RT Article
T1 Corporations, minors, and other innocents — A reply to R. E. Ewin
JF Journal of business ethics
VO 13
IS 10
SP 761
OP 774
A1 Wilson, P. Eddy
LA English
YR 1994
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1785605690
AB R. E. Ewin has argued that corporations are moral persons, but Ewin describes them as being unable to think or to act in virtuous and vicious ways. Ewin thinks that their impoverished emotional life would not allow them to act in these ways. In this brief essay I want to challenge the idea that corporations cannot act virtuously. I begin by examining deficiencies in Ewin's notion of corporate personhood. I argue that he effectively reduces corporations to the status of incompetent patients. I shall make use of a richer notion of corporate personhood as I explore the logical relationship between corporate action and the quality of the corporate emotional life. After discussing an alternate methodology for making moral assessments of action I consider briefly two corporate disasters: the crash on Mt. Erebus, the Imperial Foods plant fire. These cases are used to show the inadequacy of Ewin's thesis that only corporate managers are capable of displaying vice.
K1 Logical Relationship
K1 Corporate Action
K1 Corporate Manager
K1 Food Plant
K1 Economic Growth
DO 10.1007/BF00876257