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18 Crim. L. & Phil. 1 (2024)

handle is hein.journals/crimlpy18 and id is 1 raw text is: Criminal Law and Philosophy (2024) 18:1-17 https://doi.org/10.1007/si1572-023-09661-z ORIGINAL PAPER Moral Entanglement in Group Decision-Making: Explaining an Odd Rule in Corporate Criminal Liability Sylvia Rich' Accepted: 4 February 2023 / Published online: 15 February 2023 ŠThe Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2023 Abstract Acting as part of a corporation may allow an individual more easily to rationalize participating in a harmful act, but there are countervailing forces in corporate ac- tion that increase moral oversight and accountability. Making use of group agency to explain membership as a special feature of some corporate agents, I argue that when someone becomes a member of an organized group like a company, their own moral responsibility becomes entangled with the decisions of other members of the company, whether or not they intend this effect. This moral entanglement in corporate decision-making explains why individuals have a moral obligation to act in their role as a corporate officer when they would not have an obligation to act in a personal capacity even if they had identical knowledge. The entanglement affects the individual's own moral status and the moral status of the company itself. Moral entanglement of corporate decision-makers provides a principled explanation for a rule that is present in corporate criminal law that corporate officers with knowledge that another employee is about to commit a crime must actively intervene, and can- not rely on their status as bystanders. Keywords Corporate criminal law - Group agency and criminal law Moral responsibility in group decision-making - Philosophical foundations of corporate crime 1 Introduction People often talk about businesses as selfish, profit-motivated and harmful. This is true of the individuals involved but seems to be even more particularly true about the corporate entities. Some scholars have argued that it is inherently problematic for Sylvia Rich srich@uottawa.ca Faculty of Law, Common Law Section, University of Ottawa, Fauteux Hall 57 Louis- Pasteur Private, KiN 9A7 Ottawa, ON, Canada O Springer