Relationships, Authority, and Reasons: A Second-Personal Account of Corporate Moral Agency

We present a second-personal account of corporate moral agency. This approach is in contrast to the first-personal approach adopted in much of the existing literature, which concentrates on the corporation’s ability to identify moral reasons for itself. Our account treats relationships and communications as the fundamental building blocks of moral agency. The second-personal account rests on a framework developed by Darwall. Its central requirement is that corporations be capable of recognizing the authority relations that they have with other moral agents. We discuss the relevance of corporate affect, corporate communications, and corporate culture to the second-personal account. The second-personal account yields a new way to specify first-personal criteria for moral agency, and it generates fresh insights into the reasons those criteria matter. In addition, a second-personal analysis implies that moral agency is partly a matter of policy, and it provides a fresh perspective on corporate punishment.

Corporate Criminal Law Unbounded

In matters of lawmaking, ascription of fault, and imposition of punishment, corporate prosecution diverges from traditional understandings of what criminal law is, how it should be made, and how it should be implemented. Contemporary criminal law scholarship seeks to restrain the government’s enforcement and lawmaking powers in regard to punishment. At the same time, corporate crime scholarship presses in the opposite direction, urging government prosecutors to punish more often, more severely and more creatively. This divergence merits scrutiny and a measured reconsideration of corporate criminal law’s reform. If the specter of unrestrained prosecutorial discretion provides sufficient reason for criminal law’s contraction and reform, presumably those reform principles ought to apply as well to the world of corporate crime, where limiting principles are almost no-where to be found.This chapter recites criminal law’s fundamental tenets (aspirational as they may be) and highlights the particular ways in which corporate punishment diverges from and ultimately ignores them. It considers the normative implications of an “unbound” corporate criminal law and concludes by arguing for legislative reforms that would not only improve corporate criminal law’s adherence to the legality principle, but also impose needed restraints on the prosecutors who have been tasked with investigating, sanctioning and effectively regulating corporate misconduct.

The Conventional Problem with Corporate Sentencing (and One Unconventional Solution)

A recent wave of expressive accounts of corporate criminal law operate on the promise that corporate punishment can express a unique form of condemnation not capturable through civil enforcement. Unfortunately, the realities of corporate sentencing have thus far failed to make good on this expressive promise. Viewed in light of existing conventions that imbue meaning into our practices of punishment, corporate sentences rarely impose hard treatment in a manner or degree that these conventions seem to require. Accordingly, standard corporate sanctions turn out to be ill-suited to deliver—and, often, will likely undermine—the stigmatic punch upon which expressive defenses of corporate criminal law depend. A common response to this conventional problem with corporate sentencing has been to propose more, and harsher, corporate punishments. However, this approach overlooks the extent to which corporate punishment derives its stigmatic force from preexisting norms and conventions concerning individual punishment. If trying to improve corporate punishment, then, expressivists might instead seek either to leverage or to dismantle the underlying conventions that give existing sanctions meaning. An example of the former strategy would be to revitalize long-neglected proposals for corporate shaming by adopting a criminal convention currently absent from the corporate space—namely, the pervasive, stigmatic application of epithets like “thief” or “felon.” An example of the latter would be to join criminal justice reformers in targeting conventions that, in recent decades, have enabled increasingly draconian sentencing practices. On this view, dissolving corporate sentencing’s conventional problem may represent a further, incidental benefit of systemic criminal justice reform.

Nexus of Students Behaviors and Teachers Attitudes With Corporal Punishment in Peshawar Schools

Throughout the world corporal punishment is seen as initial matter. In order to ensure discipline, institutes used corporal punishment as a tool. This study is undertaken in the background of emerging nations particularly Pakistan. It has been observed that on account of corporate punishment in Pakistan mostly students quit educational institutes. The current study discovers the occasion on teacher’s perception regarding corporal punishment across various chosen institutes of KPK. This study targets several well educational institutes of Peshawar, utilizing a survey questionnaire as the data collection instrument. The results show that corporal punishment, as a tool leaves negative indelible imprints on the minds of students and needs to be discouraged. Several methods alternative to corporal punishment for controlling student’s behavior are unknown to teacher. Further, this study exhumes alternative methods that helps teacher in controlling students’ behavior in the schools.

Equity fines for corporate crime: Why they should be back on the legislative agenda

Corporate crime causes significant social and environmental harm and its sentencing is frequently ineffective due to the ability of corporations to pass-on monetary fines to stakeholders such as workers and consumers. This article investigates the notion of equity fines or share dilution as an alternative corporate punishment that avoids the pitfalls of conventional monetary fines while acting as a significant deterrent to corporate offending. It does so by responding to the last official Australian critique of this punishment, in light of a 2010 attempt by the Scottish legislature to implement equity fines in that jurisdiction.

The EU's Fight Against Corporate Financial Crime: State of Affairs and Future Potential

Considering the European Union's efforts to tackle various forms of financial crime more effectively, especially since the financial crisis of 2008, one would expect that the Union has also been strengthening its grip on national law with respect to corporate financial crime. Instead, this Article finds that the EU approach to corporate financial crime has actually not evolved that much over the past two decades. Moreover, this Article demonstrates that EU law still fails to sufficiently take into account the specific features of corporate entities (as opposed to individuals), as well as to fully exploit the potential strengths of a criminal law approach, as opposed to an administrative or civil law approach. In the author's view, the EU should more carefully consider the objectives and strengths of different kinds of enforcement mechanisms and adopt a more coherent approach, particularly with respect to corporations. Furthermore, when it comes to corporate punishment, the EU seemingly lacks ambition and creativity. EU legal instruments focus strongly on fines while insufficiently exploring other, potentially more adequate sanctions to achieve certain punishment goals. Ultimately, this may undermine the effectiveness of the EU's fight against corporate financial crime.

Aquinas on Physical Impairment: Human Nature and Original Sin

Medieval accounts of disability by and large (though not universally) defend what is now labeled the “religio-moral” construction of disability: seeing an individual's disability as a punishment for that individual's sin.1 Unsurprisingly, such models are not much in favor among contemporary disability theorists for a number of reasons, among which we might include the unacceptable thought that an individual with disabilities somehow deserves those disabilities. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) accepts some version of this theory, but one rather different from the standard one (or at least, from what is now generally understood as the religio-moral model). Aquinas sees physical impairments—things that constitute a subclass of what he labels “bodily defects”—fundamentally as punishments for original sin. He is (generally) very careful to distance his account of defects from notions of individual punishment. (When he is not, it is because of pressure from Scriptural sources—though as we shall see below he believes that by and large the Bible, too, explicitly rejects the view that disability could be a punishment for individual sin.) So whatever we think of punishment models more generally, Aquinas's certainly removes one of the least appealing aspects of such models as typically understood. And Aquinas is careful, too, to associate many features of the human condition—not just those identified as a certain subclass of defects – with corporate punishment for original sin. To this extent, his account of physical impairments tends to normalize such impairments, and to de-emphasize their distance from other features of post-lapsarian human existence. While I doubt that what Aquinas says about bodily defects would satisfy many contemporary disability theorists, it seems to me that parts of his accout—and not least this normalization strategy—may appeal to more theologically-inflected accounts of the human condition.