It is uncontroversial that corporations are legal agents that can be held legally responsible
but can corporations also be moral agents that are morally responsible? Part one of this book
explicates the most prominent theories of corporate moral agency and provides a detailed
debunking of why corporate moral agency is a fallacy. This implies that talk of corporate moral
responsibilities beyond the mere metaphorical is essentially meaningless. Part two takes the
fallacy of corporate moral agency as its premise and spells out its implications. It shows how
prominent normative theories within Corporate Social Responsibility such as Stakeholder Theory
and Social Contract Theory rest on an implicit assumption of corporate moral agency. In this
metaphysical respect such theories are untenable. In order to provide a more robust
metaphysical foundation for corporations the book explicates the development of the corporate
legal form in the US and UK which displays how the corporation has come to have its current
legal attributes. This historical evolution shows that the corporation is a legal fiction
created by the state in order to serve both public and private goals. The normative implication
for corporate accountability is that citizens of democratic states ought to primarily make
calls for legal enactments in order to hold the corporate legal instruments accountable to
their preferences.
