Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Books

Why Blame the Organization? by Raymond Pfeiffer

Michael Boylan enjoys Raymond Pfeiffer’s book on collective responsibility.

The recent difficulties of corporations such as Enron, ImClone, WorldCom, Tyco and Adelphia (among others) show just how topical the debate on collective responsibility has become. Moreover, it is clear that questions of collective responsibility are yet to be adequately resolved. For this reason, books like Professor Pfeiffer’s are important in furthering our attempts to clarify these increasingly complex issues, particularly in an environment of corporate globalization.

Pfeiffer begins with the thesis that, when at all possible, we should opt for blaming individuals rather than corporations. This is called the ‘thesis of individual sufficiency’ (p.

…