Artificial Moral Agents: Corporations and AI

Are corporations moral agents? I seek to make progress on that question by examining, in the first instance, whether artificial intelligence (AI) is a moral agent. The appeal to AI stands to bear fruit, I believe, because both AI and the corporation function by way of distributed cognition, and both are capable of intelligence—indeed, intelligence that can surpass that of humans. Yet both lack capacities that are central, I will argue, to our moral lives. We can see this more readily in AI, which does not depend on human capacities once they are up and running. So, the deficiencies in artificial moral agency emerge more clearly in the case of AI than in the corporation. Having argued that AI cannot qualify for moral agency, I then turn to the corporation. I contend that the corporation lacks the very capacities for moral agency that AI was found to lack and that the corporation cannot overcome the relevant deficiencies by relying on its individual members to provide what is missing. Corporations, I conclude, are not moral agents for reasons similar to those disqualifying AI from moral agency. While the bulk of the analysis surveys, in turn, each of the capacities that sustain moral agency, I end by arguing that the strategy of dissecting moral agency into discrete capacities is misleading and should be abandoned. I urge a holistic conception of moral agency instead and conclude that, viewed holistically, it remains true that both AI and the corporation are not true moral agents.