The Moral Responsibility of Corporate Executives for Disasters
What would be your main and supporting claims on this?
Senior executives are morally responsible for disasters resulting from corporate activities, even in instances where the information needed to prevent the disaster was not passed on by subordinates.
Bishop accepts that corporate officers are not responsible for anticipating acts of God and their immediate consequences, nor for disasters which do not arise as a result of their corporation's actions. He also accepts that a corporate executive is to be held responsible for a disaster if s/he possessed the information necessary to prevent the disaster, but failed to act on it. What he wants to demonstrate is that an executive may be held responsible in instances where the information necessary to prevent the disaster was possessed by someone in the company, but that information failed to reach the executive. Specifically, he wants to show that, even in instances where it is unreasonable to expect corporate executives to have gained access to the necessary information, we are nevertheless justified in holding them responsible on moral considerations. His argument is that:
- Moral responsibility must be distinguished from professional responsibility. One cannot hold a person morally responsible for performing a certain action unless the person could reasonably be expected to perform the action. In the case of professional responsibility there is no such requirement. A person may be held professionally responsible to produce certain results, even though it may be unreasonable to expect that person to produce those results.
- Corporate executives cannot be held morally responsible for failing to obtain information they could not reasonably be expected to obtain, but they can be held professionally responsible for failing to attain such information.
- Part of the professional responsibility of a corporate executive includes the moral responsibility of seeking to avoid disasters. It also includes the professional obligation actually to avoid disasters.
- Therefore, since the professional responsibility of corporate executives includes the moral requirement of seeking to avoid disasters, and since the professional obligation of the corporate executive is actually to succeed in avoiding disasters, we are justified on moral considerations in holding corporate executives responsible for avoiding disasters, even in cases where they could not reasonably be expected to obtain the information necessary to avoid the disaster.
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