Integrity, intentions, and corporations.

Not infrequently in the popular press and in the literature of business ethics we find references to virtuous corporate behavior.(1) But does it make sense to ascribe moral virtue to corporations, in a direct sense and not in some derivative or vicarious way? I want to try to show that it does

THE MORAL CONCEPT OF INTEGRITY

"Integrity," as I use the term, refers to a particular virtue, not to a combination or culmination of all virtues or a significant number of them. Admittedly, on a not unreasonable account, integrity might be treated as a kind of conglomerate virtue, one that unites the other virtues or even supervenes on the existence in a person of the other, or a significant number of the other, virtues. If that were the case, we would say that someone has integrity just if he or she is courageous, temperate, trustworthy, etc. However, integrity is more often understood as independent of the possession of the other virtues, in fact, as something a person might have while lacking some or all of the other virtues.

Still, there are etymological reasons to see integrity as a unifier, if not of other virtues, then as a unifier of various aspects of a person's character. After all, the first entry for the term in The Oxford English Dictionary is "The condition of having no part or element taken away or wanting; undivided or unbroken state; material wholeness, completeness, entirely."(2) "Integrity" shares roots with "intact" and "integer," suggesting a unity or a whole. Gabriele Taylor reminds us that a person of integrity is typically thought to be someone "whose self is whole and integrated."(3) But a whole comprised of what? What is integrated?

Martin Benjamin points out that like many moral concepts, integrity can be clarified by looking at ways people are said to lack it.(4) Four ways are especially obvious and tend to occur with uncomfortable frequency in the population of the moral community.

First, there is the moral chameleon who is "anxious to accommodate others and temperamentally indisposed to moral controversy and disagreement. The moral chameleon is quick to modify or abandon previously avowed principles in order to placate others."(5) Moral chameleons have no core set of values for which they stand. They bend to any and all social pressures. They will betray others they only yesterday befriended. When we say of the chameleon that he has no integrity, of course we mean that he stands by nothing he says or does from day to day, minute to minute. You cannot depend on him because he has committed himself to no core set of values. We must resist the temptation to give chameleons the benefit of the doubt and credit them with shifting their positions because of some deep core commitment to personal success or even social tranquillity. They just shift as the wind blows. They are not opportunists, although the two types may be confused.

An opportunist's values and principles are fluid, resembling the chameleon, but the major difference is the opportunist's motive for her shifts. "Opportunists will alter their beliefs and behavior whenever they think it will lead to personal gain or advancement."(6) The opportunist is committed to personal success even if that means changing her positions hourly. Opportunists have few substantial commitments besides those of self-aggrandizement. Still, they are not really hypocrites.

Hypocrites have more of a center of personal values than their other lack-of-integrity cousins. Taylor describes a hypocrite as

pretending to live by certain standards when in fact he does not.

In the clearest case he consciously and calculatingly exploits for his

own ends the fact that certain types of behavior are seen by others

as constituting or implying certain commitments and that therefore

he will be seen by others to be acting as he does because he is so

committed.(7)

Hypocrites have one set of values for public display and another that they keep hidden, but that actually motivates their behavior. Benjamin notes that a deeper understanding of the hypocrite, despite this apparent inconsistency between words and deeds, will reveal "a coherent internal rationale. Underlying the hypocrite's apparent external inconsistencies, then, is a deceitful internal unity. Hypocrites may be `rotten to the core,' but they are not wholly without a center."(8)

A fourth type of person lacking integrity is the self-deceiver. Benjamin again aptly characterizes the type:

Self-deceivers are often motivated by a discrepancy between the

values and principles that they like to think of themselves as acting

upon and their conduct that is motivated by quite different, incompatible

interests and desires. To resolve this tension and, at the

same time, to preserve the idealized self-conception while indulging

the incompatible interests and desires, they deceive themselves

about what they are in fact doing.(9)

Self-deceivers think they are internally consistent and positively brimming over with integrity, but it is all a sham.

I do not want to suggest that these categories either exhaust the types of persons who lack integrity or that they are pure character types. Benjamin, in fact, offers at least two other types: those weak of will and those coerced into violating their convictions. Suffice it to say that people can be traitors to their own integrity in a myriad of subtle ways and in degrees and combinations of the various types.

The lesson Benjamin would have us learn from even a cursory examination of the types is that when we talk about someone having integrity we are referring in some way, albeit oblique, to a wholeness or a unity characterizable as an integration of what that person actually values with what he or she says and does. Benjamin refers to integrity as "an integrated triad consisting of: (1) a reasonably coherent and relatively stable set of highly cherished values and principles; (2) verbal behavior expressing these values and principles; and (3) conduct embodying one's values and principles and consistent with what one says."(10)

This account, of course, is purely structural and formalistic. In fact, Rawls(11) and Flanagan(12) class integrity as a virtue of form, a structural virtue, and oppose it to contentful virtues.

[It] [a virtue like integrity] tell[s] us that a life possesses certain

internal goods. But lit] do[es] not tell us enough about the quality

of a person's projects and convictions or about the actual historical

connections his life has with the lives of others with whom he

interacts--others who may be permitted to make certain demands

of him.(13)

For Flanagan, a person can lose his or her integrity, while holding "onto the projects with which he most identifies and thus not be alienated," because integrity "is a matter of possessing the ability to act on what one recognizes as the most important reasons for actions even if these reasons conflict with other reasons."(14)

Suppose we call the view taken by Benjamin, Rawls, and Flanagan "integrity formalism." In effect, the formalist allows that someone has integrity, regardless of the content of his commitments, as long as he believes that he is acting on his most important reasons for action when they conflict with other reasons he has for acting, as long as there is an integration of his values, his words, and his deeds. Such a formalism, though it can account for the difference between a person of integrity and a chameleon, an opportunist, a hypocrite, or a self-deceiver, fails importantly to distinguish between the person of integrity and the person with the courage of unethical or immoral convictions. In short, on the formalist's account, persons with utterly immoral values and principles, those committed to values and principles that motivate actions that are inconsistent with the goals and interests of morality and human welfare, can still be properly described as persons of integrity.

In effect, on the formalistic approach to integrity, there would be nothing wrong with crediting someone with having integrity who is sincerely committed to pedophilia and acts on that commitment. On the account that I will recommend, there should be some moral restrictions on the commitments one can have, if one is to be credited with possessing a virtue. Still, as Halfon writes, "One desirable consequence ... of embracing the view that persons of integrity are typically true to their commitments is that it allows for such persons to embrace a diversity of ideals or principles and may help to create an air of toleration."(15) Even if we grant that, isn't there something rather morally unsavory about holding someone in high regard not because he or she has admirable principles, but because he or she has, in Taylor words, "the courage of his (or her) convictions"?(16)

The formalist account is inadequate, if only because it almost completely excludes the virtuous element of the virtue. Still, the account of integrity that sits on the other side of the spectrum, the one that requires a person of integrity to have only morally justifiable convictions, also has serious problems. For example, on what theory of morality are the convictions of a person of integrity to be tested. If it matters which theory is chosen (utilitarian, Kantian, egoist, cultural relativist, whatever), then someone could hold and act on convictions that satisfy a generally recognized moral theory, but not the favored one, and fail to be a person of integrity. In order to become a person of integrity, that person would have to reject his or her own moral principles. How then could such a person be regarded as having integrity?

Something between the extremes of formalism and designated content must be closer to capturing what we mean by the virtue of integrity. Halfon puts it nicely when he writes, "Persons of integrity must be permitted to cultivate Promethean impulses without being allowed to indulge Procrustean sensibilities."(17) A correction to the formalistic account of integrity that should respond to the criticism of its lacking sufficient moral content while not dictating the preferred moral theory could focus on the intentions of the person with respect to his or her beliefs about the convictions on which he or she is acting.

Perhaps what most disturbs us about crediting persons with integrity because they steadfastly pursue obviously wicked courses of action to which they are deeply committed is that most such persons also seem to refuse adamantly to submit their beliefs in their convictions either to the test of truth or to serious moral scrutiny. In short, to be a person of integrity one must not only believe that one's convictions are true and moral (or just or noble) and one's principles right, one must be in a certain state of mind: One must have the intentions to pursue the truth of those convictions and whether or not they are morally justifiable.

Saying that a person of integrity must intend to pursue the truth of his or her convictions, those on which commitments are based, does not, of course, mean that he or she has uncovered the truth or that he or she should not continue to act on those convictions until he or she has uncovered the truth. The intention in question is to pursue their truth and to desert them if they prove to be false. By the same token, a person of integrity must intend to hold or pursue only right or ethical principles or convictions. That does not entail that such a person may not have misguided or downright bad principles. The crucial difference between the position I am recommending and pure formalism about integrity is that the person of integrity is required to have a specific set of intentions on my view: the intentions to pursue the proper moral principles and the truth of one's convictions.

Peter Winch writes about the commandant of a concentration camp in the novel The Young Lions that he "exhibited integrity of a particularly revolting sort.... He was morally revolting because of the unspeakable role he was playing; to say he was playing it with integrity is ... an additional count against him, not a point in his favor."(18) On the account I am recommending, the only way the commandant could be exhibiting integrity would be if he were actively pursuing the truth of the convictions he held about Jews, etc. and if he had the intention to pursue only right or ethical principles or convictions and he was actively trying to determine if he was, in fact, doing that. As the commandant in the novel was committed to finding out neither the truth nor the moral rightness of his convictions, he is hardly a man of integrity. He is morally negligent, at the very least, in just those matters where he ought to be diligent. Though the formalist will admit him into the class of those displaying integrity, I do not.

Mine, however, is not a contentful account of integrity. Halfon makes a similar point:

Consider the case of a political operative who is loyal to his superiors

and devoted to his country, but due to, say, misinformation from

those superiors, violates the laws of his country as well as other

principles he ordinarily cherishes. This individual's integrity is not

necessarily tarnished. Persons of integrity sometimes perform ill-advised

actions or pursue unjust principles as a result of ignorance,

deception, naivete but ignorance or deception or naivete by themselves

will not bring about a loss of integrity.(19)

The intention to pursue the truth and the moral justifiability of one's convictions and principles does not ensure that one will in fact have true convictions and morally justifiable principles. It ensures that one does not abandon the pursuit for reasons of expediency and the like, and it ensures that one will not intentionally adopt false or immoral convictions and principles. Persons of integrity must at least intend to do what they believe is right in every circumstance and be willing to expose to serious examination their conception of what is right. My account shackles the formalist's position with the sort of restrictions that should bring it more in line with common intuitions about integrity as a virtue.

Halfon cashes out these restrictions in the following helpful way:

[P]ersons who have integrity ... do not embrace an undemanding

moral point of view. They do not allow prudential considerations to

outweigh moral commitments. They do not compromise their ideals

or principles in the face of adversity. Instead, they embrace a moral

point of view that urges them to be conceptually clear, logically

consistent, apprised of relevant empirical evidence, and careful about

acknowledging as well as weighing relevant moral considerations.(20)

THE NATURE OF INTENTION

Crucial to the virtue of integrity, as explicated above, are the intentions of the person. Intentionality and intentions, of course, play a central role in morality and so in the identification of the members of the moral community, those who are proper subjects of moral judgments and ascriptions of moral virtue. For the better part of twenty-five years I have argued that corporate entities are capable of intentional actions in and of themselves and that they, therefore, should be treated as full-fledged members of the moral community. If I am to endorse the view that corporations can properly be said to have integrity, to be virtuous in at least that sense, I should again have to return to the earlier arguments that corporations have intentions, and that they can perform the sorts of intentional actions, etc. that the virtue of integrity, as above explicated, requires. I am tempted simply to provide a precis of those arguments and maintain that there is no reason why an intentional actor, be it human or corporate, could not have the requisite intentions: the intention to pursue the truth of one's convictions and commitments and to do what one believes is morally right in every situation. If corporations can intend, why can't they intend what is required for the virtue of integrity?

Unfortunately, I have somewhat altered my views on intention since the publication of the papers and books(21) in which I labored to make the case for corporate intentionality. The view of intention I now hold, however, I think makes the case for corporate intentionally rather easier than the one for which I previous argued. I propose only to outline the argument and then proceed to apply it to the question of corporate integrity.

At the base of my earlier view was the widely-held position that intentionality should be understood in terms of a desire/belief complex. That position is flawed; indeed, it is downright wrong.

To intend to do something is to plan to do it. If I intend to go to Colorado in June, then I plan to go to Colorado in June. Or, at least, I have made some plans to do so. It isn't that I just desire to go there in June. I may intend to go even though I don't desire to go there. I would rather go to Ireland, but I agreed to attend a condo owners' meeting in Colorado. I am committed, resolved, to doing it. That is what it is to intend to do it. To say that a person acted intentionally is to say that his or hers or its actions were planned, or undertaken deliberately to accomplish a goal(s); they were schemed, designed, even premeditated by that person.

I may do little to indicate what intentions I have, what my plans are. I may put off buying the tickets and packing my clothes. You might not be able to tell from any of my present behavior that I am intending to go to Colorado in June. The reason for this is that any number of things that I might now be doing are compatible with my intention to go to Colorado in June, though they have nothing to do with a Colorado trip. On the other hand, I cannot be intending to go to Colorado in June if I book up that month with trips to Europe and Asia. So if I intend to go to Colorado in June, some things are excluded from my possible present activities. That is what it means to be committed to, to plan on, doing something.

My intention seems to have little to do with my current desires and beliefs. In fact, desires and beliefs are, at most, only tangentially involved. My plans and my commitments to those plans are at the heart of my intentions.

A number of philosophers, including Alvin Goldman,(22) Elizabeth Anscombe,(23) Donald Davidson,(24) and Robert Audi(25), in their analyses of intentionality and intending, focus exclusively on intention as it seems to appear in actions rather than, in Michael Bratman's terms, "the state of intending to act."(26) Because they do that, they seem compelled to believe that "what makes it true that an action was performed intentionally, or with a certain intention, are just facts about the relation of that action to what the agent desires and what the agent believes."(27) For some, like Davidson in his early papers on the subject, that relation is made out to be a causal one. Desires, coupled with beliefs, cause intentional actions. If I have the desire to go to Colorado and I believe that I have the means to do so, then I intend to make the trip. Others, such as Audi, argue that there is no state of intending because intentions with respect to future activities always reduce to appropriate sets of desires and beliefs. In other words, if I say, "I intend to go to Colorado," I am saying no more than that I desire to make the trip and believe that I can make it.

It should be expected that those who interpret intention on the popular desire-belief model would think that any talk of corporate intentions (and so corporate actors) must be metaphorical or reducible to the intentions of humans who have the requisite desires and beliefs. Corporations cannot, in any normal sense, desire and believe. In my earlier accounts I redescribed desires and beliefs into corporate policy in order to match the model. Many objected that I had overly formalized the notions of desire and belief to fit the Corporate Internal Decision (CID) Structure approach I had created. With them I am now prepared to say that if intention is no more than desires and beliefs, then corporations will fail to make it as intentional actors.

However, the desire-belief theory should be rejected, as has been persuasively argued by Bratman. He writes: "Our understanding of intention is in large part a matter of our understanding of future-directed intention.... Plans are not merely executed. They are formed, retained, combined, constrained by other plans, filled in, modified, reconsidered, and so on. Such processes ... are central to our understanding of ... intention."(28) Such an account helps to explain why it is senseless to ask someone whether he intentionally sat in a chair(29) if, when he entered the room, he just sat down in the chair. To raise the question of intention suggests that he was up to something besides sitting down. Was it an act of protest?

Austin, I think, is correct when he notes:

"I intend to" is, as it were, a sort of "future tense" of the verb, "to

X." It has a vector, committal effect like "I promise to X," and

again like "I promise to X," it is one of the possible formulas for

making explicit, on occasion, the force of "I shall X" (namely, that

it was a declaration and not, for example, a forecast or an undertaking).(30)

Intentional actions are not necessarily caused by desires and beliefs. "It is no part of the nature of an action to have a prior causal history of any particular kind."(31) I do not say that intentions never involve desires and beliefs. They may enter into the various planning stages. We should be surprised if they did not. (Austin talks of the machinery of action involving such stages or departments as intelligence, planning, decision, appreciation, and resolve.)(32)

I am not saying that planning causes actions. I side with Frankfurt in reaching the conclusion, based on a literature of counterexamples to the various causal theories, that "[n]o matter what kinds of causal antecedents are designated as necessary and sufficient for the occurrence of an action, it is easy to show that causal antecedents of that kind may have as their effect an event that is manifestly not an action but a mere bodily movement."(33) What is important in deciding whether or not someone is acting is to determine what is going on when the movements are in progress and not what proceeded them. Again, with Frankfurt, what we are looking for is whether or not the movements are "under the person's guidance,"(34) regardless of their antecedents. Actions are "guided." Mere movements are not. Intentional actions are planned. They are undertaken deliberately, on purpose. The operative element in intentional action is planning, and to plan in the relevant way is to make commitments to perform certain future actions.(35)

CORPORATE INTENTIONALITY

Planning is indisputably a major corporate activity. What may be plausibly disputed, however, is whether corporations plan or just their managers plan and so only the managers can be said to intend and have commitments and therefore integrity with respect to corporate activities. I hope that a cursory mention of work I have previously done on CID Structures will suffice to make the case for corporate intentionality on the planning theory.(36)

Every corporation has an established way by which it makes decisions and converts them into actions, a CID Structure. CID Structures have two elements crucial to our understanding of how intentionally acting corporations emerge at certain levels of the description of events: (1) an organizational flow chart that delineates stations and levels within the corporation; and (2) rules that reveal how to recognize decisions that are corporate ones and not simply personal decisions of the humans who occupy the positions identified on the flow chart. These rules are typically embedded, whether explicitly or implicitly, in statements of corporate policy.

Its CID Structure is an organization of its personnel for the exercise of the corporation's power with respect to its ventures and interests and, as such, a CID Structure's primary function is to draw various levels and positions within the corporation into decision-making, ratification, and action processes.

A CID Structure subordinates and synthesizes the intentions and actions of various human persons (and even the behavior of machines) into a corporate action. What I mean by that is that the CID Structure not only organizes the various human beings in the system into a decision-making and acting entity, it makes it possible for us and those within the structure to describe what is happening as corporate. In the absence of the structure, the various activities of the humans and machines would be utterly unintelligible.

CID Structures generally are, and need to be, epistemically transparent. Anyone with access to these structures should be able to discover everything about how they work. Hence, CID Structures can be confidently used as licenses of redescription to transform descriptions of certain events as the actions or the mere behavior of humans and/or machines into descriptions of corporate acts. A CID Structure provides the means by which we gain access to intentional agents at a different level of description than the one we typically use to describe the behavior of humans.

I have elsewhere distinguished two sorts of rules: organizational rules and policy/procedure rules, in CID Structures.(37) The organizational rules distinguish players, clarify their rank, and map out the interwoven lines of responsibility within the corporation. They give us the grammar of corporate decision-making. Policy/procedure rules provide its logic.

Every corporation creates a general set of policies that are easily accessible to both its agents and those with whom it interacts. When an action performed by someone in the employ of a corporation is an implementation of its corporate policy, and accords with its procedural rules, then it is proper to describe the act as done for corporate reasons or for corporate purposes, to advance corporate plans, and so as an intentional action of the corporation.

Corporate plans might differ from those that motivate the human persons who occupy corporate positions and whose bodily movements are necessary for the corporation to act. Using its CID Structure, we can, however, describe the concerted behavior of those humans as corporate actions done with a corporate intention, to execute a corporate plan or as part of such a plan.

Corporate intent then, is dependent upon relatively transparent policies and plans that have their origins in the socio-psychology of a group of human beings. Corporate intent might look like a tarnished, illegitimate offspring of human intent, but such an assumption reveals an anthropocentric bias. If we concentrate on the possible descriptions of events and acknowledge that there are distinctly corporate plans and policies that provide the reasons why corporations do the things they do, then we should not feel compelled to reduce statements about corporate actions to ones about the actions, reasons, plans, or interests of humans who happen to be agents of the corporate actor.

In sum, to this point, corporations make plans, in fact, if anything, they are planning entities, designed to do just that. It therefore should not be too troubling to talk about corporate commitments that are not merely reducible to the plans and commitments of those who directly or indirectly participate in the corporate planning processes. "Corporation X plans to build a new plant in Mexico," does not entail that all (or any) of the personnel employed by X plan to build anything in Mexico. "Corporation X revealed its commitment to finding cheaper sources of labor when it revealed its plan to move its assembly unit to Mexico," also does not entail that all (or any) of the personnel employed by X are personally committed to finding cheaper sources of labor. Corporate commitments both are shaped and inform corporate planning, and as already argued, questions of integrity are in order with respect to an entity that makes commitments.

CORPORATIONS AND INTEGRITY

I have tried to suggest why it makes sense to say that corporations can perform intentional actions and adopt commitments. Hence, it should make sense to say that corporations may act in ways that are consistent with the virtue of integrity. What that means, as I understand it, is that corporations can adopt policies that require them to continually pursue the truth of their corporate commitments and that regularly expose their convictions and corporate policies and procedures to moral scrutiny. The latter requirement might be accomplished in part procedurally, for example with a compliance system, and an active ethics officer plugged into the CID Structure in a significant way. In any event, there are functional ways to build both regular exposure to moral scrutiny and the pursuit of the truth of the corporation's commitments into its CID Structure ensuring the integrity of the corporation. Conversely, of course, corporations can be designed in ways that encourage a lack of integrity. Such corporations will typically suffer from what Kenneth Goodpaster calls teleopathy. "[T]eleopathy can be understood as a habit of character that values limited purposes as supremely action-guiding, to the relative exclusion not only of larger ends, but also moral considerations about means, obligations, and duties."(38)

Goodpaster points out that there are at least three types of teleopathy that infest CID Structures. Corporations can adopt the general policy of applying the techniques of cost/benefit analysis, as the final arbiter of all their judgments without consideration of ethical examination. Secondly, they can buy into the invisible hand approach popularized by Milton Friedman that accepts as dogma the belief that the capitalist free market system itself contains within it all of the values it needs to insure that business is operated with integrity. Profitability in a fair market justifies all, and over the long haul markets will adjust to correct for any untoward gains. The third type substitutes non-economic forces outside the corporation, such as the law, for the marketplace or cost/benefit analysis to avoid internal ethical scrutiny of corporate commitments. If and only if the law requires it, then that is what, and all, the corporation should do. The responsibility for making ethical evaluations is understood to be well outside the realm of the CID Structure. The economic interests of the corporation within the limits set by law are to be solely pursued. Following the dictates of law is supposed to guarantee that ethical principles are not offended.

Teleopathy in a corporation could show up in ways that directly mirror the ways in which human beings can lack integrity. I don't see why, for example, a corporate actor could not be designed to produce hypocritical behavior. The tobacco companies, many of us suspect, have been hypocritical for decades. Perhaps they are not so much hypocrites as self-deceivers. Recently and at last, at least Philip Morris has stepped forward to negotiate with the government to control the distribution of cigarettes to children. Whether this signals an end of hypocrisy and/or self-deception in the corporation is difficult to tell. There are extremely powerful factors outside of the company that may be driving its new found social awareness, not the least of which is the threat that the FDA will declare nicotine a dangerous drug and regulate it.

Putting aside the multi-layered integrity problems of the tobacco industry, other cases can be provided in which it is plausible to say that a corporation designed itself as a self-deceiver by instituting policies that have the effect of keeping it in the dark about what it is really doing, while fostering the conviction that it is up to something else. Some years ago and for decidedly different purposes, I did a study of Air New Zealand regarding the crash of one of its DC-10's into Mt. Erebus in Antarctica.(39) Now it strikes me that Air New Zealand, at least in those days, lacked corporate integrity because it was a self-deceiver.

Air New Zealand, since its inception, conceived of itself as a family-like corporation. Verbal communication was the norm. That is what families do. The company's operations had, however, grown to a size, with multiple divisions, that made such communication not only inefficient, but unsafe.

Flight TE-901, on a sightseeing tour with 257 people on board, was to have flown on a certain navigational track that had been used by previous flights of its type. That flight plan was given to the captain at a briefing and he noted it and entered it on his maps. It would have taken the plane over McMurdo Sound, where it was to fly at 1500 feet to give the passengers a good view of the splendors of the frozen continent. The evening before the flight, the Navigation Section of the Flight Operations Division directed its Computer Section to reprogram the on-board computer of TE-901 to bring it in line with the tactical air navigation system of McMurdo Station. That was not an unreasonable thing to do, all things being equal. The order to reprogram came verbally from the operations manager who had heard from a captain of an earlier flight that the computer navigation track was about twenty-seven miles to the west of the McMurdo signal. That pilot did not tell the operations manager to change the flight plans. He only expressed the view that the other pilots should be informed that there was such a discrepancy. At least that is what he claims he said. Nothing is in writing! The operations manager, believing that a serious error in the flight plan existed, ordered the reprogramming of the computer to bring the track in line with the signal. He, so he says, did not think such a change important enough to inform the captain, so he said no more about it and, of course, no written messages about the change were left for the captain or the crew.

If you fly an airplane at 1500 feet down a track twenty-seven miles west of the original McMurdo Sound track, you will crash it head on into a 12,000 foot mountain. Worse yet, you will not notice the mountain until you are virtually on it because the terrain is so white that it causes a flattening, or white-out visual illusion. If you think you are over the frozen sound, none of the visual cues you are receiving from scanning the horizon will persuade you otherwise. There will be no time to take evasive actions. Two hundred fifty-seven people, many unwittingly snapping pictures of their gruesome deaths, perished.(40)

An investigating commission found that the primary cause of the disaster was the communications system of Air New Zealand. At the commission hearings Air New Zealand insisted that the company was run on a verbal basis to foster a family-like atmosphere and that the airline had an excellent safety record before TE-901.

It was pointed out in the commission's report that trusting crucial messages to word-of-mouth and a family-type organizational policy was inappropriate for the industry. The policy, however, was treated as an unquestionable corporate commitment, not to be tested against truth or morally scrutinized. For some time Air New Zealand persisted in the self-deceptive lack of corporate integrity. They insisted that the reason for the crash was pilot error and they steadfastly made no changes in the corporation's standard operating procedures. They did, however, end the sightseeing flights to the Antarctic.

CONCLUSION

We thus can properly ascribe to corporations the virtue of integrity. Integrity requires a particular set of intentions: the intentions to pursue proper moral principles and the truth of one's convictions. On the view of corporate intentionality I have described here, corporations are capable of such intentions and thus capable of exhibiting the virtue of integrity. Such recognition of corporate integrity is fundamental to understanding the moral significance of the corporate entity. (1) In fact, a book entitled A Virtuous Life in Business: Stories of Courage and Integrity in the Corporate World (edited by O. Williams & J. Houck (Lanham, MA, 1992) recently crossed my desk and provoked my thinking on this subject.

(2) Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford, 1971) p. 1455.

(3) Gabriele Taylor, "Integrity," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume, 55 (1981) p. 143.

(4) Martin Benjamin, Splitting the Difference (Lawrence, 1990).

(5) Ibid. p. 47.

(6) Ibid.

(7) Taylor, op. cit., p. 144.

(8) Benjamin, op. cit., p. 48.

(9) Ibid. p. 49.

(10) Ibid. p. 51.

(11) John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford, 1972) p. 519.

(12) Owen Flanagan, Varieties of Moral Personality (Cambridge, MA, 1991).

(13) Ibid. p. 91.

(14) Ibid. p. 92.

(15) Mark Halfon, Integrity (Philadelphia, 1989) p. 29-30.

(16) Gabriele Taylor, op. cit., p. 143.

(17) Halfon, op. cit., p. 32.

(18) Peter Winch, Ethics and Action (London, 1972) p. 71.

(19) Halfon, op. cit., p. 35.

(20) Ibid. p. 36-37.

(21) See for example, Peter A. French, Collective and Corporate Responsibility (New York, 1984). (22) Alvin Goldman, A Theory of Human Action (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1970).

(23) Elizabeth Anscombe, Intention (Ithaca, NY, 1963).

(24) Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (New York, 19801.

(25) Robert Audi, "Intending," Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 70, (1973), p. 387-403.

(26) Michael Bratman, Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason (Cambridge, MA, 1987),

(27) Ibid. p. 6.

(28) Ibid. p. 7.

(29) A point made by Austin. J.L. Austin, Philosophical Papers (Oxford, 1970).

(30) Ibid. p. 279.

(31) Harry Frankfurt, "The Problem of Action," The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge, 1988) p. 69.

(32) Austin, op. cit., p. 193-94

(33) Frankfurt, op. cit., p. 70.

(34) Ibid. p. 73.

(35) Those commitments, of course, do not cause the actions, either.

(36) If not, then the more technical account is available in the book cited in footnote 21.

(37) See French, Collective and Corporate Responsibility, op. cit.

(38) Kenneth Goodpaster. "Ethical Imperatives and Corporate Leadership," Business Ethics. The State of the Art. ed. by R.E. Freeman (Oxford, 1991) p. 94.

(39) See French, Collective and Corporate Responsibility, op. cit., chapter 11.

(40) The whole gruesome story of the flight and the subsequent investigation in told in Gordon Vette, Impart Erebus (Auckland, 1983).

PETER A. FRENCH, Cole Chair in Ethics, University of South Florida