I'm off to see Philip Pettit's inaugural Edmund Burke lecture in Trinity College Dublin at 18:00 this evening. He'll be speaking on "Democracy: Fashions, Failures and Fantasies." I might be wrong, but the title suggests he'll be making a comment or two on the failures and fallacies of democracy-by-invasion.

Pettit is best known in my sort of crowd for his philosophical work on republicanism (in the proper sense, not that expressed by most of the commenters on Slugger), but I've read more of his work on groups, responsibility and the discursive dilemma.

He's just published a great article on a few of these ideas in Ethics (subs required¹). Responsibility Incorporated kicks off with a discussion of possible corporate responsibility for the sinking of the Herald of Free Enterprise in 1987 and goes into some very interesting issues about how groups, above and beyond their members, can be thought of as responsible agents.

I'm not entirely persuaded by Pettit's approach to organisational responsilibity. First, although it might outline why individuals are not completely responsible within groups (an interesting enough observation in itself), I'm not convinced that the discursive dilemma is sufficient to describe group responsibility per se. In part, this is because it presumes a degree of democracy that is missing in many actual corporations (though perhaps not in corporate boards).

Second, I suspect we need to think a lot more about the agency required for responsibility as is generally expected in moral philosophy. Philosophy Incorporated has me nearly convinced by Pettit's position, and he's certainly making a huge contribution in providing a clear grounding for innovations like the UK's glacial Corporate Manslaughter bill, but more work is required for it to be totally persuasive.

¹Earlier drafts of this paper are hanging around (pdf) online. Or you could of course drop someone with a sub an email...