This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: When Boeing certified the 737 Max in 2017 as safe to fly, a flight-control system it had approved caused two crashes that killed 346 people. When Takata kept shipping airbag inflators it had cleared for use, the devices exploded on impact, triggering the largest automotive recall in U.S. history.
When a Hollywood armorer handed Alec Baldwin a gun on the set of "Rust," she believed it held no live rounds, but it did, and the shot killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins. Each case arguably involved a form of negligence; in the "Rust" case, it involved individual belief, but the first two involved a form of corporate belief. A new paper, published in the journal Synthese by Kirk Ludwig, Ruth N.
Halls Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington, argues that the idea that a corporation "believes" or "thinks" something is not just a metaphor. "Corporations and other organizations are often said to want, believe, and intend various things," Ludwig writes in the study. But a company does not have a mind the way a person does, he argues.
So when a corporation is negligent, acting on a false belief it should have caught, responsibility has to land somewhere else. He argues that we need a way of conceptualizing this problem so that it does not lead to the unwanted result that no individual is ever to blame in cases of corporate negligence. And Ludwig's paper says exactly where to start.
He begins by rejecting two popular but flawed views. The first treats companies as having minds and beliefs of their own, distinct from those of their employees, managers and stockholders. The second says a company's beliefs are a simple function of the beliefs of its members or some subset of them.
Ludwig shows how both break down. The first entails, somewhat absurdly, that even a three-member corporation has a mind of its own. The second is undermined by real-world examples in which a government drug-approval committee may vote to approve a medication as safe even if every member privately doubts it, because members vote on separate technical questions, not the final position directly.
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