2.2.2 TIPOS DE AUSENTISMO LABORAL

A long tradition of thought in philosophy of the social sciences holds that the basic unit of analysis in collective situations is the individual, and that any analysis that appeals to collective entities can be reduced without remainder to an analysis in terms of individuals alone. This line of thought is clearly highly relevant to the question of the nature of collective

responsibility, since it would entail that any analysis of moral responsibility that appealed to collective entities could be reduced to an analysis of purely individual responsibility. Such a position is known as methodological individualism (MI). Arguments for MI start from the seemingly unobjectionable observation that, when we come to explain socio-economic phenomena, we must give a prominent place in our explanation to the individuals engaged in the relevant activity. Although the history of such an approach goes back much further, the term ‘methodological individualism’ was coined by the economist Joseph Schumpeter in 1908 (Hodgson, 2007). It was picked up by Austrian School economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises in the 1940s, and then employed by Hayek’s friend Karl Popper who introduced the term to philosophers (ibid.). However, as Hodgson argues, exactly what the MI position is meant to hold is quite ambiguous. He goes on to identify three such ambiguities.

The first is in the scope of the MI proposition – is it meant to apply to any explanation of socio- economic phenomena, or is it just one valid perspective for such explanation? Schumpeter himself took it to be one method of explanation that was complementary with others, although recent accounts of MI tend to take it as showing that only explanations that are based exclusively in individuals are coherent (ibid.). The second ambiguity is in whether MI is

making an assertion about what exists, i.e. a claim about social ontology (only individuals exist, not ‘collective entities’), or whether the point is to argue that explanations of social

phenomena must only make reference to individuals (ibid.). In Hodgson’s view these two claims are often confused, but they are neither synonymous nor entail each other. It is perfectly consistent to hold that the only things that exist are individuals, but that it is not possible to capture fully the nature of certain social phenomena and explain their occurrence without reference to non-individual terms and ideas. I take a different view to Hodgson, which I set out in §19 below, and that depends on reading less into ontological claims than is

commonly supposed. The third ambiguity is whether MI requires explanation to be conducted ‘in terms of individuals, or individuals alone’ (ibid.). If it is the former, then it is an

uncontentious theory since the significance of individuals is hardly disputed; if it is the latter then MI is in danger of going too far, since it appears to rule out appeal to elements such as the relations between individuals. It is unclear how we could explain social phenomena without basic reference to these relations (ibid.).

The first point to highlight from this brief overview is that MI is most commonly framed as a theory about explanations of social phenomena. However, the arguments employed by MI are often taken to have implications beyond such explanations. As mentioned above, one type of conclusion that may be drawn is ontological, about the kinds of entities that exist and in particular about the possibility of social entities being ontologically distinct. Another type of conclusion is normative. When extended to the normative field, MI becomes a theory about the possible subjects and objects of normative theorising, and about which normative conclusions may be drawn. It is these normative conclusions that are particularly relevant to questions of collective responsibility. For example, MI would deny that a collective entity such as ‘a corporation’ could be a subject of moral responsibility distinct from the individuals that make it up. In terms of the conception of moral responsibility I developed in the previous chapter, this would entail denying that a corporate entity could ever have moral ownership of an action or event. Clearly, however, these three types of implication that may be drawn from MI arguments are connected. Whether or not we want to argue that distinct corporate entities can be morally responsible in their own rights, such entities may appear (irreducibly) in an explanation of how we hold individuals responsible, and the things for which we hold them responsible. Equally, any argument for distinct corporate responsibility will be significantly affected by the position we take on the possible ontological status of sociological entities.

So the second point to draw from this brief overview is this: a general appeal to

methodological individualism is too vague a strategy to deny the coherence of accounts of collective responsibility in the context of organisations. It is not clear exactly what is being denied and on what grounds. As should be clear by now, I will not accept the stronger claims associated with MI, those that would conclude that there is no such thing as collective responsibility. In order to make my argument, and to make clear exactly which MI claims I am refuting, I will firstly consider an explicit argument from the corporate responsibility literature which draws on MI to deny the possibility of anything other than individual responsibility in the context of business organisations. In the rest of this chapter, I will then show that there are various ways that we can formulate accounts of collective responsibility that avoid the

genuinely troubling parts of this argument. This approach will provide a much more focused refutation of the general and vague anti-collectivist tendencies of MI while acknowledging some important insights that arise in particular lines of argument that it advocates.

Miguel Velasquez (2003) makes an argument for corporate moral responsibility that draws on central aspects of MI. He argues for the position that we should not consider a corporate organisation ‘as anything other than a multitude of inter-related people each of whom is more or less morally responsible for what the organisation does (what [he calls] the “individualist” view), and [that we should] reject, therefore, the idea that the corporate organisation has some additional share of moral responsibility that is distinct from the responsibility that can accrue to each of its members’ (Velasquez, 2003: 531). From this statement we can already identify an element of the MI position that Velasquez is endorsing: the normative conclusion that sociological entities cannot be the (irreducible) subjects of responsibility ascriptions. Equally, there is at least the suggestion that he is less worried about incorporating sociological entities into the explanation of how individuals come to be responsible, allowing that they may be held responsible ‘for what the organisation does’. Indeed, Velasquez goes on to say that ‘[m]y aim is to take some small steps toward debunking the view that a corporate organisation is some kind of ghostly moral agent, what some have called an “invisible person” and others have said is “no collective name for individuals, but a living organism and a real person, with body and members and a will of its own”’ (ibid: 532). Velasquez, it thus appears, takes himself to be adjudicating between ‘individualism’ and ‘collectivism’, where the latter amounts to the postulation of sociological entities that are people, as real and distinct as the individuals that make them up. This position is often likened to the theory in biology that postulates a mysterious vis vitalis, or ‘life force’, that is the source of life in organic organisms. The idea is that collectivist positions are ‘emergentist’ in the sense that they are committed to a similar

kind of mysterious life force or consciousness that animates something that is the ‘organisation’ and that exists independently from the individuals that populate the

organisation. But this theory in biology is now discredited, for good reason, and likewise the analogous position in social theory is also highly implausible.

Insofar as Velasquez’s approach, rooted in MI, takes issue with this ‘emergentist’ approach to collective responsibility, it makes an important point. However, what Velasquez does not consider is whether there are other ‘collectivist’ positions that do not have such unpalatable implications. Indeed, as I will show in the remainder of this chapter, collectivists can adopt much more modest positions while still offering more than stark individualism, ones which are in fact compatible with the more modest assertions of MI. Before coming onto these,

however, it is worth seeing how Velasquez develops his argument as it illustrates some of the issues at the heart of the collective responsibility debate. Velasquez attributes the following argument to collectivists (ibid: 539):

1. ‘If X has properties that cannot be attributed to its individual members, then X is a real individual entity distinct from its members.

2. ‘But corporate organisations have properties that cannot be attributed to their members.

3. ‘So the corporate organisation is a real individual entity distinct from its members.’

Velasquez accuses collectivists of making an ‘elementary logical mistake’ since ‘[a]s any teacher of elementary logic knows, every collection of objects (no matter how unrelated the objects are) has properties that can be attributed only to the collection as a whole and not to its individual members (and vice versa)’ (ibid: 539-540). To illustrate this, he gives the example of grains of sand stacked into a pile. While the pile may be ‘big’, none of the grains of sand are big. The same is true of corporate groups, which may correctly be attributed properties that are not possessed by any of their individual members. But as Velasquez goes on to argue, ‘this fact does not turn the corporate organisation into a new real individual entity any more than any random collection of objects is constituted into a new individual entity by the fact that it has characteristics that cannot be attributed to its members’ (ibid: 540). This is a question I address explicitly in §19.

Collectivists, at least in Velasquez’s terms, proceed from the argument above by claiming that corporations can be causally responsible and possess intentions to act in their own rights, so

establishing that they can be moral agents in their own rights. However, according to Velasquez such arguments are fallacious. Although corporations may be said to act in ways that cannot be predicated of their members, this is just an example of playing on the logical mistake set out above. Indeed, the possibility of such ‘corporate’ actions establishes nothing about the existence of a distinct corporate entity. Moreover, it certainly establishes nothing about what caused those actions to occur. Such actions are entirely consistent with the only causal agents being individual humans. To the second part of the collectivist claim, Velasquez responds that, while we must accept that it is common practice to attribute intentions to corporations, we attribute intentions to all kinds of things (for example cars, when we say that they are ‘trying’ to start in the morning) and such attributions are only metaphorical. The fact that corporations exhibit goal-oriented behaviour does not make a difference to the claim that any ascriptions of intentions to them are metaphorical; other things, for example human collectives like ‘markets’ exhibit such behaviour, but we would not think that a market was an agent (ibid.). Sometimes we use such metaphors to describe phenomena that mimic

intentional behaviour; sometimes we use them to indicate that we should treat an entity as if it possessed intentionality. But in neither case is intentionality genuinely present. In the remainder of this chapter I argue against Velasquez’s view. In particular, I argue that despite it being unremarkable for collectives to be attributed with properties that are not possessed by any of their members, this unremarkable fact has significant implications. I do not claim (as Velasquez thinks collectivists must) that the presence of some properties at the collective level licenses the imputation of all properties necessary for moral responsibility at the collective level. But rather that, in the case of some collectives, the properties which may be seen to exist unremarkably at this level are, nonetheless, sufficient for this purpose.

Velasquez takes a strong stance with respect to this argument. In his view, it will never be possible for collectivists to make a convincing argument for treating ascriptions of

intentionality to corporations as anything other than metaphorical. This is because

intentionality is something which can only be generated by a single conscious mind, something which organisations will never have. Thus ‘if an organisation has intentions, beliefs, and desires, it must have a conscious mind, a mind with a unified consciousness that encompasses within a single field of awareness all of its nonpathological intentions, plans, beliefs, and desires [...] The corporation as such does not have such a unified consciousness.’ (ibid: 550). This conception of intention and the consciousness that must support it is quite closely related to the conception of the human mind offered by Moran (op. cit.) as outlined in the previous chapter. The arguments for collective responsibility in the rest of this chapter deal in different

ways with these objections that Velasquez sets out. None of them posit the existence of an ‘emergent’ corporate entity with its own distinct mind, and so in various ways deny the need for such an entity to exist in order for a distinct form of collective responsibility to be possible. For example, in the next section, the relational account of collective responsibility is rooted firmly with individuals and their intentions. Later arguments for distinct organisational intentionality deny the characterisation of intentionality offered by Velasquez and show how an alternative conception is both plausible and can be possessed by corporations. Here I refer back to the discussion of moral ownership in the previous chapter and suggest that it is acceptable to posit that corporate intentionality may be of a different kind from human intentionality, and yet both may ground moral ownership of certain actions. I also suggest the idea, which I develop further in chapter six, that corporations may own certain outcomes without the need to appeal to corporate intentionality at all. This is the case where the corporation mediates the intentional actions of others.