Fuentes de financiamiento del crédito financiero.

I have now completed my analysis of the kinds of individual action that will be present in the different varieties of collective activity that I have discussed. This, as I have said, is a first step to developing an analysis of individual responsibility in the context of such group actions. I have been very careful throughout to specify that when I talk about moral responsibility I mean backward looking responsibility, where this can be understood in the way set out in chapter three. I have steered clear of other ways in which responsibility language may be used, particularly the sense where ‘responsibility’ is used to mean ‘obligation’ and the question at hand looks to the future and asks about the moral requirements for future action. Analysis of obligations – both collective and individual – in the context of business organisations is a separate and extensive project in its own right. Nonetheless, the discussion in this chapter that

relates activity at the individual and collective levels opens up one specific question about obligations in the context of organisations that is particularly pressing – in cases of collective responsibility, particularly where the collective is responsible for some kind of grave wrong, where do the obligations fall to make things right and to avoid repettitions in the future? While I cannot offer anything like a comprehensive answer to this question here, I will try to sketch the outlines of what it would have to look like.

The first thing to be said is that obligations emerging from collective activities will depend significantly on the particular form those activities take. Here there will be some reasonably straight forward cases, those in which the blameworthy collective action is undertaken by a moral agent or set of moral agents that are, as a consequence of holding this status, capable of assuming obligations. This will be the case in joint actions, where the relevant moral agents are the various participants in the joint action, and in cases of collective moral agents, either formally or informally structured. When collective activity of these kinds results in

responsibility for blameworthy actions or outcomes it will be moral agents who are subjects of the responsibility and it will be on them that any immediate obligations fall. Of course, in the case of collective moral agents any activity they undertake will supervene on the actions of individuals, and this will undoubtedly result in derivative obligations for those individuals as well. Following on from my earlier discussion of contributory action, it should be clear that the obligations falling on members of a collective moral agent will not necessarily be easily

determined simply by understanding the obligations of the collective. It will at least be necessary both to understand the mechanisms by which individual action is translated into collective action, and the level of epistemic access that can reasonably be expected of each individual, before a determination of individual obligation can be attempted.

The picture becomes even less clear in the case of morally significant systems. The reason that such organisations accrue moral responsibility is not because they are moral agents, but because they are complex in a way that creates epistemic barriers to those establishing their structure and operating their processes. They therefore are susceptible to ascriptions of moral responsibility generated by their members but that cannot justifiably be assigned to those members. The problem here is that it does not make sense to say that the organisation can be subject to obligations as a result of its culpability, since it cannot act to fulfil such obligations. On the other hand, it is hard to see what obligations may accrue to the individuals that form the joint commitments that establish its structure or that operate the processes thereby established. A basic feature of morally significant systems is the fact that these individuals are

epistemically limited in their ability to understand the consequences of their actions, so assigning them obligations would simply be ineffective. It is for these reasons that the kinds of bad outcomes that result from morally significant systems are particularly pernicious and hard to address. Indeed, it may be the case that the only kinds of action that can genuinely be required in a situation where a morally significant system has generated bad outcomes are those that somehow disband the organisation so it ceases to be one that creates these responsibility effects. These obligations, presumably, would fall on those with the power to succeed in fulfilling them. While such individuals may be members of the organisation that is the system – they may, for example, fulfil the ‘ownership’ function – it may be that it is only external agents that can curtail the effects of the system and this, perhaps, suggests a role for government.

If organisations or those that populate them are incapable of arriving at an organisational structure where adverse ascriptions of responsibility generate clear obligations that will enable improvement in the future, change might be imposed on them externally. One example might be the enforced breakup of large, complex organisations that cannot be fully understood and therefore cannot be managed in a responsible way. It is interesting to note that one of the main criticisms of the large financial institutions in the recent financial crisis, aside from being too big to be allowed to fail, is that they were too big to be managed effectively. Break up of these institutions could therefore be justified on the grounds of removing responsibility- dislocating epistemic barriers, quite apart from the more popular arguments relating to the implicit government support afforded to systemically important institutions. A further challenge might come about in cases where a large complex organisation is not obviously susceptible to being ‘broken up’ without defeating the object of it existing in the first place. The tax system example that I offered in chapter six may be a case like this.

This idea of an obligation to change organisational form gestures at a different, although related, kind of obligation that individuals might acquire as a result of responsibility that is generated at the collective level – the obligation to organise themselves in certain ways. All the discussion that I have offered to this point has started with situations in which different kinds of collective activity are being undertaken – joint action, moral agency in informally and formally structured organisations, the operation of morally significant systems. However, there is no necessity for any of these kinds of organisation to exist at all, and so it is legitimate to ask not only how we should judge their outputs, but whether one kind of organisation should be preferred over another, and whether some should not be undertaken at all. If we could come

to conclusions of this kind – and there is no obvious reason why we should not – then individuals who are undertaking a given activity may find themselves under an obligation, for example, to ensure that their organisation acquires moral agency so that it can be reactive to the appropriate reasons for behaving in one way or another. Such obligations would extend significantly the idea of the ‘responsibilities of business’ that are typically discussed in ways which are blind to the pros and cons of the particular model of business that is supposed to enact the obligations described.