Workshop: Climate Change and Group Agency

The workshop "Climate Change and Group Agency" will take place in a hybrid format. Registration is required in any case.
Unfortunately, the places in presence are already fully booked, therefore participation is only possible via Zoom. external pagePlease register via the registration form.call_made Deadline for registration is July 4 at 23:59, 2023.
Before the workshop all information will be sent to you by e-mail.

Control Gaps and the Duty of Accountability 
Frank Hindriks

Who is to blame when an organization does something wrong? Its members are obvious candidates. But what if they have justifications or excuses? Then none of them is blameworthy. Such situations have been taken to constitute responsibility gaps, in which case blame is fitting but cannot be attributed. It has been argued that such gaps can be closed by blaming the organization as such. Against this, I argue that the notion of a responsibility gap is incoherent: either it is possible to attribute blame or there is no good reason to do so. The real problem is that, in many situations where member responsibilities are defeated, organizations lack adequate control. Because of this, they are more prone to commit wrongdoings than they should be. Organizations have an obligation to prevent or close such ‘control gaps.’ Once they have fulfilled this ‘duty of accountability’, they possess the control they should have and they are less prone to commit wrongdoings. Furthermore, both their back-ward and forward-looking responsibilities properly distribute to their members.

Contractualism, Group Reasons, and Practical Identities
Niels de Haan

Organized groups such as states, corporations, and universities qualify as agents in their own right. These group agents are (typically) morally competent. They can understand and process moral reasons in light of their available evidence and act accordingly. In this paper, I investigate how a practical identity of a group agent can affect its moral reasons within contractualism. Practical identities come with specific constitutive ends. The group agent must pursue those ends to be an agent of that kind. I argue that a group agent’s practical identity can affect both the weight and the exact set of moral reasons of the group agent. However, any practical identity and its constitutive ends must be morally permissible. If the pursuit of a constitutive end conflicts with another agent’s pro tanto moral rights, then we must look whether the implied principle can be reasonably rejected. If the principle can be reasonably rejected, then the constitutive end is morally impermissible. Finally, I apply this account to business corporations, profit-maximization, and moral reasons to mitigate climate change.

Corporate agency as political agency in climate change: Structural injustice, political responsibility, and corporate structure
Joseph Conrad

When thinking about the role of corporations in climate change, we can start with the agent and adopt a perspective from inside the group. Or we start with the social structure and adopt a perspective from the outside. In this talk, I focus on the latter perspective and begin with a description of climate change as a structural injustice. Following this, I ascribe a political responsibility to corporations to overcome the unjust structures that bring about climate-change harms. I illustrate how corporations might take up political responsibility in climate change with an example from the financial industry while also offering a critique of corporate political responsibility in the face of corporate power. Finally, I turn to three political theories of the corporation and bring them into conversation with the group agency literature. Such a conversation, I suggest, can illuminate corporations’ role in climate change.

Can Corporations Sympathize?
Franz Altner and Cécile Rosat

Sympathy has been taken by Adam Smith and Bernhard Williams to be central to moral thought and action. In this paper we explore what it means for groups, such as corporations and states, to emphasize and sympathize with others. To do this, we first explore the conceptual possibility of functional account of sympathy and consider whether the constitution of, specifically, corporations, is compatible with the manifestation of these functional states. Answering in the affirmative, we consider whether corporations could rely on corporate sympathy in order to prompt them to tackle climate change.

Climate risks, moral emotions and corporate decision making
Sabine Roeser

Climate risk is a major socio-technical challenge that urgently needs to be addressed. The question is by whom, and how. In this contribution I will argue that all societal actors should be involved in climate action, and that moral emotions can be an important source for profound understanding of the ethical challenges of climate risks, as well as for motivation for climate action and to stimulate climate solidarity. I will specifically zoom in on the role of corporate decision making. I will argue that corporations have a specific and unique responsibility for pro-active climate action, and that moral emotions should be embraced as source of corporate decision making.

Transforming Business for Good
Kenneth Silver

There are several reasons to think that corporate agents have some kind of obligation to mitigate climate change. But what is the extent of this obligation? Rather than merely off-setting or engaging in various initiatives, we might think firms ought to shift to a sustainable business model. But is this asking too much? In this paper, I consider whether shifting business models constitutes a kind of corporate transformative experience, and what the recent work on the ethics of these experiences suggests about whether we can obligate firms in this way. I argue that this is not too much to demand of firms. Moreover, although making a similar demand of individuals would require some kind of compensation, firms are not so entitled.

The climate crisis is one of the most urgent problems that humanity currently faces. Even if individual contributions might present one puzzle in a concerted effort to tackle climate change, the role of corporations, as among the most powerful agents, will be essential if we want to make any meaningful progress. In market societies, corporations are relatively free, and can, in a self-governing way, decide for themselves how they want to spend their resources and organize their activities. This makes it all the more important to understand the kind of institutional reasoning and the limits of that reasoning that corporations are capable of. And consequently, how we can reform the social and legal conditions in order to change the kind of reasoning and the affective states that corporations are capable of.

The workshop “Climate Change and Group Agency” explores the role group agents, such as corporations, should play in the fight against climate change. In recent decades, numerous philosophers have argued that corporations are moral agents. As such, they have the capacity for the functional equivalent of affective attitudes that are required to reason, understand and respond to moral considerations. Others have raised doubt against this possibility, pointing at the ubiquitous instrumental reasoning and the prevailing practice of shareholder governance that undermine moral deliberation and motivation.

Behind the backdrop of this controversy, this workshop investigates the material and social conditions that give rise to moral agency in corporations in the fight against climate change. Can we rely on corporations to be self-governing, sustainable and environmentally considerate agents or do we have to restructure them or change the social and material conditions within which they are embedded? Do they have the functional equivalents of central moral emotions like sympathy, guilt and shame? And if not, can we educate them or their members in moral thinking, maybe through emotions and art? Moreover, in how far does the legal and social framework and the economic conditions undermine their agency and the moral ways for corporations of deliberating?

To explore the conditions of moral group agency with regard to mitigating climate change, this workshop proceeds through two main focuses. First, it explores the epistemic and motivational role of corporate emotions. Second, it considers how the social and legal framework within which corporations are embedded can be conducive to functional states that can play the role of these emotions or are conducive to other forms of moral reasoning and how this in turn can influence the obligations that we can hold corporations to.