Description Richard T. de George's "Moral Person View" and highlight a strength and weakness of his view.

Briefly, de George'smoral person viewrelates to
corporations, ascribing to them the knowing, willful intent of acting agents. As such,
de George contends, corporations have moral responsibility for their actions just as
knowing, willful, intentioned acting agents who are individual human beings have moral
responsibility for theirs. Corporations here, of course, are described in their legal
definitions as whole, unified entities. According to de George, a corporation that
suffers an oil spill or a radiation leak through intentional choices of will that were
known to bear undue risk are held morally accountable and responsible for the
consequences and results of the harm done by the spill or leak. If, on the other hand,
the corporate agent acts without knowledge, without willful intent, then it--the
entity--bears no moral guilt, thus no moral
responsibility.

A strength of de George's proposition is
that corporations are held responsible for acting according to the knowledge they
possess and for the consequences of being an agent with will and intention to act. A
weakness of the position is that, as opponents contend, corporations are legal entities
having legalrights but no moralrights. If corporations have no moral rights, the
argument goes, then corporations cannot logically have moral
responsibilities.

One serious difficulty with the whole
discussion is that corporations are a legal construct to facilitate
financial, tax, and other legal processes and proceedings. Outside of this framework
with its legally defined rights and responsibilities, the designation of
corporation has very little practical meaning. The entity that is
in reality the corporation are the board of directors and executive officers that
comprise the corporation, that assimilate the knowledge, that act upon their wills, that
form and express intent, and that comprise the agent(s) of action. These individual
human beings comprising the agent of will and intent and action that is the corporation
have moral responsibility jointly and individually as surely as
they individually and jointly have moral rights. Thus, the legal
entity of a corporation is comprised of individual human beings who cannot escape their
moral responsibilities under any guise.