Are corporate bodies psychopathic?

We owe a cornfield respect, not because of itself, but because it is food for mankind.
In the same way, we owe our respect to a collectivity, of whatever kind – country, family, or any other – not for itself, but because it is food for a certain number of human souls.1
– Simone Weil

Extended writeup.

“Intelligence,” for present purposes, is defined as being effective at achieving goals. A core component of psychopathy is an incapacity for empathy. Individuals who combine high intelligence with psychopathic traits are especially dangerous. In the 18th century, David Hume identified a character he called a “sensible knave” fitting this description. Such a person, he realized, would be a challenge to his moral theory, a version of moral sense theory. The theory proposes that at the heart of moral behavior is a capacity for empathy – sympathy, benevolence, other-regard, fellow-feeling, etc., in general, the capacity to subserve self-interest to the interest of others to some degree. Empathy and psychopathy are on a spectrum. While psychopathy itself may be an individual thing, social environments can magnify its consequences, its toxicity.

There is power in numbers. Groups can be more ambitious in, and effective at, achieving their goals than solitary individuals. Allied groups are abstract entities in the sense that they did not come about through natural biological processes. Abstract entities do not manifest affect. Empathy is an evolved adaptation, no less than self-interest, promoting species survival. Allied groups, of course, behave, but they do not have moral agency, except in so far as they are socially or legally constructed as though they did. Moral agency implies liable to being held responsible as a paradigmatic instance would, such as a normally capacitated human. In such individuals, responsibility can be brought to bear from two directions: internal and external. The abstract entity, the allied group, is an inorganic construction with no evolved internal mechanism for enforcing responsibility.

Such collective entities have power to affect outcomes having great moral consequences but without internal constraint. It makes them dangerous, and poses a problem for a moral theory based on a capacity for benevolent affect, suggesting that despite its intuitive appeal the theory cannot be adequate to explain moral judgment. If moral sense is the only theory in play, then, because of their power, groups can behave with impunity because they can enforce standards of behavior, based entirely on effectiveness of achieving goals and without the internal constraints that may impede individual agency.

Rightness or wrongness, then, answers exclusively to the power to effect.

This may help explain the need for moral theories that are not based on a capacity for benevolence, but rather on some capacity more universal – or, at least, more general. It’s important to note that, since we are addressing humans, an affect of one sort or another will be involved in every moral theory,1 but the affect cannot be exclusively benevolence.

1. We say this because it is still a common mistake to classify Kantian ethics as an exception.

‽

By “corporate body,” I mean associations, profit or non-profit, public or private, nations and their governments, clubs, teams, political parties, groups on any scale held together by some shared history or purpose, not to exclude consortiums, cartels comprised of any number of smaller corporate bodies, from the United Nations to groups of groups... in short, collectives organized to serve any goal. For purposes of this discussion, I include any group with legal or moral power – even, as Weil suggests, a family. In short, a collective that, because of its size, exceeds the influence of a given individual.

I am not particularly addressing the prevalence of psychopaths high up in corporate hierarchies which is more of a psychosocial problem than a conceptual one, and has, as such, gotten more attention. It is on the psychopathy emerging from collectives in which the collectives themselves are psychopathic agents that we focus here, a phenomenon less recognized.

An argument for why these collectives have psychopathic traits goes like this:

Psychopathy is defined by a lack of internal moral qualms when engaging in activity that negatively affects others. Psychopaths consider their own interests first and the interests of others only to the extent the latter's interests may serve their own more narrow ones. A psychopathic agent’s epistemic efforts at determining whether the interests of others serve their own will be limited by their rational capabilities; otherwise, their epistemic carelessness would hobble or defeat their intended goals. Effective psychopaths will have strong rational capabilities. Success at achieving their goals is the bottom line for a psychopathic entity. Moral considerations are not among their cardinal interests except insofar as keeping up moral appearances can be conducive to their proprietary interests. Moral considerations exist to be circumnavigated.

This understanding of psychopathy is usually applied to individuals, but the traits can apply to corporate bodies. It is a well documented fact that corporate bodies do not have anything resembling a “conscience” to aid in regulating their behavior. There can be sufficient external constraints on the corporate body that may compensate for the lack of internal ones, but, having to exert pressure from one direction, external, where the non-psychopathic individual is subject from two, the external constraints must be especially stringent on the collective to be as effective at curbing abuse as combined internal and external constraints are in the case of typical non-psychopathic individuals.

Among the explanations for this lack of conscience or internal constraint is the bystander effect: a group or corporate body is a moral abstraction devoid of sentience or a natural claim to dignity based on integrity while the individual constituents of the group have a tendency to fob off responsibility to others or ignore it altogether when in a group. In effect, when things go wrong no entity assumes responsibility, not the constituent members (it can’t be the fault any one of them) nor the group (the group is an abstraction without the concrete internal constraints that may curb self-interest). It’s almost as if collectives can do no wrong because they are pro-social by design. Responsibility either gets assigned elsewhere, even to amoral natural causes (such as “this is how the world is”), and no single individual can be blamed, or responsibility gets diffused so thinly that any given individual’s portion is negligible. Individual members become acclimated to seeing their liability progressively delimited as the size of the group with which they are affiliated enlarges. This can be institutionalized in group norms, i.e., in law. The larger it is, the more self-legitimated, the more shielded from blame the collective becomes.1 This, combined with the natural tendency of any party, individual or collective, to accept credit before blame, will conduce to making corporate behavior easier to justify.

The net effect is that a corporate body acts like a psychopath. It clearly sees only its own interests. Other interests are vague and require external forces or conditions, if they exist, to be attended. In the typical non-psychopathic individual’s case, moral constraints operate from both internal and external directions, from internalized norms and from attunement to social consequences, making responsibility more difficult to evade, dismiss, or rationalize away, while corporate bodies are better empowered to do these very things.

There are likely evolutionary explanations why corporate bodies are not psychologically equipped with the necessary empathetic imagination for non-psychopathic agency. One of the obvious ones is that “there is strength in numbers,” as they say, including, strength to act with impunity. Effective action at group survival trumps moral niceties. That, together with diffusion of agency, probably explain the tendency. Super-organisms, which include corporate bodies, may be less evolved because less vulnerable.

Certainly, in a corporate body, there is also strength to do good on a scale impossible for an individual. All the beneficial accomplishments of civilization driven by communities are testament to this… But our history of mass murder and mayhem can also be attributed to an insufficiency of group circumspection and constraint – even, especially, when the group self-construes its behavior as constructive. Groups may not only act with relative impunity, they are empowered to judge themselves with greater authority and less scrutiny. The forces to channel strength and maintain focus in a moral direction are weaker. “Prosocial” is not equivalent to “moral.”

Thus, rule-based moral theories exist to supplement more natural empathetic impulses when these are absent or insufficient. It is why consequentialist and deontological imperatives evolved. Our “better angels” are too easily distracted, the more as we act in concert with others. Both of these theories ask that moral identity be rooted in something more universal than the happenstance of an artificially or naturally constructed community3: whether the identity is, in the end, biological, sentience – or, as Kant emphasized, a cognitive singularity: the ability to identify with a rational ability that sorts us out from the rest of the natural world.

We do have "better angels," right?
The Eighteenth Century Scottish School of “moral sense” theorists thought so. Contemporary moral theories such as feminist Care Ethics follow in this tradition, as do communitarian and Marxist theories. These view human nature as, at least where the impulse is not oppressed, predisposed to benevolence. People, left to their own devises, care about each other. We are social beings, after all. Dog-eat-dog social conditions can’t fully explain our evolutionary success up to now. We have moved away from Hobbes’ state of nature where it is everyone for himself – and God against all.1 According to the moral sense theorists, we possess an innate measure of cooperation and trust, not just because it makes rational sense, but because we like and want to help each other – until, at least, we have reason not to. But fellow-feeling is the natural starting impulse. We would have become extinct long ago were this not true – so the moral sense theorists reason.

Moral sense theories, in contrast to the rule-based theories, give people the benefit of the doubt. Thus, Adam Smith, author of the Wealth of Nations, the “capitalist manifesto,” thought societies benefit by allowing individuals as much liberty as possible to exert their self-interested efforts as they see fit with the least possible interference from government or social pressure. Individuals will be more productive and generate more wealth this way precisely because of more potent self-interested motives. But – and many miss this critical assumption made by Smith and fellow moral sense theorists – because humans are fundamentally concerned for the well-being of others, they will, having amassed wealth, voluntarily wish to use it to benefit others. This is what motivates the amassing of wealth in the first place, Smith generously wanted to believe, because it facilitates being in a position of service to others. Poor people can’t help other poor people as much. Ergo, seek wealth.

The moral sense theorist need not deny we are inclined to look out for ourselves first. We must do that or we won’t be in the best position to help anyone else. (“Put on your oxygen mask first before you help others with theirs,” flight attendants remind us.) But moral sense theorists also believe that, ultimately, we want to and will help others, given the chance. We do both – look out for number one and for other numbers – because we want to and because it makes self-interested sense. We are not, by and large, psychopathic or stupid, not typically utterly devoid of empathy, nor so shortsighted that we don’t see advantages accruing to ourselves in seeking to help others.

Before characterizing the group form, we retreat to a bit of the history of the idea behind psychopathy.

Hume and the "sensible knave"
David Hume6 is probably the most interesting moral sense theorist because he conjured up and addressed a major challenge to his own version of moral sense theory: the “sensible knave.” He meant by this 18th Century phrase something close to what we today pathologize as a “psychopath.” “Sensible,” in his historical context, meant savvy. “Knave” still means an unsavory character. We will specify the concept this way, the psychopath is an affront to the moral sense vision because they

• lack genuine feelings of benevolence toward others, and
• are, at least, above, if not far above, average in intelligence.

Combine these traits in an individual or entity, and you get an agent who does not mean well by others, except incidentally, and is competent at disguising this deficiency. The more extreme cases are proportionately dangerous. These are expert manipulators, but do not get caught being such. In fact, being detected is an indication of failure at being a true psychopath. Competency is a mark of psychopathy. If you suspect someone is a jerk, they are not psychopaths, maybe wannabes, but a true psychopath leaves no sure evidence – at least none most may act upon. They, by definition, get away with moral criminality and almost always with the legal sort. They will be highly respected by most in the community for their accomplishments, and those few that don’t respect them will be themselves subject to suspicion precisely for not recognizing what most do. A psychopath will effectively isolate and incriminate their critics.

Also, because they lack natural feelings of benevolence, they also lack those to do with malice.7 They cannot experience feelings the capacity for which they don’t have. They are, in a sense, forces of nature, adiaphorous, i.e, amoral or immune to normal moral judgment, as perhaps, very young children and animals are.

The philosophical question is, however, “are psychopaths really bad or evil people?” Remember, they don’t naturally come equipped with the fellow-feeling which often hobbles the average person’s capacity for maleficence. They are born that way. We don’t ordinarily hold people responsible for characteristics they had no part in creating – for disability because they were born blind, for example. If some capacity for empathy is the basis for genuine moral behavior, and psychopaths lack it congenitally, they can’t be blamed for the lack or the consequences that follow from the lack. Moreover, being exceptionally competent, they may be productive people in many of the ways we value, extra-morally or amorally. Some of that competency may even be due to their ability to act with fewer scruples.

One could even view them as victims of exploitation by larger psychopathic corporate bodies that benefit from using them as effective means for their ends. If their facility for ruthlessly amassing wealth is seen as beneficial to the community, and they are tended and nurtured for that very reason, then we can say a morally hapless psychopath can be a victim, even an unknowing one. (Can one be an unknowing victim? From which perspective?)

These larger corporate bodies or superorganisms we might even characterize as super-psychopathic, since no constituent of the body escapes being used, not those with, or without, any set of feelings. Again, because these bodies are abstract entities and know nothing of feelings. These bodies exploit publicly scrutable behaviors, not private subjectivities where feelings reside.

The term “psychopath” retains negative connotations, though. Hume’s “sensible knave,” no matter how competent and rational, was still a knave. We will explore why...

Resources

• On Psychological egoism: “‘We’re All Selfish’ | Philosophy’s Darkest Idea,” Joe Folly’s addressees the philosophical implications.
• “Moral Sentimentalism,” Antti Kauppinen, SEP. Excellent overview of moral sense theory.
• “Are Corporations Like Psychopaths? Lessons On Moral Responsibility From Rio Tinto's Juukan Gorge Disaster,” Anne Schwenkenbecher, Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility, 2024; 0:1–12.
• “The Influence of Psychopaths: Why Humans Are Better Than We Think | Frankly 108,” Nate Hagens. “...Nate reflects on intraspecies predation (ours) and the impact psychopathic actors have on the mean and median of human behavior – in the past all the way up to our modern society. Human evolution was shaped by both cooperative, pro-social behavior and a competitive, predatory approach for survival – resulting in a balanced distribution for most of humanity’s existence.

“But, as agriculture, surplus, and other factors propelled more hierarchical social structure, aggregate human behavior and culture has slowly shifted over time to express more psychopathic traits. This thread of behavior continues to run through our modern society, where a relatively small (but disproportionately powerful) segment of the human population can pull societal behavior towards anti-social and individualistic values – even if the majority of people still inherently operate from a place of reciprocity.

“Why might our modern society provide a more fruitful breeding ground for psychopathy than past societies did? What do chickens and eggs have to do with psychopathy and the economic superorganism? And ultimately, what strategies could we begin to think about in order to shift mean and median human behavior back towards a more cooperative, prosocial middle?”

1. From Weil’s essay, “The Human Soul.”
2. For purposes of this discussion, we include any group with legal or moral power – even, as Weil suggests, a family. In short, a collective, that because of its size, exceeds the influence of an individual.
3. The excuse “too big to fail” is rooted here.
4. Naturally, as the moral sense theorists would have it; anthropogenically, as the virtue theorists would.
5. To paraphrase film maker Werner Herzog’s line from Stroszek (1977) and the title of his memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All. The line may be a tweaked version of “Each man for himself, there is no other (way)” which appears in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, (1386), or “Everyman for himselfe and God for us all” as it appears in, The proverbs of John Heywood. Being the “Proverbes” of that author printed 1546. Ed., with notes and introduction by Heywood, John, 1497?-1580?, (published in 1874).
6. The Earl of Shaftesbury and Frances Hutcheson preceded David Hume and Adam Smith in the moral sense school. Hume, with his characteristic empiricist rigor, introduced the “knave” monkey wrench into the theory, thus inadvertently setting the stage for others (e.g., Kant) to point out the theory’s inadequacy as a full explanation of the human moral landscape.
7. A malicious person, a sadist, is capable of being moved by other-regarding sentiments, the wrong, but still human, ones. A psychopath is not a sadist. He or she (more often he) does not hate you. You don’t count, that’s all.

Art by Abby