Organizations as Wrongdoers: From Ontology to Morality, by Stephanie Collins. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. 208 pp.

Organizations do moral wrong. States invade one another, businesses avoid tax, charities misdirect funds, and some corporations are responsible for serious environmental degradation. Organizations need to be held accountable for their misdoings, but what is an organization? Is it nothing more than its members? Then, what if an organization is to be fined for something it has done? If “the polluter pays,” then who is that? Who is the polluter, and who puts their hand in their wallet to pay for it? Are they even the same person? Surely the employees are not any part of this? Perhaps the shareholders are what make an organization, but then why should the shareholders lose out when they weren’t the ones who spilled the oil, committed the fraud, or broke trading standards? Similarly, if shareholders are the company, then what are employees? One of the foundational questions of business ethics is whether firms are moral agents and morally responsible considered as (qua) firms, not considered as aggregates of individual members of firms (see Moriarty 2021, section 2). Before it is possible to address organizational ethics, some questions about the ontology of organizations need to be answered.

Stephanie Collins defines an organization as “a collective agent that involves a large number of people who realize a structure that coordinates divided labour via rules and hierarchical command relations, guided by a collective decision-making procedure” (9). She provides three reasons for why organizations are real existing things: firstly, organization-level phenomena remain constant, whereas individual-level actions, which bring them about, can vary, meaning that organization-level phenomena cannot be reduced to individual-level phenomena; secondly, organizations are causes of effects that cannot simply be attributed to individual members; thirdly, organizations have agency insofar as they have internal mechanisms and processes that give rise to collective action.

Organizations are real, according to Collins, and they are made of their members, which is what accounts for organizations’ material existence. She has a slightly unusual conception of membership, though: a member has committed to abide by the organization’s decisions, a member has inputs into the organization’s decisions, and a member has the ability to enact at least some of the organization’s decisions. Her description is underwritten by a very relationally egalitarian conception of an organization in which everybody has a say in its governance. In reality, this excludes a lot of people who are part of an organization from membership of that organization, because organizations are not as egalitarian as she seems to think they are. Collins claims that she is a member of her university, but, unless she also has a position as a university administrator, or has been granted some autonomous power by the university administrators, she does not actually have any input into the governance of her university. Even if she does—perhaps she can teach her courses as she likes, having been given that autonomy—most workers are not in that position. Though she claims that many nonmanagement employees are members of organizations, I do not think that many are any more than parts.

It is upon this ontological theory that Collins establishes a moral approach to organizational wrongdoing. Because they really exist, it is not difficult for her to establish her first moral premise: that organizations are blameworthy. She has three arguments, again, for why organizations are wrongdoers: a volitionalist one, which focusses on the will, choices, or intentions of the entity; an attributivist one, which focusses on the entity’s evaluative attitudes; and an aretaic one, which focusses on an entity’s character and vices. These three attitudes were originally developed with respect to individual human agents, but Collins demonstrates how they equally apply to organizations as she has defined them. This is not an uncommon argument. Where hers differs from others is that others have tended to ignore the variety of these three different arguments, focussing instead on volitionism.

A problem for making organizations blameworthy is that their agency is analogous to the agency of complex machines, yet complex machines are not blameworthy, according to Collins (though, I might add, perhaps this will change with artificial intelligence in coming years, as some [e.g., Gunkel 2018] are already beginning to grant “robot rights”). To solve this problem, she argues that what makes organizations blameworthy and machines blameless is that blameworthy entities must be capable of “moral self-awareness,” which organizations have if at least one member has the capacity for moral self-awareness while performing their role in the organization and adopting the organization’s rational point of view. In other words, when someone is doing their job and is aware that what they are doing is wrong according to the organization’s own beliefs, then the organization itself is aware that it is doing wrong. This account seems to assume that there is a certain amount of communication between the members of an organization so that the epistemic state of a part can map onto the epistemic state of the whole. This is, I suppose, part of what Collins means by “ontological holism.”

Clearly, members form an integral part of Collins’s account of organizations. They are responsible for both its reality and its moral blameworthiness and can even give it something like consciousness under certain conditions. So what is the moral relationship between members and organizations? How to answer the questions with which we began?

Collins argues that all members are implicated in organizational wrongdoing simply because they are part of the thing that has done wrong. She acknowledges that not everyone is equally blameworthy, though. In her taxonomy of blameworthiness, members can be implicated as enactors, either principal or complicitous; as endorsers; or as omitters, when they fail to take feasible steps to push against organizational wrong. The last is the most objectionable, because it makes something like activism morally obligatory when it would perhaps be more palatable if it were supererogatory; otherwise, it would make the whole world exceptionally immoral for letting the Nazis get away with the Holocaust for so long—which is a challenging position to hold in ethics. In addition to her taxonomy, Collins argues that costs should be apportioned among members according to their blameworthiness regarding the organization’s liability to cost.

By now, most in business ethics will be familiar with Elizabeth Anderson’s (2017) conception of corporations as “private governments.” They are not democracies but totalitarian states. Thus enactors may have been forced or may not have known what their actions would have led to due to their limited epistemic status as just part of an organization. Endorsers may have endorsed a certain course of action that was not taken and may not have endorsed certain consequences. Similarly, accidents happen. Worst off are those facing moral or even legal repercussions as omitters who tend to be powerless. Collins’ view of organizational punishment strikes me as like blaming the Jews for the Holocaust or the Russian proletariat for Stalin’s tyranny. The trial of the Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann is a striking example of what Hannah Arendt (1963) called the “banality of evil” and of how individuals are distanced from the consequences of their actions in a bureaucracy. Collins does not seem to appreciate fully the role of bureaucracy in organizational wrongdoing. In the case of pollution by states, she readily admits that pollution by citizens (members) is attributable to states (organizations) and that costs attributed to polluting states (organizations) can justly be passed on to a wide diversity of citizens (members), including those who are not themselves wrongful polluters.

Complicity is very serious: you go to jail for assisting in a murder, or fraud, or most other crimes. Her theorizing is just a little too ideal in this respect because it is very objectionable to punish members who are not voluntarily complicit, and the world is rarely so convenient that all members of an organization are active in organizational wrongdoing. On the other hand, Collins defines membership in a way that all members have input and the power to act, excluding most workers. But then, that makes it unfair for the organization when a worker, a non-member, accidentally spills two hundred million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and kills eleven other workers in the process and the organization is fined billions of dollars. Collins fails to properly account for the power dynamics within organizations and, consequently, implicates many in crimes who could not have done anything to prevent them or may not have even had knowledge of them in the first place. When she does consider these problematics, she completely runs against her theory of blameworthiness when she caveats implication via omission by saying that omitters are implicated only if they can act with reasonable cost and if they are not low ranking. Though some have argued that whistle-blowing is a moral obligation, these caveats make it supererogatory. Additionally, they would make it seem like Adolf Eichmann was innocent because he was only following orders, for the cost of action would have been extraordinarily high (he would certainly have ended up imprisoned at best, at worst on the wrong side of a concentration camp fence), in which case, he should not have been hanged. In my assessment, Collins’ theory requires rethinking with greater attention the epistemic and political inequality that exists in real, nonideal organizations so that blame can be properly attributed to those responsible rather than dispersed throughout an organization’s entire membership.