events in ways that were not previously possible for a person; that it crucially involves acquiring a certain kind of conceptual understanding. I talk about the conceptual shift from innocence to moral maturity in terms of the loss of seriously using childhood illusions to describe actions and events. But I also argue that central to the loss of innocence is gaining a certain kind of knowledge: knowledge of one’s capacity to do and be done evil, and that this must be learned by acquaintance and not solely by description. It is the latter claim that suggests to some that I am walking a very fine line between ushering a child into adulthood and child abuse. After all, knowing evil by acquaintance can be a very unpleasant, extremely hurtful, and sometimes identity shattering experience. Still, my point is that it is not enough to expose children to literature, fictional or nonfictional, or take them to “coming of age” films. Though most people probably will learn more about evil by description than by acquaintance and that, of course, is a good thing, members of the moral community must grasp their own potential to be the subject and object of evil by personal confrontation or it will only be an “academic” matter for them, using that term in its pejorative sense. Like Morris, I was interested in the Biblical account of the Fall. I decided, after rejecting a number of alternative accounts of what Eve may have learned from her ingesting the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, that all Eve needed to taste in that first bite was an immediate acquaintance with her capacity to do and be done evil, all the rest could occur incrementally and much of it through knowledge by description.

Professor McKenna makes an important point challenging my claim that loss of innocence is always accompanied by the sort of gain required for full membership in the moral community. He points out that a child who has been sexually molested may well lose his or her innocence while not gaining the knowledge that he or she can also do evil. I agree that being a victim, understanding that you are a victim, does not necessarily lead one to the realization that you are also capable of being a victimizer. And this must be especially true in cases of greatly disproportionate power situations. It is also unlikely that sexually abused children gain from those horrific experiences an understanding of intimacy in mature moral terms, as Professor McKenna notes. However, some may experience the reactive attitude of resentment and that may be an incremental step towards their gaining knowledge of evil in the requisite sense for moral maturity. It is difficult for me not to imagine that a sexually molested child would not experience resentment, and some may, sadly, experience shame. Those reactive attitudes, as Strawson famously maintained, rest on a set of expectations of respect, good will, and the protection of personal dignity that have “common roots in our human nature.”[4]

Though the set of expectations may reside in human nature, the reactive attitudes that give rise to our moral assessments of ourselves and others typically need to be cultivated. A molested child may have certain feelings with respect to the molester, but be confused as to what those feelings are or unable to sort out conflicting feelings that the episode triggered, a point, I noted in the original paper, Seneca made persuasively.[5] In some of the widely publicized cases involving the Roman Catholic clergy, the child may believe or be led to believe by the molester and the institutional accoutrements of the situation in which the abuse occurs that what the priest is doing to him or her is a loving or caring act, even a sacred one, and will not grasp its true moral significance for some time, often years, when the appropriate negative reactive attitudes then take hold. No matter how painful psychologically, moral maturity with respect to that part of the person’s life then emerges.

I certainly am not claiming that there might be some good in child abuse. In fact, the trauma of an abuse situation may block or greatly delay the abused child’s gaining moral knowledge. In some cases it may numb the victim or regress the victim as a way of coping with the experienced horror. In such a case, the victim cannot face the moral reality of his or her experience and so cannot be expected to gain a deeper conceptual understanding of mature moral description. The language of rape, assault, molestation, and the like finds no foothold when the dominate image in the child’s mind is that it was an experience that gave pleasure to an authority figure, a stepfather, a priest, a favorite teacher. In any event, we should not overlook the fact that most children experience evil and their ability to do it without extreme trauma and typically incrementally.

One of the central themes of my paper that Professor McKenna profitably explores is that gaining mature membership in the moral community involves losing the “illusions of innocent description.” Those illusions are cultural artifacts, as is the whole idea of loss of innocence and achieving moral maturity. Humans could biologically mature, carry on their lives, reproduce, and die and never invoke moral conceptual descriptions of their actions and the events in which they are involved. Humans would then be in something not unlike Hobbes’ state of nature or in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve before the Fall. They would not be moral agents and their relations with each other would not be, as Hobbes rightly believed, stable. Social arrangements would be virtually impossible to sustain. I imagine such pre-moral humans in somewhat the way Kierkegaard describes the life of the aesthete. He writes, “when a man lives aesthetically his mood is always eccentric because he has his center in the periphery.”[6] Like a child at play, and Kierkegaard uses reference to childish behavior in his characterization of living aesthetically,[7] the interest of premoral humans in one thing or one activity or one person or group of persons soon wanes and they look for something new and different. Perhaps Eve was curious about the fruit of the forbidden tree not so much because it was forbidden as because it was different. Alasdair MacIntyre provides a description of people of this sort. He writes that they are “those who see in the social world nothing but a meeting place for individual wills, each with its own set of attitudes and preferences and who understand the world solely as an arena for the achievement of their own satisfaction, who interpret reality as a series of opportunities for their enjoyment and for whom the last enemy is boredom.”[8]

I think there is much to be learned from Professor McKenna’s account of the “illusions of innocent description” as the cultural artifacts of a simplistic moral order used to begin the indoctrination of children into morality. He has elaborated on an important step in the loss of innocence that I only mentioned in passing. He notes that I was especially concerned with the way that losses of innocence often assault a person’s confidence in the continuity of one’s self. My examples of that phenomenon were taken from two nineteenth-century British novels, Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights, but I failed to explore the fact that fearing loss of innocence may not be because one fears loss of one’s sense of self, as is the case with Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights. It probably more often is the internal discovery by those moving into maturity that they do not really know how to replace the comfortable illusions of childhood that have shaped their world and given it meaning with mature moral ones that lack the magic, charm, simplicity, finality, and joy that were embedded in the illusions of innocent description. Professor McKenna writes about this sense of loss: “We are uncertain what to do, or how to live. We are left aware that we need a far more nuanced map of our moral surroundings, but how are we to acquire it?” He provides a passage from Catcher in the Rye to illustrate his well-taken point.

The closing section of Professor McKenna’s paper moves the discussion into an issue that few philosophers have examined. It revolves around the question, suggested by my “controversial thesis”: How should adults parent their children? Parenting is an especially morally significant human activity. We all know that it can be done well or poorly, but on what criteria, what grounds, what benchmarks, should it be judged? Certainly how the child “turns out” must be considered, but that often-used phrase is ambiguous and lacking in anything more than the mere suggestion of criteria. Eliminating career and financial measures and concentrating on moral maturity as a primary goal of parenting, we can ask what innocence-ending experiences are morally appropriate.

Professor McKenna stresses that the “should” question that needs to be answered is not should we usher our children out of innocence into moral maturity, but how should we do so. I had not credited our culture with having rituals designed to facilitate a child’s exposure to evil and the risks humans run in interpersonal encounters, but Professor McKenna corrects me with reminders of some of the transitional experiences children endure, or are forced to endure, in which they get “to explore the underbelly of the moral world.” His examples, though not rituals in the sense I had in mind, admittedly have a certain ritualistic character to them, such as teenagers going off to college or boot camp or taken into the family business.

I am most impressed with Professor McKenna’s attention to the appropriate use by parents of the illusions of childhood that will be discarded upon moral maturity. He maintains that proper parenting requires that the illusions that are “fed” a child must “contain the seeds of basic, true moral insights.” The idea is that the myths we teach to the young on which they build their childish illusory conceptions of the moral order in which they function remain moral anchors during the shattering experience of loss of innocence when the magic is replaced with the mundane. He offers one example, but it is very persuasive. It is that embedded in the illusions of childhood there morally ought to be the lesson that a person’s moral worth and merit cannot be discerned solely from her physical appearance. The idea is that having anchored that notion in the child’s repertoire, it will serve as a foundational concept as the child outgrows or is torn away from the magic of fairy godmothers, good witches, elves, dwarfs, wolves dressed up as grandmothers, prince charmings, and all the rest and must deal in mixed motives and principles of utility and questions of integrity in morally complex and conflicted encounters with others. One way in which the parent may prepare the way for the transition is for the parent to encourage, in Feinberg’s terms as quoted by Professor McKenna, “the habit of critical self-revision.” What this comes to in parenting is fostering a critical stance in the child towards those childish illusions of the moral order. “Why,” Professor McKenna hopes the child will question, “did Snow White have to be so beautiful or so white?” What a marvelous question. I recall that when my daughter was a child of ten or so she told me that she hated Alice in Wonderland, but loved The Wizard of Oz. When I expressed dismay because I favored the Lewis Carroll for its philosophical aspects, she told me that Alice is alone in a frightening world, but Dorothy, though also in a frightening world, makes honest and loyal friends who, despite their individual deficiencies, with courage, love, and intelligence face the evils with her. Such virtues morally matter in the transition from innocence to moral maturity.

III

The core problem raised by Professor Deborah Tollefsen’s paper launches from the same paper of mine that engaged Professor McKenna. She is concerned with the affectivity that my account of loss of innocence requires in the members of the moral community. She points out that in the 1970s I wrote a paper published in the American Philosophical Quarterly that fostered something of a “cottage industry” of responses from philosophers because it propounded the theory that being a moral person was to exhibit a certain set of functional capacities and that some corporations satisfied that criteria. Professor Tollefsen rightly points out something that has not been noted by a number of philosophers who still cite that paper: that I modified my position two decades later in what I regard as two crucial ways. First, I no longer referred to corporations as moral persons, substituting “moral actors,” though I continue to hold a functionalist account of what it is to be a moral actor. In fact, I am happy to reserve the term “person” for humans, but maintain that the basic requirement for admission into the moral community is to satisfy the functional capacities of a moral actor. My second alteration was to move my account of one of those functional capacities, the ability to act intentionally, from the traditional desire/belief model to a planning model of intention that follows the work of Michael Bratman on that subject.[9]

Professor Tollefsen is willing to grant me these moves away from the original paper, but she points out that I need still to respond to the criticism that moral agency essentially involves affectivity and corporations lack that capacity. She notes a paper by Mitch Haney[10] that uses my account of loss of innocence as a way to argue that I must exclude corporations from the moral community because a corporation does not have the ability qua corporation to recognize its capacity to do evil and that should be understood as its lacking the functional capacity to care about the moral quality of its actions. The capacity for caring in this way is linked to the capacity for affectivity and that is what, it has been alleged, I cannot make sense of in the case of corporations. So, corporations, on this account, remain in an innocent state from which they can never escape. Apparently, when we talk of the responsibility of a corporation for pollution or inflated prices or moving its production plants overseas and putting its American employees out of work, we are either talking nonsense or some sort of code or shorthand, not really meaning what we seem to be saying.

Professor Tollefsen points out that losing one’s innocence and acquiring mature moral self-reflectiveness (as well as trust) requires affectivity. She offers me three possible strategies for responding to the attack (in part provoked by my own work, as noted above) that corporations cannot be moral actors because they lack the requisite affectivity. The first strategy is to differentiate human moral agency from corporate moral agency, each having its own conditions and the corporation’s conditions not including affectivity. She rightly points out that I cannot use the first strategy because to do so I would have to jettison a central element of my general account of moral responsibility: that the ability to appropriately respond to moral criticism is constitutive of moral agency.

I might, she suggests, give up the affective component and maintain that to be a moral agent one does not need to have the capacity for reactive attitudes with respect to the behavior of others and oneself. Such an entity would have no sense of indignation (or sympathy) upon learning or witnessing an injustice visited upon another or resentment when it is the target of undeserved harm or shame or regret or remorse when it reflects upon its improper or immoral behavior. I agree with Professor Tollefsen that the second strategy is unacceptable and for reasons that mirror the rejection of the first strategy. Professor Tollefsen maintains that my best strategy is to deny that corporations necessarily lack affectivity. The expression of moral emotions must be a part of the picture and, indeed, we certainly express them in our dealings with corporations, whether or not it is easy to identify that corporations have them, in any sense, as well. So, to salvage my position on corporate moral agency from the argument from affectivity, I need to produce a convincing account of how corporations can be subject to reactive attitudes, granted that they are indisputably the target of such attitudes held and expressed by human moral agents.

I note that Professor Tollefsen rejects any account of our reactive attitudes towards the behavior of corporations that associates them with our reactions to fictions. I think she has made a double-barreled point because it not only addresses the problem at hand, it also dismisses the old Fiction Theory that has been one of the dominant conceptions of corporations in legal history and in some of the work of philosophers. Though she categorizes the general response of philosophers to the obvious fact that we are often moved by fiction, following Walton, as just make-believe, there have been other philosophical responses to the so-called Radford Paradox that cover the spectrum from the position that our reactions to fictions are simply irrational and an indicator of an inherent irrational element in our nature to elaborate accounts of the biochemistry of our brains responding to certain stimuli or memes. In any event, our moral reactions to corporate behavior are not ersatz or irrational. They are genuine and appropriate expressions of resentment when we are their victims and indignation when we learn of what they have done to others, even other corporations. This strongly suggests, as Professor Tollefsen says, that corporations are morally addressable, assessable, and that entails that they are presumed to have the ability to consider our criticism and respond in a morally appropriate fashion. But, the naysayers maintain, that cannot be the case, as they cannot have self-reactive attitudes or emotions.

At this point I might want to take back the argument for knowledge by acquaintance and the emotion element I made regarding loss of innocence to become a mature member of the moral community and adopt a purely cognitive account that associates having an emotion with the making of a judgment or having a belief. Corporations, my critics such as Haney will allow, can do that. But I am not prepared, nor is Professor Tollefsen, to take that escape route. I am willing to join with Professor Tollefsen in trying to defend the view that corporations can and do have reactive attitudes. She has developed a vicarious emotion theory in which corporate employees are “conduits for corporate emotions.” What she has in mind is that when a corporate employee in her role qua corporate employee tells me on the phone that she is sorry that they double billed me for a purchase on my credit card account, she is not expressing her personal regret for the double billing, she is expressing corporate regret. She is the vicarious moral emotion expresser for the corporation. Professor Tollefsen associates her account with the fact that humans can have vicarious reactive attitudes for others even if those others do not (cannot?) have the same attitudes about themselves. We can be ashamed for others, particularly those with whom we have a relationship, and such shame is not being ashamed for ourselves because we have done nothing to be ashamed of. This calls to mind a scene in Pride and Prejudice in which Elizabeth witnesses the inappropriate and oafish behavior of members of her family at a ball and feels ashamed for them, though they were not ashamed of themselves or they would have ceased acting like country bumpkins. Professor Tollefsen goes on to propose that collective emotion (and presumably that includes corporate emotion) is a form of this sort of vicarious emotion. What we have is not corporations feeling emotions, but emotions being corporatized. (Elizabeth Bennet’s shame might be thought of as an emotion that is familyized.) Professor Tollefsen worries that this may not satisfy critics of allowing corporations into the moral community and she hopes I might take on the problem.

I think the problem is manageable. It may be recalled that on my account of corporate intentionality I maintained that all intentionality, and consequently corporate intentionality, is a matter of redescription. My point was that an act is corporate if at some level of true description it is the action(s) of a person(s) in a corporate role(s) and it is redescribable, as licensed by the rules of the corporation’s internal decision structure, as an act of the corporation. It is then appropriate to refer to it as intended by the corporation. In effect, I argued that corporate intentional acts are typically human bodily movements under a corporate description. Human physical movements and actions usually are necessary for corporations to act on corporate reasons and interests. Corporate decision structures subordinate and synthesize the intentions and actions of various human persons (and often the running of machines) into a corporate action. They provide epistemically transparent bases for the redescriptive transformation of bodily movements, actions, and events, usually seen under another aspect as the acts or the mere behavior of humans (those who occupy various stations or roles on the organizational chart), into corporate acts. The corporate actor makes its appearance on the moral stage at the level of redescription that those corporate structures, including their organizational and policy/procedural rules, make possible. When an action performed by someone in the employ of a corporation filling a specific role in the corporate structure is an implementation of its corporate policy, then it is proper to describe the act as done for corporate reasons or for corporate purposes and so as an action of the corporation. Corporate reasons and purposes might differ from those that motivate the human persons who occupy corporate positions and whose bodily movements are necessary for the corporation to act.

My suggestion, though I am afraid that is all it is at this time, is that the same redescriptive account might be applied to reveal something that will pass as corporate affectivity. What I need to allow is that a corporation’s decision structure may contain conversion rules for descriptions of certain types of utterances by appropriate employees into descriptions of corporate reactive attitudes. When a corporate employee says, “We are sorry that we double billed your credit card account,” I do not think the employee with whom I am speaking personally regrets the corporate act. I understand that I am receiving an apology from the corporation and that it is as sincere as apologies go. By the same token, when the President of the United States apologizes to native Hawaiians for past actions taken by the United States military on the Hawaiian Islands, the regret being expressed is that of the collective and it is so identifiable because of the redescriptive licenses that are a part of the decision structure of the collective the President represents or for whom the President speaks. The expressions of reactive attitudes are, generally, performative, ritualistic, conventional. They may be regarded as insincerely made if they are not “backed” by a certain sort of feeling, for example, an apology without the feeling of sorrow, but they are not void.

The idea of collective emotions, including regret, prima facie does not lack sense and is a topic of much current discussion in the literature. Though I am somewhat uncomfortable with Margaret Gilbert’s plural subject account of group emotions,[11] what I like about her account is the idea that a group can become jointly committed to feeling an emotion as a group. She says that joint commitment is “a function of the understandings, expressive actions, and common knowledge of the parties.”[12] I am inclined to the idea that something like her idea of a joint commitment in a corporate setting can be functionally engineered by the inclusion of certain rules and policies in a corporation’s internal decision structure. Such an account, of course, would not claim that the corporation feels or has “pangs” of regret or remorse or sorrow when it expresses affectivity, though members or employees may suffer such feelings (what Gilbert calls “membership remorse”) because of their association with the corporate wrongdoer. I do not, however, think that employee feelings are essential to the truth of the claim that the corporation regrets what it did qua corporation, just as I do not think that we can say that a human does not regret doing something even though she does not experience the typical or expected “pangs” or emotions. I would not, however, say that a corporate employee expressing corporate regret for double billing my credit card account is necessarily vicariously feeling regret for the corporation. She is performing her corporate duty of expressing the corporation’s regret, though she may have, incidentally, membership regret when learning how her corporation treated me. In effect, I think that with appropriately constructed and largely transparent internal decision structures, corporations are normatively competent.

What this probably suggests, as prompted by Professor Tollefsen’s paper, is that a more robust theory of corporate moral agency than I have previously offered is needed to understand why corporations are not illegitimate aliens in the moral community. I think there is a sufficient basis in the general structure of my original work on the subject to admit corporate affectivity by way of the redescription of human behavior within the corporate structure, though there may be some wrinkles that will require ironing out.

Endnotes

1. Harry Frankfurt. “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility.” In The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Chapter 1.

2. See Harry Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” in The Importance of What We Care About, Chapter 2.

3. Herbert Morris. “Loss of Innocence.” In On Guilt and Innocence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 139-61.

4. Peter Strawson. Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays (London: Metheun & Co., 1974), 16.

5. See Seneca, Letters of a Stoic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), Letter XC.

6. Soren Kierkegaard. Either/Or, volume 2, trans. by Walter Lowrie (Garden City: Doubleday, 1959 edition), 235.

7. Ibid., 192.

8. Alasdair MacIntyre. After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 24.

9. See Michael Bratman, Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).

10. Mitchell Haney. “Corporate Loss of Innocence for the Sake of Accountability.” The Journal of Social Philosophy 35 (2004): 391-412.

11. Margaret Gilbert. Sociality and Responsibility (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), Chapter 7.

12. Ibid., 135.

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