Corporate Weakness of Will

Abstract

Proponents of corporate moral responsibility take certain corporations to be capable of being responsible in ways that do not reduce to the responsibility of their members. If correct, one follow-up question concerns what leads corporations to fail to meet their obligations. We often fail morally when we know what we should do and yet fail to do it, perhaps out of incontinence, akrasia, or weakness of will. However, this kind of failure is much less discussed in the corporate case. And, where it is discussed, the view is that corporations are less prone to weakness. Here, I argue that proponents of corporate responsibility should say that corporations can and often do instantiate weakness of the will, and that this is important to recognize. Weakness of the will requires certain capacities that these proponents typically take corporations to have. And once this is appreciated, we can assess how corporate weakness might proceed differently than how it does for individuals. We can also begin a conversation about how best to meet the distinctive challenges for recognizing and correcting corporate weakness, using a number of resources from management scholarship.

Full text

Vol.:(0123456789)
Journal of Business Ethics
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-024-05804-x
ORIGINAL PAPER
Corporate Weakness ofWill
KennethSilver1
Received: 22 December 2023 / Accepted: 16 August 2024
© The Author(s) 2024
Abstract
Proponents of corporate moral responsibility take certain corporations to be capable of being responsible in ways that do
not reduce to the responsibility of their members. If correct, one follow-up question concerns what leads corporations to
fail to meet their obligations. We often fail morally when we know what we should do and yet fail to do it, perhaps out of
incontinence, akrasia, or weakness of will. However, this kind of failure is much less discussed in the corporate case. And,
where it is discussed, the view is that corporations are less prone to weakness. Here, I argue that proponents of corporate
responsibility should say that corporations can and often do instantiate weakness of the will, and that this is important to
recognize. Weakness of the will requires certain capacities that these proponents typically take corporations to have. And
once this is appreciated, we can assess how corporate weakness might proceed differently than how it does for individuals.
We can also begin a conversation about how best to meet the distinctive challenges for recognizing and correcting corporate
weakness, using a number of resources from management scholarship.
Keywords Corporate moral responsibility· Weakness of the will· Organizational control
“…the incontinent person is like a city that votes for all
the right decrees and has excellent laws, but does not
apply them…” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book
VII, Ch. 10, §3: 20, 21)
Introduction
Can corporations, as potentially responsible agents in soci-
ety, instantiate anything like weakness of will? And what
would be the significance of this if so? Management scholar-
ship has considered the question of the causes of corporate
misconduct (Greve etal., 2010), as well as mechanisms for
the attribution of corporate irresponsibility (Lang & Wash-
burn, 2012). So, it may seem perfectly plausible for firms
to act wrongly in this way, and for us to attribute the wrong
conduct to them. This picture might be appealing to those
working within the behavioral theory of the firm in particu-
lar, which takes seriously the idea that how firms decide and
act can be modeled on how individual agents might behave
(Cyert & March, 1963; Gavetti etal., 2012). However,
whereas the behavioral theory is often read analogically—
providing a way for us to theorize about the firm by analogy
to deliver insights (Ketokivi etal., 2017)—our question here
is meant literally. Is it possible for firms to act in ways that
don’t just look like cases of weakness of will if firms were
agents like us, but to literally instantiate weakness of the
will, perhaps even if their employees do not, and for it to be
appropriate to hold firms morally responsible for this?
Within normative business ethics, there is a long-running
debate over whether it is ever appropriate to blame corpora-
tions themselves, or to take them to be responsible in any
way that does not somehow reduce to the responsibility of
their members. Opponents of corporate moral responsibil-
ity (‘CMR’) are likely to say that whatever blame we feel
is really meant to be targeted at employees (though we may
not know which ones) (e.g., Hasnas, 2010; Velasquez, 1983).
These are appropriate responses if we think that the firm
itself is just the collection of individuals, or that the firm
itself cannot act in ways for which it can be responsible, or
if we think that the firm cannot be the appropriate target of
blame (Sepinwall, 2017; Shoemaker, 2019).
Alternatively, proponents of CMR hope to vindicate
many instances of corporate responsibility. According to
proponents such as Peter French, Tom Donaldson, David Sil-
ver, Philip Pettit, Christian List, Carol Rovane, David Copp,
Kendy Hess, Stephanie Collins, and many others, at least
* Kenneth Silver
silverk@tcd.ie
1 Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin, 182 Pearse
St, Dublin 2, DublinD02F6N2, Ireland
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K.Silver
some corporations are capable of acting and being morally
responsible for what they do (and not merely legally culpa-
ble). That is, firms are literally responsible, and it is possible
for a firm to be responsible for some misdeed even if none of
the individuals responsible for them are similarly responsi-
ble (Copp, 2006). It is of course up for debate exactly which
corporations could qualify as true corporate agents. Still,
the thought is that some firms (likely complex, structured
organizations) will qualify as responsible for what they do
over-and-above the responsibility borne by individual mem-
bers of them.
Given this, only proponents of CMR will potentially be
in a position to affirm corporate weakness of will, or what I
will call ‘corporate weakness.’ (Opponents will attribute any
responsibility for apparent weakness to certain employees.)
However, it is not obvious that such proponents will be will-
ing to recognize corporate weakness. Few proponents actu-
ally consider the sources of corporate immorality; instead,
their focus is entirely on whether corporate moral responsi-
bility can be affirmed at all. And what little discussion there
is of this topic suggests a rejection of corporate weakness.
Peter French (1979)was an early and staunch advocate
for corporate moral responsibility, but, for reasons we will
discuss, he maintains that organizations like corporations
are much less likely to act weakly (French, 1995). Since
then, French’s point has passed without much discussion
(Tollefsen, [2008: 9] remarks on this feature of French’s
view, but leaves it unchallenged.).1 One notable exception
is Pettit (2003)’s positive argument for group/corporate akra-
sia, also to be discussed below. However, Pettit doesn’t rec-
ognize French’s concerns, and there is a more general failure
to appreciate or handle what it is about corporate weakness
that might strike us as especially odd.
Stepping back, it is not surprising that corporations would
be thought to be less prone to weakness. Acting weakly often
has a certain feeling about it. We are giving in to tempta-
tion. It feels good, but leaves us with feelings of guilt and
regret. At the very least, it is internal and tumultuous. Cor-
porations, however, act through the execution of established
rules and procedures. They act, but likely without the burden
of emotions or phenomenal experiences. So, perhaps the
natural view of the proponent of CMR is that corporations
cannot act weakly. The problem with this is that it is not
hard to imagine many cases where weakness is most natural
diagnosis.
Consider a corporation (Chairs 4 All) with an explicit
diversity & inclusion mission statement2:
Chairs 4 All is deeply committed to championing
a plurality of lived experiences in the workplace,
empowering our people to express disparate opinions
and perspectives and providing tools for professional
growth and meaningful contributions. Diversity in hir-
ing and promoting is among the highest priorities of
Chairs 4 All, as we recognize the value of diversity for
developing a sustained competitive advantage in the
global marketplace.
Suppose that an independent audit was done of Chairs 4 All
in 2023 and found that the company was less diverse in its
hiring and promotions than 90% of firms either of its size
or in its sector. Moreover, since this mission statement was
adopted 7years ago, say, the company has not improved by
any measure of diversity or inclusion. Now, what should we
think about this complete failure of Chairs 4 All to act in a
way aligned with their mission statement?
Some of this, much of it even, may come down to individ-
ual failures at the level of hiring managers, interviewers, or
line managers. These individuals may be led in their hiring
and promoting practices by their own prejudices or biases.
They may be led to hire in ways that are not diverse by the
same biases in resume reading, for example, with which we
are now quite familiar (e.g., Derous & Ryan, 2017).
To the extent that the employees are acting in this way,
they will have acted wrongly. They are obligated not to be
biased in these ways. And we may also think that there is
an obligation to their employer that employees are failing
to fulfill in not aligning their conduct, as agents of the firm,
with the mission statement. Apart from this bad conduct of
employees, though, it may be natural to think that the firm
itself bears some responsibility for failing to comply with
its own standards, its own expressed values. In fact, this
is surely something that proponents of CMR will want to
affirm. Thus, the natural diagnosis is that Chairs 4 All has
acted weakly in some way. The moral failure of the firm at
issue in the case does not seem to be a matter of the firm’s
making the wrong judgment about how to act; instead, it
seems to concern their inability to adequately enforce the
commitments they have made.
1 One recent exception to acknowledge can be found in Collins
(2023: 101–2). Collins discusses organizational akrasia in passing as
a part of a larger discussion of how we can ascribe character/character
traits to organizations. She generally takes it to be possible, though
does not argue the point, and she does slightly earlier take on board
French’s claim that organizations are less prone to fickleness (98).
2 Much valuable work has been done within management scholar-
ship on mission statements (e.g., Campbell, 1997; Ireland & Hitt,
1992; Pearce & David, 1987), their relation to performance or finan-
cial impact (e.g. Bart & Baetz, 1998; Bart, Bontis, & Taggar, 2001;
Desmidt, Prinzie, & Decramer, 2011; Sidhu, 2003), and their efficacy
(e.g., Braun etal., 2012; Rey & Bastons, 2018). We are concerned
with a broader kind of corporate wrongdoing that transcends failures
of mission alignment. But we will return below to focus on how some
of this scholarship could be leveraged to avoid corporate weakness.
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Corporate Weakness ofWill
Proponents of CMR are left, then, as either having to find
some other way to characterize the case of Chairs 4 All or
else as being unable to recognize it as a corporate wrong-
ing, despite it clearly being a case for them to capture. I
will argue that this issue should be resolved by allowing for
corporate weakness. Corporations as agents can be weak-
willed or akratic. As a matter of fact, we will see that firms
may be even more prone to akratic actions than we are as
individuals.
I will start by considering different views about what
weakness of the will consists in, and so how much is
required to instantiated it. Then, in the following section,
I will argue that proponents of CMR likely already accept
corporations as having the states required to instantiate
weakness. We will see that weakness need not presuppose
phenomenology even in our own case, and so it may be pos-
sible for firms to act weakly without it. Moreover, I will
draw out and answer the separate issue mentioned above
concerning how rule-governed firms seem to be. Plainly,
being rule-governed generally is compatible with instances
of failing to be rule-following.
If firms instantiate weakness, there might be differences
between how firms and individuals act weakly. Moreover,
there may be special challenges in the recognition and cor-
rection of corporate weakness. The third section explores
these potential differences with corporate weakness, and
the final substantive section considers these additional chal-
lenges. This discussion leads to several insights. Corporate
weakness is most likely to manifest as a matter of the firm’s
habitual agency, or how the firm and its agents act habitually.
It is especially challenging to distinguish corporate weak-
ness from disingenuously made corporate resolutions, or
from things done by rogue employees. But these challenges
have interesting analogues in the case of our weakness, and
they can be addressed by being sufficiently connecting to
management literatures focused on organizational control
and authenticity. There is a further question about how to
control employees well without dominating them, and I sug-
gest that this can be achieved by more intentionally adopting
and communicating the firm’s strategy and value orientation.
What Does Weakness oftheWill Involve?
It will be hard to assess whether corporations can suffer
from weakness if we do not have some conception of what
is involved in acting weakly on hand. Unfortunately, part of
what is at issue in the literature is precisely what is involved
internally in agents acting from weakness or akrasia. (Or, for
that matter, whether weak-willed action and akratic action
are distinct phenomena. See Holton 1999, Mele (2010),
and May & Holton (2012).) Authors tend to proceed by
considering cases of paradigmatic weak-willed action and
introspecting the agent’s psychology.3 So, let’s begin by con-
sidering the following case:
Chocolate Chip:
Chip loves the taste of chocolate. Still, he feels that
he’s been indulging a little too much lately, so he
decides not to have any chocolate treats at a party on
Saturday where he knows there is likely to be choco-
late. Sure enough, there is chocolate at the party. And,
sure enough, Chip sees the chocolate and indulges.
Later, he regrets his behavior. The pleasure was
quick to fade, but his knowledge of his own weakness
remains.
This vignette depicts paradigmatically weak-willed
behavior, but it is told in such a way that we can imagine
that there are different elements to what is happening within
Chip psychologically. Within the literature, we can in fact
find at least five different stories for what might be going
on in the case:
(1) Perceptual illusion
(2) Corruption of the Will
(3) Overwhelming desire
(4) Lack of or insufficient desire
(5) Reconsidering a resolution
(6) Acting out of habit
In the Protagoras (352-356c), Socrates argues that weak-
ness of the will is impossible. Weakness of the will involves
one’s knowingly acting contrary to one’s better judgment,
but Socrates maintains that one cannot act way in full view
of another act that one genuinely believes one ought to do
instead. Persons are not knowingly evil. To account for
apparent cases of weakness, then, Socrates maintained that
they were in a kind of perceptual or ‘evaluative illusion’
(Watson, 1977: 319), perhaps involving how comparatively
vivid the hedonic qualities of proximate pleasures relative
to distant ones (Obdrzalek, 2023). The agent is not acting
against what he takes to be best; the agent is tricked by the
tempting visual quality of the chocolate into reevaluating
what he takes to be best, and then acts accordingly. On this
story, although Chip has decided that it is best not to eat
chocolate at the party, we can suppose that he gets to the
party, looks at some chocolate, and thinks, “Now wait a
minute. I don’t remember chocolate looking that good. I
think I might have undervalued the significance of the joy
that I would get from eating this chocolate. And, correcting
3 Another way to proceed would be to present a psychological situ-
ation that would be puzzling (such as judging A to be better than B
but being motivated to do B) and then to argue that this situation is
instantiated (Davidson, 1980).
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K.Silver
that error, it seems clear that what I ought to do is to eat the
chocolate.”
There does seem to be something deeply true about the
Socratic story. Agents often display a bias for near-term
benefits over greater long-term rewards (which is much
discussed in economics and philosophy). Arguably, what
is happening is that it is easier for us to attend to the value
of what’s in front of us, and so we are likely to give it more
weight in our decision-making. Still, there are other stories
for what might be going on in the case that do not end up
denying the reality of weakness of will.
Considering (2), it may be natural to think that all agents
possess a Will, and temptations threaten to corrupt it. Under-
standing what this looks like psychologically or metaphysi-
cally can be quite challenging, with few scholars these recent
decades being willing to reify the Will as something existing
and corruptible. If we were to go in for it, though, it would
seem reasonable to maintain that the Will, and exertions
thereof, involve something phenomenological, with there
being a feeling of what it is like to will an action to comple-
tion, or fail to. More often, though, discussion of the Will
is connected to willpower, where this is understood in ways
apart from the Will itself. Instead, it is taken to reduce to
other psychological features. It may be a matter of psycho-
logical effort that stops one from reconsidering a resolution
(Holton, 2003), or else involve psychological processes of
suppression or resolve (Ainslie, 2021), or else be wholly
(and problematically) metaphorical (Koi, 2024).
In contrast, (3) is likely the dominant conception of what
normally happens in cases of weakness of will. On this pic-
ture from Donald Davidson (op. cit.), Chip had judged it
best not to eat chocolate and yet eats it, acting contrary to
his better judgment, or his all-things-considered judgment.
And this is likely due to a strong desire for chocolate. It was
the strength of the desire that somehow tips Chip toward
concupiscence. There is a temptation here to say that in these
cases the agent is overwhelmed by their desire. Put this way,
it again has a phenomenological flavor. Chip is reacting to
an extremely strong feeling. However, the model need not be
understood in this way. If the agent was truly overwhelmed,
then it starts to make us wonder whether this really is a sin-
cere action for which the agent is responsible, as opposed
to an instance of compulsion. (We will return to this issue
below.) And, relatedly, it is often observed that agents can
remain quite calm as they act weakly.
Instead of modeling the agent as overwhelmed by a
desire for what they judge to be the wrong thing, moving
on to (4), we might instead imagine that the agent sim-
ply insufficiently desires or is motivated to do what they
judge to be the right thing. In the Nicomachean Ethics
(1999, Book 7, ch. 1–10), Aristotle draws out this picture
in a lengthy discussion of incontinence and weakness. He
distinguishes it from bestiality, intemperance, softness; he
considers whether the incontinent person knows what he
is doing when acting; he even explicitly contrasts his view
with the Socratic picture. About weakness in particular, he
says, “For the weak person deliberates, but then his feeling
makes him abandon the result of his deliberation…” (ibid.:
ch.7, §8: 21–22).
On an Aristotelian model of moral motivation, virtuous
agents desire and are motivated to act in accordance with
reason. Self-controlled agents may additionally desire to do
the wrong thing, such as pursue un-choiceworthy pleasures,
but they will nevertheless be motivated by the right desire to
act rightly. Genuinely akratic agents, by contrast, are inad-
equate with respect to having the right kind of motivation,
the desire to do the right thing. There are some interpreta-
tive challenges concerning whether Aristotle took akratic
agents to entirely lack this positive desire (as Henry [2002]
argues) or whether akratic agents do potentially have the
right desire, but where that desire is insufficiently strong and
so outweighed by a desire to do otherwise (as Stoyles [2007]
suggests). Either way, though, we are left with a model of
akasia in terms of the having and lacking of the right mental
attitudes.
Whereas the Davidsonian and Aristotelian stories
involves this simple interplay between the desires of the
agent, more complicated stories have been offered more
recently in terms of the concept of intention and resolution.
For Richard Holton (1999, 2003, 2009), what is significant
for a case of weakness of will is that the agent has formed
some resolution about what they are to do, but then they are
inappropriately brought to reconsider their resolution. (This,
then, is (5)’s interpretation of what is going on in the case.)
Since Davidson, the literature has come to recognize the
many mechanisms that agents fashion as a means of achiev-
ing diachronic control. In particular, resolutions are a form
of self-binding that we use so that we are able to settle our
minds on what to do. This frees us up cognitively, allowing
us to avoid endlessly, anxiously weighing our options right
until the last moment. So, on this picture, Chip has formed a
resolution not to eat chocolate at the party, and what’s criti-
cal is that something has happened to lead him to reconsider
whether to eat the chocolate.
As a final alternative (6), perhaps Chip just has this habit
of eating chocolate in front of him if he’s not careful, and
he failed to attend to his intention to not eat chocolate as
he habitually consumed it. Whereas most of the literature
focuses on these perhaps intense experiences of giving into
temptation, Silver (2019b) suggests that there’s a kind of
weakness possible when acting out of habit, where one fails
to be sufficiently vigilant about what we have intended to
do. Failures of vigilance and self-control can be moral fail-
ings (Murray, 2017; Murray & Vargas, 2020). But we are
creatures of habit—some bad and some good. We can try
to change our habits or intend to act a certain way despite
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Corporate Weakness ofWill
them, but if we are not careful, then we may act contrary to
our intentions or judgments because of them.
For our purposes, we do not need to come to a view of
what the right psychological picture is in the case of Choco-
late Chip. Each of these psychological stories can be made
to sound somewhat plausible in the case. The literature on
weakness of the will primarily concerns which of these psy-
chological stories is essential for truly weak-willed action.
However, we do not need to come to a full view of what
constitutes weakness of will for our purposes.
Addressing this fully involves coming to terms with a
number of interesting issues. Among others, we would need
to understand the significance of different kinds of judg-
ments, have a view of how desires relate to intentions/resolu-
tions, determine the psychological reality and significance
of willpower, discover the degree to which judging a choice
correct immediately motivates us to enact it, and so on. But
even without resolving these issues, most philosophers will
accept that most of these psychological stories could have
been what happened in Chip’s case and certainly do happen
regularly in life. More important is recognizing the kinds of
views out there, and the psychological/cognitive machinery
that they tend to require.
There were any number of ways psychologically that Chip
could have failed to act in line with his decision not to eat
chocolate. In each of them, though Chip knew what he had
to do, he failed to be properly motivated to do it. Our ques-
tion is, assuming that certain corporations can act and be
obligated to act in certain ways, are there any similar ways
that they can be led to fail to meet their obligations?
Do Corporations Have What It Takes?
I think the clearest path toward answering whether corpora-
tions can act weakly involves considering whether explana-
tions for certain corporate conduct can be given that is simi-
lar or analogous to Chip’s actions. However, before pursuing
this, I first want to acknowledge and consider the limitations
of the earlier instance of direct advocacy for group/corporate
akrasia alluded to in the introduction. Pettit (2003) distin-
guishes between different kinds of groups, eventually focus-
ing in on ‘self-unifying cooperatives’ or group agents like
certain organizations and corporations (78). He argues that
groups like these can act akratically and perhaps often will
based on how they form decisions.
Groups, like individuals, can be rationally constrained
on the basis of their previous decisions. Pettit shows how
groups can have procedures for arriving at decisions (such
as majority voting) that can lead to cases where group
rationality requires deciding and acting a certain way, but
many or even a majority of the individuals in the group may
disagree, thinking the group should act differently. And so,
these individuals may be motivated to act against what it
is rational for the group to do. Importantly, this need not
be a matter of these individuals themselves acting akrati-
cally.4 They may act as they see it in the best interest of
the world, albeit threatening group irrationality. As Pettit
says, “Personal virtue is as likely as personal vice to source
recalcitrance towards a collectivity. Virtue in the individual
members of a group may make for akrasia in the group as
a whole” (84).
This is an important kind of case to recognize. If it is
group akrasia, then Pettit thinks this shows that akrasia need
not be a matter of a failure of executive control (89–93). And
Pettit’s focus on it is understandable insofar as it relies on
certain challenges with collective decision-making (i.e., the
discursive dilemma) that he has long discussed. However,
there are a few problems.
First, the kind of case Pettit considers is ultimately quite
narrow. He imagines a group of individuals who each con-
tribute to group decisions, and akrasia for him basically
involves defectors, or when individuals act in full view of
what they know the group should do (rationally speaking)
and for their own reasons. If this counts as group weakness,
I don’t think it is likely to be the usual case in corpora-
tions. We will see more about why below, but essentially
the point is that corporate weakness may be instantiated by
individuals in the firm with no standard input into corporate
decision-making, who continue to act for corporate reasons,
and who are insufficiently aware of what the firm is ration-
ally required to do.5
With that said, I am also not confident that the group
conduct as Pettit describes it genuinely is akratic. It may be,
and I will suggest how below, but one reaction is that it is
not genuinely weak-willed group action if individuals are
going rouge and acting on their own motivations. Perhaps
their behavior is attributable to the firm insofar as they act
4 It may be. All of this is consistent with the idea that employees
within firms act akratically, and that corporate behavior is at times
instantiated by akratic employees. See Patsioti-Tsacpounidis (2023)
for an interesting discussion of corporate wrongdoing grounded in
the Aristotelian conception of akrasia, which entirely concerns how
employees can akratically engage in wrongdoing. I am certainly not
ruling this out or assessing how common it is. But more important for
us is the possibility (and, indeed, the easy plausibility) of employees
doing what they think is right, which nevertheless leads to corporate
akrasia.
5 More recently, Flowerman (2024) also considers how (primarily
political) groups can instantiate weakness of will, and she similarly
criticizes Pettit’s view as too narrow. However, while Flowerman is
more sensitive to more sources of weakness (or ‘akratic breaks’), she
does not consider group weakness coming about through habitual
agency, which I take to be much more prevalent in group and corpo-
rate cases. Also, neither Pettit nor Flowerman discuss the particular
challenges around the collective mentality required for weakness, and
whether they can be instantiated by corporate actors.
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K.Silver
in their role as employees, and perhaps firms must be ready
to take responsibility for this conduct, but that doesn’t mean
that it is best understood as akratic or weak-willed behavior.
Pettit has a surprisingly low bar for akratic behavior; it
simply involves failing to act in a required manner that is in
some way recognized (68). The problem is that compulsive
behavior might fit this characterization, and many scholars
will argue for a difference between compulsive and weak-
willed conduct. We will return to this issue below, but for
now it should leave us suspicious of Pettit’s conception of
group akrasia. With individuals acting on their own motives
against what is it rational for the group to do, in what sense
is the group really suffering from a kind of weakness (per-
haps inappropriately privileging some reasons over others),
as opposed to simply failing to be responsive to its own
reasons?
I think the best way to proceed is by sticking closely to
exactly how scholars have characterized weak-willed behav-
ior, as we saw in the last section. We can be reasonably sure
that corporations act weakly if they perform actions which
have explanations that are analogous to any of the explana-
tions of Chip’s action. Unfortunately, there are two kinds of
challenges to thinking that they ever do perform actions with
the same kinds of explanations.
First, the explanations of Chip’s misconduct were point-
edly psychological. They involved a suite of mental states
that we may think corporations or other kinds of groups sim-
ply cannot instantiate. For starters, a number of the expla-
nations required states such as judgments (that one course
of action in superior), desires, intentions, and resolutions.
Apart from these basic action-involving mental states, how-
ever, we might also think that a host of even more sophisti-
cated mental faculties are required. If we think that all weak-
willed actions are a product of misapprehension or some
kind of illusion, then this seems to require certain perceptual
faculties. Authors such as Richard Holton also take there to
be such a thing as willpower that plays an important role in
agent’s self-control. And others take certain emotions to play
an important role in weak-willed action (Tappolet, 2003),
such as the guilt of acquiescing to temptation. In short, the
more cognitively involving we take instances of weakness
to be, the less likely we are to think corporations are capable
of instantiating it.
Second, we might think analogous cases of even possible
group weakness will be hard to find, because group agents
tend to be constructed in ways to avoid weakness. This was
precisely the basis on which Peter French thought cases of
corporate weakness would be unlikely. He says, “The [Cor-
porate Internal Decision] structures of corporate actors can
be designed so that they are not prone to weakness of will.
They can be specifically built to override human weakness of
will” (op. cit.:47). The thought is that corporate behavior is
largely governed by procedures and rules of the corporation.
Given this apparent blind, rule-following nature, there will
not be cause for corporations to be bumped off of course and
into akratic action. The group can control itself in ways and
to a degree that individuals cannot.
Let’s consider these challenges in turn.
Can Corporations have theRight Mental States?
This first objection feels most pressing, but in fact I think
it will fall flat for proponents of corporate responsibility.
Though the explanations of Chip’s misconduct were psycho-
logical, it was unclear how much or what kind of psychologi-
cal states are really required for weak action. And even if a
hefty amount of psychological baggage is required for Chip
and other individuals like him to act weakly, perhaps the
same would not be required of corporations.
In my own case, I often feel the phenomenal force of
temptation. I feel pulled toward the object of my desire,
steeped in the knowledge of the pleasure that accompanies
its satisfaction. Put this way, it can be hard to see that cor-
porations would be capable of being weak willed. After all,
most proponents of CMR deny that corporations are genu-
inely phenomenally conscious (e.g., Hess, 2013; Baddorf,
2017; c.f., Schwitzgebel, 2015; Silver, 2019a:261–3). So,
if it is only conscious experiences that lead to weak-willed
behavior, then firms would not act weakly. However, it might
be inappropriate to generalize from our own experiences.
That our own weak-willed behavior feels a certain way may
be a typical feature of it for us, but maybe corporations do
not need this kind of baggage to act weakly.
Thinking back to the stories we saw trying to explain
Chip’s weak-willed behavior, note that most of them
involved certain mental states within Chip, but not necessar-
ily the phenomenal quality of those states. What matters was
that Chip had made a resolution and then was drawn to give
it up, or that Chip was led to reconsider a judgment. (Not
that there was something that it was like for Chip to experi-
ence coming to a resolution or abandoning it.) The reason
for these changes for Chip may be a matter of feeling the
pull of temptations. But apart from that pull, the same effect
may occur merely given a reflection upon Chip’s incentives,
perhaps along with certain biases Chip might have, such as a
tendency to overweight the satisfaction of satisfying short-
term desires as opposed to long-term ones. These biases
and changes in judgment can be recognized apart from any
phenomenology associated with them, so there is reason to
think that the states that may be necessary for instantiating
weak-willed behavior may not require phenomenology.
Further, there is good reason to think that proponents of
CMR will take firms to have the necessary states. Any such
proponent is likely to say that groups are capable of coming
to judgments regarding what to do. In fact, that corporations
and group agents can arguably come to collective judgments
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Corporate Weakness ofWill
about what should be done that are not necessarily shared
with any of the individual people in charge of them is one
of the primary motivations in the literature for accepting
corporate agency (List & Pettit, 2011; Pettit, 2007, 2011).
So, if firms can have these judgments but fail to act on them,
then that may be all that is necessary.
(If weakness is understood on the Aristotelian model
of being insufficiently motivated by the judgment – hav-
ing judgments and not having the right corresponding atti-
tude that leads to action – then this will be easy for firms
to instantiate. In fact, this is likely the best interpretation
of group akrasia as Pettit (2003) discusses it. There is a
constraining group decision, but there is no corresponding
group attitude to motivate the individuals in that direction
apart from their own motivations.)
In each case of some apparently necessary psychologi-
cal component, we will likely be able to either make the
case that groups do instantiate some version of that state or
else argue that those states are not required for weakness.6
As an example of the latter, we could argue that while cer-
tain emotions may naturally accompany our own descent
into weakness, perhaps groups may act weakly and issue an
apology thereafter without having to feel these emotions.
(Doucet [2016] argues that emotions like regret need not
even accompany our own instances of weakness.) As an
example of the former, while we might accept for the sake
of argument that groups lack some phenomenal kind akin to
our willpower, we might point to other forms of self-binding
and self-control that can stop weak-willed action (or fail to).
Collins (2023: ch.4) expressly argues that organizations can
be blameworthy on accounts that require acting from a cer-
tain volition or will, and she draws out how Held (1970),
List and Pettit (2011), Tollefsen (2015), and others similarly
suggest firms and group agents are blameworthy assuming
similar volitional requirements for blameworthiness.
If we wanted to be extremely bare bones about it, we
could even argue that all that is really required for firms
to act weakly is for them to have most reason to behave a
certain way, be in some way in a position to act in light of
that reason, and yet fail to do so. All that would be required
for weak-willed action on this conception is an ability to be
responsive to reasons even if the firm itself lacked mental
states (Silver, 2022). However, since most proponents of
CMR are already committed to some degree of corporate
mentality, there is little reason to think why such proponents
would not take firms to have the mental states necessary for
weak-willed behavior.
Clarke (1994), Tollefsen (2002), Copp (2006), and others
argue (on the basis of their acceptance of functionalism in
the philosophy of mind) that groups can instantiate men-
tal states such as beliefs, desires, and intentions.7 Tollefsen
(2008), Collins (2018), and Silver (2019a) consider how cor-
porations can be construed as having emotions, and Björns-
son and Hess (2017) even argue that groups can instantiate
reactive attitudes like guilt. If these proponents were to agree
that groups cannot act weakly, it would likely not be on the
basis of their lacking the requisite mental states.
None of this will satisfy opponents of CMR, who reg-
ularly deny claims that corporations can themselves have
mental states of any kind. They do not just lack phenomenal
consciousness; it is also pure metaphor to suggest that firms
can ‘want’ things or ‘intend’ or ‘judge’ this or that. Without
these mental states, surely firms will not act weakly. This is
not the place to adjudicate this larger question. The point is
that those who already allow for sufficient corporate men-
tality for firms to behave in responsible ways have likely
already admitted the components necessary for firms to act
weakly. So, proponents of CMR should accept the possibility
of corporate weakness of will.
Are Corporations Too Rule‑Governed toAct Weakly?
Still, even if firms have all that it takes to act weakly in prin-
ciple, should we really think that they often do? Perhaps cor-
porate agents are organized to ensure that acts judged to be
best and intentions set will be carried out by the corporates
in virtue of the procedures that the firm has put in place for
carrying out its actions. So, perhaps even if firms could act
weakly, they typically do not.
I see why authors have been drawn to this opinion. Rules
and procedures are so integral to corporate life that we may
6 I am leaving aside any discussion of weakness of will that follows
the Socratic understanding mentioned—of being led to change one’s
judgement on the basis of a misperception. If this is a way we act
weakly, I doubt it is the only way. And so, if these perceptions require
abilities firms lack, their inability to act weakly in this way would
not stop them from acting weakly in others. That said, I do think that
firms can act weakly in this way. While we often talk about conscious
perceptions, not all perceptual experiences are conscious. And I do
think it is possible for firms to be led to misrepresent some opportuni-
ties to management in ways that lead to wrongly abandoning resolu-
tions.
7 There is quite a large literature about precisely how to understand
the nature of these states within groups and corporations. Given
this, there are of course nuanced positions that could raise trouble.
For example, we might think that firms are capable of instantiating
the attitude of acceptance, but not belief (Wray, 2001, 2003). If we
thought that weakness is a matter of acting against one’s judgment
of what is best, and we thought that judgment is a kind of belief,
then corporations would technically not be able to act weakly. Here,
one could argue against these considerations positively for group
belief, or one could consider more closely the nature of judgment. I
am inclined towards the former approach, but this need not be seen
through here. The more important point is that most proponents of
CMR do take firms to have these states, and so such proponents
should accept the possibility of corporate weakness.
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K.Silver
take them to be even partially constitutive of the corporation.
For someone like Peter French, corporate conduct is entirely
a matter of employees acting within their roles as defined
by these corporate structures, so it must seem impossible
to countenance corporations legitimately acting yet in ways
not in conformity with the procedures that have been laid
down. Nevertheless, I think even a cursory consideration of
real corporate life reveals just how prevalent cases exactly
like this can be.
If we consider some of the most morally egregious cor-
porate offenses, we are just as likely to find a breakdown in
the procedures meant to secure adequate self-control that we
see in the case of individuals. Consider the following case,
Volkswagen:
Suppose Volkswagen is a car manufacturer that wants
to produce cars cheaply and efficiently and doesn’t care
about the environmental impact of those cars. How-
ever, Volkswagen knows that it is against the law to
sell cars that fail to meet certain fuel efficiency stand-
ards, and so Volkswagen sets a policy of delivering
high-quality cars that meet these standards, even if it
would be easier to cheat the fuel efficiency tests than it
would be to cheaply meet the standards. Sure enough,
it is easier to cheat the tests than cheaply meet the
standards. And, sure enough, Volkswagen cheats on
the fuel efficiency tests. After being caught, Volkswa-
gen faces hefty fines, a loss in public trust, and issues
public apologies.
The example is not subtle, but it should make the point
loud and clear. If groups like corporations are capable of
acting wrongly and being responsible, then the case of
Volkswagen’s fraud surely is a paradigm instance of wrong
action. And it is not reasonable to think that Volkswagen
acted wrongly because it did not adequately appreciate the
moral reasons that it had to comply with the law. Instead,
what seems to have gone wrong is an inability to translate
the corporate judgment of legal compliance into action.
Just as in Chip’s case, there are a number of ways that
the story might go for how this failure occurred. Perhaps
Volkswagen judged that it ought to comply with the law, but
this judgment did not translate into motivation for the cor-
porate agents to act it out (the Aristotelean model). Or per-
haps Volkswagen’s background desire for profit motivated
corporate agents to commit fraud. Or perhaps Volkswagen
formed a resolution to remain within the law that was later
collectively abandoned or changed (even if not formally). Or,
finally, perhaps Volkswagen had practices of cutting costs
and tampering with efficiency test equipment that were so
ingrained that they were not appropriately sensitive to a
resolution to comply with the law. (I won’t take a stand on
the right story in this particular case, but we will see in the
next section how this last story is the kind of story I think
most commonly leads to corporate weakness.)
In this case, we don’t need to know which kind of mecha-
nism actually led Volkswagen to fraud. Patsioti-Tsacpounidis
(2023: 429) compellingly argues that this is an instance in
which corporate wrongdoing stems from the greed and akra-
sia of managers. For our purposes here, that may well be
right. But all we need to know is that Volkswagen did the
wrong thing and because it was unable to have its practical
judgments guide its behavior. Despite surely having many
rules and procedures for how its employees should conduct
itself, at the end of the day these rules were no better at
tempering Volkswagen’s immoral conduct than the princi-
ples that individuals purport to follow. More generally, we
can appreciate that the mere fact that groups are often rule-
governed in principle does not mean that they will remain
as rule-governed in practice.
We saw above how French maintained that corporate
weakness was unlikely because they can be designed to
avoid weakness. Well, have they been? As we see above,
compliance departments based entirely on the enforcement
of legal rules on the firm can be unsuccessful. I am optimis-
tic with French that perhaps we could use the malleability
of the corporate structure and our knowledge of moral psy-
chology to engineer firms this way. But we surely have only
barely begun this project. And this paper is a clear step:
We need to know that corporations can act weakly, then we
need to investigate why and how corporations most often act
weakly. So, we should not think that firms as they are today
are any less prone to weakness just because their structure
is subject to revision.8
8 French also maintains that firms can be built to avoid our weakness.
And, again, perhaps. But two points. First, and more importantly, this
is to some extent irrelevant. As we saw in discussing Pettit, propo-
nents of CMR should not think that corporate weakness is necessar-
ily a matter of the weakness of employees. Second, though, I again
doubt that firms genuinely have been built in this way to avoid our
weakness. In some sense, how could they be? Our individual weak-
ness of will is just too personal. Depending on my own view of what
I ought to do, it could be that even coming to work and doing my
job efficiently is my acting weakly. (Perhaps I judge all things consid-
ered that I should shirk on the job or quit.) What French likely means
is that firms can do a lot to monitor and police the conduct of their
employees, ensuring that employees do not go rouge in the way that
Pettit discusses. That may be, although avoiding rouge employees
may still not avoid the kind of corporate habitual weakness discussed
below.
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Corporate Weakness ofWill
What isDistinctive About Corporate
Weakness?
Even accepting that corporations can act weakly, this is not
to say that corporate weakness of will is just like weakness
of will as it occurs for individuals. There will be differences,
and attending to these differences could be significant when
it comes to our ability to recognize and potentially guard
against corporate weakness.
Most notably, it may well be that the path to corporate
weakness as it most often occurs, or how corporations act
weakly, may diverge from the typical process of individual
weakness. We saw a number of stories given above for what
is happening in the case of individual weakness of will.
There is now a large debate about which of these stories
picks out what is truly akratic or true weakness of will, or
whether these come apart. Nevertheless, I take each of these
processes to be possible for individuals, and for them each
to have problematic results, even if they are not all properly
called ‘weakness of will.’ Even if they are each possible,
though, we might wonder whether certain of the routes are
more common than others.
Notice how often individuals seem to rationalize their
choices as they make them. As I abandon my resolution to
run every day, as I am tired from the first day of running,
I tell myself that running every day is probably a bad idea
anyway—surely it’s not good for the knees; surely there
are more efficient exercises. Similarly, when Chip eats the
chocolate, though he may ultimately regret his behavior, at
the time he may well change his mind and decide that a lit-
tle chocolate is not a bad thing, and what’s life for anyway?
Generally, individuals seem liable to switching their judg-
ment in the moment of temptation and even claiming that it
was actually the rational thing to do. We talk ourselves out
of things.
In contrast, I am not sure how this kind of process might
proceed in a corporation. When confronted with the results
of the audit, I do not think that the executives of Chairs 4
All are likely to say that the firm had acted well and simply
failed to update its mission statement. This is not to say that
this kind of process can’t happen in corporations. But I think
it is much less likely to happen in firms than in incontinent
individuals, and for good reason. Even if we think corpora-
tions literally have intentions to act, and form judgments,
and can instantiate states similar to guilt or shame, even
this is a far cry from think that corporation instantiates first-
personal, dialogical states of mind of the form, “Yes, why
shouldn’t I?”.
As individuals, we have a running train of thought and a
psychological need to appear rational to ourselves as agents.
That is, we represent ourselves to ourselves in thought. These
indexical or de se thoughts occur to us consciously, and they
play a role in our thinking and acting. Now, it is controver-
sial exactly what is distinctive about de se thoughts or what
role is played by them (Torre, 2016). But de se thoughts of
this kind do seem important for this way of instantiating
weak-willed behavior.
In general, I am sympathetic to those arguing that cor-
porations token many different kinds of mental states, but
I think it is unlikely that they often instantiate indexical
thoughts of this kind. Even if corporate spokespeople can
make statements that refer to the firm as a whole in the first-
person plural (e.g., “We here at Chairs 4 All promise to…”),
and even if an appropriateness condition on statements of
this kind involved their reflecting some kind of attitude with
de se content, this is far short of ongoing de se thoughts
occurrently structuring how corporations engage in reason-
ing and decision-making. That is to say, even if they can
have these thoughts, it has yet to be argued for explicitly,
and it is not clear that these thoughts would play the same
role in their weak-willed behavior has our de se thoughts
play in our behavior.
In contrast, firms seem much more likely to act weakly
via something like habitual action.9 There is now a substan-
tial literature within management scholarship on routines
within organizations (e.g., Becker, 2004; Pentland & Rueter,
1994), and routines are often connected in some way with
habitual action within firms (usually the habitual action of
employees) (Makowski, 2021). While more would need
to be said, a proponent of CMR should generally be open
to the possibility of corporate habitual agency, and likely
ready to identify corporate habits with some organizational
routines.10
9 While my focus here is on how firms instantiate weakness as a
matter of habitual agency, we might be tempted to think that surely
the most common form of corporate weakness is of the Aristotelean
variety. Firms come to judgments, but then there is insufficient moti-
vation stemming from those judgments to get the firm to cooperate.
This may indeed often be the case. On the Aristotelian picture, the
agent is motivated by other of their attitudes rather than being moti-
vated by their judgment that a certain action is the right one. And
perhaps individuals in the firm are directly sensitive to the pressure
on the firm to cutting cost or upping revenue even as the firm has cen-
trally decided to act in ways that will increase costs or suppress rev-
enue. I focus more here on corporate habitual agency because I think
corporations are more prone to weakness in this way than we are, and
there are interesting interdisciplinary resources that can be brought to
bear to characterize this form of corporate agency.
10 While routines may constitute corporate habits, we need to be
careful here. First, routines have been spoken of in many ways
(Becker, op. cit.), as have habits (Makowski, op. cit.). Some of these
ways lend themselves to this idea better than others. For example,
some identify routines with patterns of action within the firm (e.g.,
Parmigiani & Howard-Grenville, 2011; Petland & Hærem, 2015), but
even this may not constitute corporate habit, if not all of the elements
of this pattern of employee action constitutes a pattern of conduct of
the firm itself.
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K.Silver
All too often, executives set the plan for the organization,
but other members proceed with their own momentum. The
larger and more complex the organization, the more inevita-
ble this becomes. Employees constitute corporate conduct,
and so the firm is inclined to act as it always does. Without
special care, corporate conduct generally may be somewhat
insensitive to what the firm technically judges to be best,
perhaps what has only been affirmed in the C-suite. Our
original example seems to be of this kind. Executives have
established a mission statement, but they seem to have failed
to sufficiently bring the whole firm to act in line with it. This
is not to say, in line with Pettit’s model, that employees are
going rouge—acting on their own motives for what they
judge the firm should do regardless of corporate rational-
ity. It’s just that not enough have been done to thoughtfully
change hiring practices, for instance.
When employees enact corporate routines, which new
corporate decisions and missions have failed to unsettle,
these individuals are in some sense still be acting for the
corporate reasons the routine was originally established, not
their own rouge motivations. Of course, employees can go
rouge, and then there are interesting questions about whether
to attribute their agency to the firm and how best to hold
the firm liable. These are ongoing issues especially within
social ontology and the philosophy of corporate criminal
law. But that’s not the best interpretation of what is going on
in the case of Chairs 4 All, or indeed in many cases where
firms fail to move themselves to act in line with their own
judgments.
Large organizations require a substantial regulative infra-
structure to avoid the most basic instances of akrasia. Such
infrastructure is expensive and can only do so much. (We
will return to the question of how much it should do below.)
It is hard enough to minimally ensure legal compliance,
let alone moral compliance, or complete compliance with
quarterly shifts in managerial directives. When the left hand
doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, but should, then
this too is a kind of weakness. And this kind of coordina-
tion is especially challenging for international organizations
operating across many different local contexts and cultures.
Such an organization may commit itself to a certain course
of action but lack the self-control to implement strategy
across its businesses.11
While individuals may exhibit this kind of habitual
weakness (I certainly do), firms seem more prone to act-
ing weakly in this way. Still, assessing the problem is the
first step toward solving it. If we can judge not only that
corporations can and do act weakly, but that the source of
their weakness often stems from this misalignment between
the judgments or pronouncements of executives and con-
duct resonating out through the organization, then we can
see a prima facie path toward steeling corporations against
weakness.
What is perhaps especially promising with this kind of
approach is that it suggests a natural integration of work
within management scholarship into business ethics. In the
past few decades, there is a whole research stream focused
on organizational control (Cardinal etal., 2017; Flamholtz,
1996; Flamholtz etal., 1985; Ouchi, 1979; Ouchi & Magu-
ire, 1975; Sitkin etal., 2010). Scholars have focused, for
instance, on how to think about control through organiza-
tional structure (Ouchi, 1977), or through algorithms (Kel-
logg etal., 2020), or how different controls lead to different
performance outcomes (Sihag & Rijsdijk, 2019), or how
control is influenced by the way in which managers construe
problems the organization is trying to solve (Zhong etal.,
2022). So, whereas business ethics can articulate what is
bad corporate conduct and perhaps what constitutes corpo-
rate weakness, it may be that management scholarship has
already furnished the tools for better articulating the nature
of the failure in question and what can be done to fix it.
Outstanding Challenges toRecognizing
andCorrecting Corporate Weakness
The task of this paper has been to make the case for the
claim that proponents of CMR should accept the possibility
of corporate wrongdoing as a matter of weakness, as well as
against the thought that surely firms are much less prone to
weakness than we are. I think this task has been achieved.
Practically, though, the more that can be said about recog-
nizing and correcting corporate weakness, the better. I sug-
gested just above that a practical path forward would involve
dutifully pointing to cases of weakness, and then using work
on organizational control to help correct this weakness or
avoid it in the first place. However, there are a number of
challenges with engaging in this process. In this section, I
want to consider these challenges. None of them undermine
the central point defended about the possibility (and com-
monality) of corporate weakness. Still, acknowledging and
engaging with them is an important part of determining how
best to take action against corporate immorality.
11 Some opponents of corporate moral responsibility deny it pre-
cisely because they think corporations can never adequately assume
the necessary type of control (McKenna, 2006: 31), or because
employees are not able to switch between acting for their own rea-
sons versus taking on corporate reasons (Leffler, 2024). In contrast,
Goodpaster (1979), Donaldson (1982), and Silver (2022), among oth-
ers argue that corporations can be sensitive to and act for their own
moral reasons.
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Corporate Weakness ofWill
Challenges withRecognizing Corporate Weakness
It is not easy, even in the individual case, to recognize some
conduct as an instance of weakness of will. And issues are
magnified in the corporate case. Let us consider three ways
in which it is hard to distinguish corporate weakness from
some other phenomena.
First, weakness of will is an agential failing for which a
firm might be blameworthy, but merely acting irrationally
might be seen at times as more accidental than actually bad.
It might not be good, and it could be worth recognizing and
avoiding, but we might not blame an agent (corporate or oth-
erwise) for acting irrationally as an accident like we might
blame them for acting weakly. So, how can we tell when a
corporation is acting weakly, rather than just accidentally
irrational? In the case of Chairs 4 All, there is a mismatch
perhaps between the judgment by executives of what is to be
done (expressed through the mission statement) and the col-
lective conduct of employees. But why think this constitutes
an instances of genuine weakness of will, as opposed to a
kind of collective irrationality?
Accidents do happen, and we do generally make allow-
ances for this. Chip, as well, may forgive himself for acci-
dentally eating chocolate, if he did so unthinkingly, forget-
ting his earlier resolution. Still, that accidents happen does
not undermine the reality of weak-willed behavior for us or
for corporations. If Chip has a habit of ‘forgetting’ his reso-
lution to avoid chocolate at convenient times, then he may
well blame himself after the fact for his failure to remain
vigilant about his resolution. But there is a hard question
about how to distinguish blameworthy weakness from an
accident.
There will not a context-free answer to this question. In a
given case, we will have to ask: Are these ‘accidents’ com-
mon, common enough for it to be a failing not to have done
more to guard against it? And how high are the stakes in
this case? The higher the stakes, the more we might expect
agents to do to avoid accidents. In the case of Chairs 4 All,
since the firm’s conduct has not substantively changed in
years, we can infer that there is a systemic issue that the firm
has failed to address, despite the high stakes.
As a second issue, it will be hard to differentiate a case
of corporate weakness from a case where the firm intention-
ally acted wrongly without ever having sincerely resolved to
act rightly. Firms often strike us as disingenuous, and so an
unsurprising intuition in the case of Volkswagen or Chairs
4 All is the thought that these firms never really intended
or resolved to do the right thing. Sure, Chairs 4 All has
this nice statement on its website. But if nothing has been
done to implement it, then we will doubt whether the firm
is sincere in issuing it. If they are not, then their ultimate
failure to implement good policies is not merely a failure of
weakness; instead, the firm would have intentionally done
the wrong thing and be additionally responsible for their
disingenuousness.12
Again, this is a real concern, and it connects to a larger
problem of being able to judge the authenticity of firms.
Some have puzzled, for instance, about our demand for pub-
lic apologies for corporate wrongdoing, yet at our inability
to take those apologies as authentic (MacLachlan, 2015).
Others have considered whether individuals can ever genu-
inely trust (as opposed to merely rely on) group agents like
corporations (Pouryousefi & Tallant, 2023; Tollefsen, 2008).
And there is of course a much larger literature within mar-
keting on brand authenticity (e.g., Campagna etal., 2023;
Morhart etal., 2015; Södergren, 2021). So, while I cannot
resolve this issue here, we can see that there is a lot of work
to draw from when thinking about how to differentiate an
authentic instance of corporate weakness from disingenu-
ous corporate marketing. Much of this, I suspect, will come
down to whether the firm has a history of doing what it says,
and whether the supposedly weak-willed behavior is actually
in line with what we can infer about the firm’s strategy. If
some bad corporate conduct is expedient or easy, and it is a
clear departure from the firm’s demonstrated strategy, then
it will seem more like a case of potential weakness.
As a connected final issue, we may wonder how to judge
when there is an instance of corporate weakness as opposed
to a case where the corporation has not intentionally acted
at all. Imagine a case where managers make a certain deci-
sion, but rogue employees do as they please. This certainly
happens, and there are times where employees act quite
badly against the firm’s interests. So, what is weak conduct
of the firm versus mere bad, non-conforming conduct done
by employees, where the firm is not really in control, and
individuals should be responsible rather than the firm?
Frankly, this is one of the hardest questions for any pro-
ponent of CMR to answer. I take it that we are committed to
some answer; proponents will say that employees can remain
responsible for their conduct even as employees, but firms
too can be responsible, even if they are not responsible for all
employee conduct. And, crucially, corporate responsibility is
12 Whereas is it all too common to expect this kind of behavior, there
has been little work on group or corporate lying in particular. As one
recent exception, Lackey (2020) discusses lies and bullshit in the con-
text of group assertions, and in doing so raises a challenge for popu-
lar views of group belief. See de Ridder (2022), Marsili (2023), and
Hormio (2022) for responses. Her objections do not hold for more
directly functionalist or interpretivist views of corporate attitudes
(views that maintain that mental states ascriptions are accurate purely
on the basis of the firm’s satisfying the right kind of functional char-
acterization), which have often been more popular for proponents of
corporate agency (e.g., Collins, 2023; Tollefsen, 2015). My response
(below) to how to potentially judge corporate sincerity in some way
relates to how Hormio, (2022)(op. cit.) discusses the significance of
narrative coherence, where for me this coherence is found in coher-
ence with the firm’s strategy.
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K.Silver
not reducible to the responsibility of employees. So, propo-
nents need to think that there can be some way in principle
to disengage the appropriate attributions of responsibility. I
do not have one to hand at present, but there are a few things
to be said.
It bears acknowledging that this issue does seem pressing
in the corporate case in a way that it is not for individuals.
Unless we are convinced individuals are themselves best
modeled as groups (Dietz, 2020), there is a special chal-
lenge with how firms should handle the autonomy of their
members, and how they could be responsible for employee
conduct (especially in cases where employees seem to be
acting against the explicit directives of the firm). With that
said, there is an analogous problem that we face in the case
of individuals.
If I bite my nails when I have resolved not to, then we
may take me to be intentionally acting weakly. At some
point, though, we may think that I am so inexorably drawn
to nail-biting that it should be understood as a compulsion.
And, traditionally, it has seemed inappropriate to hold peo-
ple responsible (at least to the same degree) for compulsive
behavior. How are we to distinguish weak-willed behavior
from mere compulsion? This is a similar question to the one
above, and yet it is one of the infamously challenging issues
in the literature on weakness of the will.
A standard answer to how to distinguish weakness from
compulsion adverts to how resistible the behavior in ques-
tion is. The more resistible it is, and the more under your
control it is whether you perform it, the more we will want
to say that it is not compulsion, and that you are directly
responsible for it. This is what Zaragoza (2006) calls the
‘standard view’ (c. f. Gorman, 2023). In the corporate case,
this will come down to our judgments about how under the
control of the firm the bad conduct was or could have been.
This solution involves again drawing us to think about
organizational control,13 and it also permits us to recognize
that there might be an appropriate amount of organizational
control of employees, where absolute control is not neces-
sary. Biting my nails is under my control in the sense that I
could strap myself down—as Ulysses to the mast—to avoid
it. It is resistible in some absolute sense, but we would typi-
cally still classify it as compulsive and not hold ourselves
responsible for failing when this level of self-control is
needed. Similarly, we will have to determine how much
employee conduct can be controlled versus how much of it
should be controlled.14
This is a process that firms should be happy to facili-
tate. Firms do not want to be blamed for bad conduct, but
firms do want to be praised for good conduct. But justifiably
praising a firm also involves attributing the conduct to the
firm itself, rather than its agents. So, while firms will not
want to be responsible for all employee conduct, they should
endorse a standard of organizational control that leaves them
sufficiently praiseworthy and blameworthy alike. (Where
should the standard be? I cannot fully address this, but I am
open to skepticism about there being any particular, univer-
sal answer.) When we reflect on this question of the right
standard of organizational control, though, it leads us to an
interesting issue around how best to address corporate weak-
ness, and so it is to this that we will now turn.
A Challenge forCorrecting Corporate Weakness
A natural thought might be that corporate weakness is a
matter of the firm’s being insufficiently or inadequately con-
trolled. However, as we just saw, weakness is not necessarily
about being out of control. If conduct is truly out of your
control, then it is hard to see how it can even be attributed
to you as an agent. It is often clear in cases of weakness of
will that the agents involved acted in ways that were cer-
tainly under their control (Tappolet, 2017). Instead, with
these casesthere seems to be a failure to be well-controlled.
Still, someone may think that what it is to be well-con-
trolled as an organization is to exert tighter control over it,
to control it to a greater degree, or ensure more centralized
control. This may involve having compliance programs built
to be measurably effective, as opposed to merely shielding
the firm from liability (Chen & Soltes, 2018). To ensure
ethical conduct, we may think to compel employees to fur-
ther undergo specific ethics programs that tell them how to
react in certain situations. And the firm may need to engage
13 That it connects with this broader topic is why I focus on it here.
However, there are challenges for and alternatives to this view, and
it is an open question how best to draw this distinction, whether it
should be drawn the same across the individual and corporate con-
text, and what the upshots are for going one way rather than another.
Zaragoza (op. cit.) argues that the difference lies in the fact that com-
pulsion involves the presence of certain phenomenological features
(of discomfort). If that is true, that firms will never count as acting
compulsively if they lack phenomenology. Though, they may still
act weakly, and this may still be differentiated from a situation with
rogue employees.
14 Perhaps all employee conduct done beyond the scope of corpo-
rate control counts as corporate compulsion. It will not be intentional
behavior of the firm, and it will not count as corporate weakness. But
this is not to say that the firm cannot still be responsible for it. If the
firm has failed to exercise a duty of collective self-control, or self-
induced its own moral incapacity (de Haan, 2023), it may seem vicar-
iously responsible for the conduct of its agents. It is unclear exactly
what we get from the recognition of corporate vicarious responsibil-
ity. It is commonly used within the criminal law to hold firms legally
responsible, but there is reason to be skeptical that it should play this
role (Silver, forthcoming). However, we could still take vicarious
responsibility as moral responsibility of some kind (Goetze, 2021;
Mellor, 2021), and so this could still play an important social func-
tion. (Alternatively, we may hold firms directly responsible for creat-
ing the conditions for the bad behavior [Blomberg, 2023]).
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.

Corporate Weakness ofWill
in even more employee monitoring or conduct policing of
employees with thorough rulebooks and procedures. But
while firms should strive for efficacy in their compliance
and ethics programs, it may be that there are reasons why a
firm should not exert this level of control.
Exerting this much control will likely involve invading
the privacy of employees or acting tyrannically toward them.
It exercises domination. That organizational control has this
nefarious potential (or reality) has long been discussed (e.g.,
Goldman & Van Houten, 1977; Jermier, 1998). Apart from
being likely morally wrong to exert this level of control,
it’s expensive. It can also make likely other kinds of moral
failures. For instance, Stansbury & Barry (2007) discuss
how ethics programs that control employees but might lead
to worse behavior, potentially making employees less able to
handle novel moral situations. So, brute control of employ-
ees is both no guarantee of success, and it may separately
wrong employees in the process.
To get a handle on how employees might be appropriately
governed to avoid corporate weakness, I want to quickly
recognize two sources of corporate weakness, and it will be
clear that merely exerting more control over employees will
not correct them. Instead, we will see how work at the top
of organizations, followed by sufficient communication, is
a better strategy to avoid weakness.
First, suppose the firm makes a resolution expressed
through the mission statement. How will that resolution be
seen through? The firm and its employees are operating with
a certain momentum, engaging in business as they always
have. So, despite some explicit statement, if there are no
mechanisms by which to translate that statement into action,
then the firm is likely to fail to conform to it. This is a rea-
sonable problem, as we may give in to temptation because
our decisions basically aren’t specific enough about how to
fulfill them (Schwenkler, forthcoming).
Here, there is a clear strategic deficit to be filled. If the
firm issues an ambitious mission statement, which requires a
clear departure with the status quo, then we will charge them
with inauthenticity if they make no moves toward seeing it
through. But even if some changes are made, the firm can
be expected to act weakly unless there is a sufficiently rigor-
ous strategy in place, and where this strategy is sufficiently
filled out and communicated to employees, leaving no room
for ambiguity.
This is consistent with how some have considered com-
batting weakness in the case of individuals. Snoek etal.
(2016) emphasizes the reliance on diachronic strategies over
brute willpower in avoiding weakness. Similarly, to guard
against corporate weakness, firms should focus on strategic
control systems (Goold & Quinn, 1990; Ittner & Larcker,
1997), or strategic implementation more generally (Tawse
& Tabesh, 2021). Or, given that the case involves mission
statements, we could focus even more directly on the issue
of strategies for their successful implementation (Rey and
Bastons, 2018). This may involve some degree of control,
but it is not necessarily a matter of exerting more control
over employees.
Second, suppose the firm makes a resolution expressed
through the mission statement, and even delivers a strategy
to achieve it; however, suppose that what is expressed seems
clearly at odds in various ways with what is promoted or
privileged by other policies of the firm. As an employee, it
may be clear how I should act to deliver upon this resolution,
but that may be incompatible with other actions that would
deliver on other aims of the firm. This situation can arise if
the practical or value perspective of the firm is insufficiently
cohesive. Where there is no coherent value perspective, or
where resolutions made are at odds with that perspective, we
risk corporate weakness. This is a reasonable problem, as
weakness of the will could be a matter of having insufficient
coherence of one’s practical identity (Jung, 2020).
Here, the prescription is a shoring up of the value per-
spective of the firm. Proponents of CMR generally have been
amenable to talking about the firm as having a kind of agen-
tial or practical perspective, sometimes called the ‘rational
point of view’ (Hess, 2010; Rovane, 1998). And a firm’s
mission statement can clearly be important to or an articu-
lation of this perspective. However, just how key a mission
statement is to the firm’s actual practical perspective may
depend on the degree to which it is embedded in the firm.
Mission statements can be tied more closely to the firm’s
identity by being engaged with more in reports to stake-
holders (Leuthesser & Kohli, 1997). They can also be more
effective when managers are sufficiently committed to them
(Williams etal., 2014). Mission statements may also be a
tool used by managers to align the values of employees with
the values expressed in the mission statement (Toh etal.,
2022). However, we should be careful, as an imposition of
values can again introduces the concern that this involves
an inappropriately dominating form of control. While this
worry is pressing, it is worth acknowledging that value con-
gruence between managers, the firm, and employees does
seem better for everybody. This value congruence results in
positive behavioral change for employees (Denisi & Smith,
2014), and it is positively related to the ethical behavior of
managers (Posner etal., 1985). Instead of imposing corpo-
rate values, employees could be selected into the firm on the
basis of value alignment. Though, employees could still feel
compelled to shift the appearance of their values on the basis
of the precarity of employment.
It may be sufficient if firms engage in communication
strategies to clarify to employees a coherent value perspec-
tive of the firm (Dermol & Širca, 2018). If employees can
be not merely told the mission, but brought to understand
how the values it conveys are important and committed to
by bosses and peers, then this may help to internalize the
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.

K.Silver
mission in their actions (Marimon etal., 2016), even if a
given employee does not in fact share these values. At least
then, employees would be in a position to judge when their
conduct is best in line with these values as they act on the
firm’s behalf.
Conclusion
Those who accept or advocate for corporate moral respon-
sibility are already best positioned to recognize a panoply
of corporate wrongs. Instead of viewing all of it as a matter
of the firm’s failing to recognize morally relevant consid-
erations, or failing to correctly weigh different moral con-
cerns, we can now see the wide range of cases of corpora-
tions appearing to instantiate something like weakness of
the will. Though it may not always manifest exactly how it
does in us—recognized phenomenologically as a giving in to
temptation—all proponents of CMR should take firms to be
capable of forming resolutions yet failing to live up to them.
Recognizing corporate weakness is important not only
because it better explains apparent instances of corporate
wrongdoing, but because it might warrant a different kind
of response. It could warrant a different response from us
in society insofar as wrongdoing committed out of weak-
ness is overall less blameworthy than if the action had been
done intentionally and with full resolve. Some have sug-
gested blameworthiness comes in degrees (e.g., Coates,
2019; Nelkin, 2016), and so a more complete business ethics
would provide a nuanced response to corporate weakness.
This could also warrant a different response within firms. By
investigating how weakness comes about, we can develop
prospective strategies to avoid it, navigating the levers of
organizational control while working to maintain the requi-
site autonomy and dignity of employees.
Acknowledgements I would like to thank Augie Faller for comments,
as well as audiences at the 2022 Society for Business Ethics annual
meeting, the 2020 Eastern Division meeting of the American Philo-
sophical Association, and the University College Dublin Centre for
Ethics & Public Life’s 2019 book workshop for Stephanie Collins’
Group Duties. This project was funded by the European Union (ERC-
2022-STG, CMP, 101077471). View and opinions expressed are how-
ever those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect those of the
European Union or the European Research Council. Neither the Euro-
pean Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
Funding Open Access funding provided by the IReL Consortium.
Data availability This statement is not applicable for this paper, since
it’s a theoretical methodology and has no corresponding data.
Declarations
Conflict of interest The author has no relevant financial or non-finan-
cial interests to disclose. The author has no conflicts of interest to de-
clare that are relevant to the content of this article. All authors certify
that they have no affiliations with or involvement in any organization or
entity with any financial interest or non-financial interest in the subject
matter or materials discussed in this manuscript. The author has no fi-
nancial or proprietary interests in any material discussed in this article.
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attri-
bution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adapta-
tion, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long
as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source,
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