2. BARCLAYS’ BUSINESS PRACTICES

It will be useful to develop a more detailed example of a situation in which a business organisation’s culture is invoked in morally charged criticism of that business’ activity. The example I focus on is set out in Anthony Salz’s review of “Barclays’ Business Practices” in which he criticises that organisation’s culture for becoming “too focused on profits and bonuses rather than the interests of customers” (The BBC 2013c). As far as the outcomes of this culture are concerned, the Salz report focuses particularly on the LIBOR fixing scandal^{Footnote 1}; however, it also links it with other bad outcomes, one of which is the payment protection insurance (PPI) mis-selling scandal, in which Barclays was also heavily implicated. PPI policies are designed to cover loan repayments if customers lose their income for a period; however, as Salz notes, a number of concerns about how they were sold led to accusations of mis-selling. For example: high pressure sales tactics; legal exclusions which made it hard to claim against policies; sales to people who would be excluded from claiming; sales to people with no income to protect; and ‘opt out’ clauses which meant some customers did not know they were purchasing insurance (Salz Reference Salz2013, §6.16). Just as with the LIBOR scandal, Salz blames a malign ‘culture’ that prioritised profits and bonuses over customer interests for the mis-selling. However, he also sets out how the behaviour and practices of groups and individuals within Barclays contributed to this same outcome. Information provided to senior management as early as 1996 showed how profitable PPI had become, and also how the likelihood of mid-term regulation and investigation by the Office of Fair Trading threatened both profit and reputational risk (Salz Reference Salz2013, §6.19). Moreover, in 2005 “[t]he Group Executive Committee noted that there were potential concerns relating to the fairness of single premium policies, policies sold where customers could not make claims and sales practices that were ‘not customer friendly’ or ‘high pressure’” (Salz Reference Salz2013, §6.20). Given this awareness, and their failure to act on mis-selling worries, senior management provided at least an implicit endorsement of the nature of the PPI product that was being sold, and the techniques employed to sell it.

The operational practices that resulted in PPI mis-selling ran from the top to the bottom of the organisation. Indeed, it was front line sales staff that actively engaged in some of the most obvious behaviours: “[h]igh-pressure sales tactics such as giving borrowers the impression that they had to buy PPI to get a loan [...]; the sale of PPI policies to customers who were self-employed and not eligible to claim; the sale of policies to people with no income to protect [...]” (Salz Reference Salz2013, §6.16). By engaging in these behaviours front line staff, and the management that employed and directed them, prioritised profits and bonuses over customer interests. Indeed, it was not only operational staff, but also staff in core support roles that were implicated in these practices—legal experts and others who designed the products (for example, to exclude back pain and stress, which are common causes of absence from work, as allowable bases for claims); HR professionals who oversaw the incentivisation contracts; and those working in finance functions to whom it was clear how profitable PPI was^{Footnote 2}. What the analysis of the Salz Review illustrates is that the story of PPI mis-selling at Barclays that focuses moral criticism on a bad culture can be retold in a way that focuses that criticism on the practices and behaviours of groups of individuals. The questions of how the two stories and the criticisms that ensue relate to each other, and the implications for the moral responsibility borne by the individuals in question, are the subject of the following investigation.

3. ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE

There are different ways in which the term ‘culture’ is used, and so it is to be expected that there will be a variety of different ways of formalising exactly what is meant by it. Each of these may well be correct within its particular terms of reference, but to be clear, the conception that I employ here is specifically intended as a theoretical development of the idea that is being used in the kinds of moral claims I have outlined. The two disciplines that have had most to say about the notion of ‘culture’ are sociology and anthropology, with sociologists taking the functional view that organisations have cultures, while for anthropologists they are cultures (Cameron and Quinn Reference Cameron and Quinn2011, 18; Sinclair, Reference Sinclair1993, 63-64). It is the sociological view that has come to dominate thinking about culture and this results in a conception that “refers to the taken-for-granted values, underlying assumptions, expectations, and definitions that characterise organisations and their members” (Cameron and Quinn Reference Cameron and Quinn2011, 18).

The notion of ‘culture’ at work in such sociological analyses is quite different from that employed in the morally motivated criticisms of organisations with which I started. Sociological conceptions of culture are typically interested in the instrumental values according to which organisation members coordinate their activity and through which they attempt to achieve their goals. Morally motivated criticisms of organisations on the basis of their culture, however, are concerned with the intrinsic values that underpin the goals themselves: in Barclays’ case it is criticised for having as its goal the maximisation of profits and bonuses to the exclusion of other goals, in particular customer interests. Accordingly, this conception of culture as the intrinsic values that are shared by organisation members and underpin organisational goals is the one that I will employ in the following analysis, and that is important when it comes to moral assessment. It is, of course, a further question as to which goals a business organisation may legitimately identify as intrinsically valuable. It is also a further question as to what is meant by “the sharing of intrinsic, goal oriented values by organisation members”, and what conclusions regarding moral responsibility follow as a result. It is to these questions that I now turn.

4. ORGANISATIONAL RESPONSIBILITY

At the heart of the traditional analysis of moral responsibility in the context of organisations is the notion of joint action. This is the idea that individuals in organisations combine their activities together in certain ways to create actions that (at least in some cases) are morally different from those created by individuals acting outside the organisational context. From the starting point of a certain understanding of joint action, further questions emerge. Who or what is doing the acting? And what further features must an action have in order for it to be something that might generate moral responsibility? The first question is often characterised as pitting ‘individualists’ who hold that only individual human beings can act, against ‘collectivists’ who argue that organisations or other collective entities can be the irreducible authors of their own actions.

The analysis of moral responsibility in business organisations that I offer here, and that starts with the moral assessment of an organisation’s culture, is therefore a novel one and can be distinguished from these ongoing debates in two main ways. Firstly, it is not based in an account of the joint action of organisation members. Rather, it is based in an account of the values that those members share. Joint action is not synonymous with the existence of shared values, nor does it necessarily follow from or imply such values. Of course, where members of an organisation share a set of values it is possible, perhaps likely, that they will engage in joint action in its pursuit. However, moral criticism of an organisation on the basis of its culture does not presuppose such joint action. My account, therefore, is intended to offer reasons for ascribing moral responsibility in business organisations that run parallel to, and are compatible with, reasons derived from the analysis of joint action. Secondly, the focus of the current investigation is squarely on how individuals may bear moral responsibility for participating in organisational cultures, and the outcomes that result. That is, it is interested in what obligations individuals have to participate, or not to participate, in certain value sharing activity, and how they may be held accountable as a result. Even collectivists, who think that organisations can exist as distinct entities that are morally responsible for things in their own right do not deny that the individuals that populate those organisations are also moral agents themselves who may be held morally responsible for the way they participate in organisational activity^{Footnote 3}.

The account I offer is thus put into context as distinct from, but compatible with, joint action accounts of organisational responsibility. In this way, the picture I endorse is one that is pluralistic. This point can be developed further both in explanatory and normative terms. To be clear, I am not arguing that organisational culture based in the value-sharing activity of organisation members is the only or even the most important factor in determining organisational outcomes. I am only claiming that it is a significant factor, and one that requires analysis in its own right; it will, therefore, form just part of a comprehensive analysis of such outcomes. On the normative side, I am not claiming that it is only through an analysis of corporate culture that responsibility for corporate actions should be ascribed. As noted above, a joint action account will be complementary to the account I offer. There may, in addition, be further ways in which responsibility can be justifiably ascribed in organisations—for example, consequentialist considerations may ground the claim that organisation leaders bear responsibility just by virtue of their positions and power in the corporate hierarchy—and I have no objection in principle to a broader pluralistic account of responsibility that incorporates all of these. However, each must be justified in its own right, and I will not venture into such investigations here.

5. WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR A GROUP TO SHARE VALUES?

A good place to start an investigation of the value sharing that underpins organisational culture is with an analysis of what it means to share values. One such analysis is offered by Margaret Gilbert (Gilbert Reference Gilbert2005). Adopting Gilbert’s account of ‘value’^{Footnote 4}, the notion of shared value is of a group of people together believing that a thing or things have value. This idea may be cashed out in a number of ways, and Gilbert identifies three such ways. I focus on one of these, which Gilbert terms the “plural subject account” (Gilbert Reference Gilbert2005, 27). I will shortly argue that this is the most relevant form of value sharing in the kinds of business organisation with which I am concerned.

To explain how values are shared in this way, Gilbert draws on her account of joint commitment that she has developed in depth elsewhere^{Footnote 5}. When group members enter into a joint commitment to share certain values they are doing more than simply making it common knowledge that they each happen to endorse the same values; such a commitment occurs when several individuals make a decision together. Joint commitments are significantly different from individual commitments. Each party is committed to acting in line with it until it is rescinded, but no one party can rescind a joint commitment unilaterally—they must again decide to do this together. Importantly, Gilbert argues that the existence of a joint commitment implies nothing about the individual commitments of those who participate in it. So, in the case at hand, a group of individuals may engage in a joint commitment to value certain things, but this does not mean that they each individually value those things^{Footnote 6}. In participating in a joint commitment, each party is required to act in certain ways. The implications of this, in the case of a joint commitment to value, Gilbert spells out as follows:

It is precisely because each individual has entered into a commitment with the others that each has an obligation to all of the others to behave in certain ways. This way of sharing values, it turns out, is particularly relevant in large business organisations.

6. SHARED VALUES AND TACIT COMMITMENT IN BUSINESS ORGANISATIONS

Business organisations are typically characterised by habitual courses of action in which their members partake, which are often identified using the language of ‘practices’ and ‘behaviours’^{Footnote 7}. Earlier, I set out how in the case of Barclays the practices and behaviours of different groups within the organisation all contributed to the mis-selling of payment protection insurance to customers. Engaging in such practices and behaviours can lead to value sharing that underpins culture (Sagiv and Schwartz Reference Sagiv and Schwartz2007); in particular, it is through practices and behaviours that joint commitments are established within business organisations to value certain things, and so value sharing is undertaken on the plural subject model described above. These habitual ways of acting often predictably promote certain things as valuable and other things as less valuable. This is not to say that all the participants in these ways of acting personally value the things that they promote—they may have other reasons for acting in these ways^{Footnote 8}. Rather, by acting habitually in ways that promote certain things as valuable, organisation members are signalling their willingness to join with other organisation members to act consistently as if they all, together, believed those things to be valuable^{Footnote 9}. For example, in the case of Barclays, many individuals drawn from across the organisation all acted as if the generation of profits was more important than customer interests. Practices and behaviours therefore provide a mechanism by which joint commitments to value may be formed. Indeed, in Gilbert’s view a joint commitment to value is formed when all members of a group express their readiness to enter into the commitment and also become aware that all other members similarly express their readiness (Gilbert Reference Gilbert2008, 138).

Participating habitually in value-laden practices and behaviours and seeing that others do the same, I maintain, fulfil these criteria in the case of members of business organisations^{Footnote 10}. To support this conclusion, however, more must be said with respect to the way in which engaging in such activities constitutes entry into a genuine commitment. In particular it might be noted that, when individuals participate in practices and behaviours within a business organisation it is very often because these activities conform with strong expectations within that organisation; this is a way of acting that is, therefore, adopted unreflectively simply as a way of ‘fitting in’. Can conforming behaviour of this kind really be characterised as constituting the kind of activity by which someone enters into a normatively binding commitment with others? Does such a person know or acknowledge (in the right kind of way) that her actions will have this effect?^{Footnote 11}

The first step to answering both these questions is to highlight that the idea that people may enter into normatively significant commitments without explicitly doing so is not a new one. The idea that implicit or tacit commitments can be normatively binding is one which has a long history in attempts to justify obligations owed by members of a political community, and has its origins in the thought of Hobbes and Locke. Indeed, in one of the most fully developed accounts of ethical obligation in business offered in recent years, Donaldson and Dunfee (Reference Donaldson and Dunfee1999: 161-163) argue that the norms governing particular business communities are “obligatory based upon implicit understandings among the members of the group or community” and, in line with the argument I am advancing here, that “[n]orms become ethically obligatory on the basis of the consent of the majority of community members, as reflected in supportive attitudes and behaviours.” My aim here is, admittedly, different from that of Donaldson and Dunfee, but in a sense is more modest. I am not appealing to the idea of implicit commitments derived from certain practices and behaviours in order to ground ethical norms that are binding on an entire community. Rather, my claim is just that those who engage in such activities enter into commitments of a minimally normative kind^{Footnote 12} with others who do the same.

Nonetheless, any appeal to implicit agreements as the basis for grounding normative commitments must address some significant challenges. David Hume challenged the claim that tacit consent may be used to ground the obligations of members of a political community, for “such an implied consent,” he says, “can only have a place, where a man imagines, that the matter depends on his choice” (Hume Reference Hume and MacIntyre1965). Hume, however, goes on to argue that the necessary choice does not exist with respect to membership in political societies, illustrating this claim with a famous analogy: “We may as well assert, that a man, by remaining in a vessel, freely consents to the dominion of the master; though he was carried on board while asleep, and must leap into the ocean, and perish, the moment he leaves her” (Hume Reference Hume and MacIntyre1965).

Hume’s challenge may be read in at least two ways (Christiano Reference Christiano and Zalta2004). The first questions whether there is sufficient voluntariness in the action or inaction to ground the claim that it can constitute consent for anything. In the case at hand, that of business organisations, voluntariness is not such a great worry. Indeed, Hume himself accepts that, in the case of political society, “the truest tacit consent of this kind, that is ever observed, is when a foreigner settles in any country, and is beforehand acquainted with the prince, and government, and laws, to which he must submit” (Hume Reference Hume and MacIntyre1965). The kind of voluntariness at work in such cases of migration is similar to that at work when a person decides to join a business organisation. It may be questioned whether the kind of comprehensive knowledge of the organisation that Hume suggests is necessary for tacit consent is available to people considering whether to take a new job. However, two related considerations help to ease the worry that such knowledge is really necessary. Just as it is possible for a person to join a business organisation, it is also possible for her to leave it, were it to become clear that she had (by joining that organisation) committed herself to values that she did not want to endorse. And even if exit would then be very costly for her, it is not generally the case that coercive reasons of this kind negate voluntariness. At most, we might accept that she has an excuse for voluntarily remaining in the organisation or for not acting in line with the commitments thereby entered into. I discuss such excuses in §11.

The second way to read Hume’s challenge is not as focusing on a lack of voluntariness in the actions that imply consent, but rather questioning whether such consent is implied at all—at least, whether consent is implied to the commitments as described. This challenge is particularly strong when it appears that the putative party to the commitment does not have in mind at all that he is making such a commitment, and perhaps, even when directly questioned, would deny that this is the case. Take again the case of Barclays. Recall that the practices attributed to front line sales staff, as set out in the Salz report, focused around the central importance of selling PPI insurance to customers, and accepted very few constraints on the pursuit of that aim, even in cases where the customer was unaware he was buying such insurance or would be unable to claim against the policy. The Salz report characterised these practices as prioritising Barclays’ profits over customer interests, and I have employed this characterisation in order to argue that, by engaging in such practices, front line sales staff exhibited their readiness to jointly commit with other organisation members to pursue the value of corporate profits over that of customer interests. However, for any given member of the front line team, we may imagine that person never having considered explicitly whether the practices in which he is engaged are value-laden or which values they exhibit, much less that he recognises himself to be exhibiting a willingness to jointly commit to pursuing those values. Moreover, we may imagine that person denying, when explicitly questioned, that any of these things are the case.

The issue, it would appear, is that there is a lack of conscious awareness on the part of the organisation member that the activities in which he is engaged could be construed as indicating his tacit consent to any set of values, and so such consent is not, in fact, given. However, this objection moves too fast. To see this, start by considering precisely what it is he must be aware of for tacit consent to be plausible. It is not the precise values that are the subject of the commitment into which he is entering, since it is possible to consent to participate in such a commitment even when its exact content is unknown. It is true that an inability to discover this content may, under certain circumstances, undermine an individual’s culpability for the consequences that flow from the commitment of which he is a part, but this is a distinct issue from the question of whether he can enter the commitment in the first place^{Footnote 13}. Rather, all that the organisation member needs to know is that by participating in organisational practices and behaviours he is committing himself to pursue, with other members, the goals and values of that organisation, and this—I maintain—is something of which he is in fact aware, as the following considerations illustrate.

People join business organisations to gain benefits from them. These benefits include financial rewards, and often also the social benefits of being part of a community and having a sense of value and shared purpose. All of these benefits, which are typical of business organisations in modern capitalist economies, are dependent on the coordination and focusing of collective activity towards the achievement of a relatively narrow set of goals, together with the imposition of various rules and processes that determine how those goals are to be achieved. That is to say, the reason that people join business organisations is fundamentally because in doing so they are able to commit themselves to pursuing certain values with others in the organisation through ongoing practices and behaviours that promote those values. This is not to suggest that engaging in commitments to pursue certain values is the motivation that most people have for joining business organisations; rather that the things that do motivate people—salary, benefits, etc.—are only possible because such organisations work by focusing the efforts of all members on clearly defined goals achieved through standardised practices and behaviours. This is the nature of business organisations, a nature, which is common across all modern capitalist economies, and something of which employees and prospective employees are consciously aware.

To reiterate: business organisations are driven by goals and values, and this is something of which there is widespread conscious awareness. Indeed, many of the processes embedded in these organisations are explicitly designed to achieve and sustain such awareness^{Footnote 14}. This being the case, an employee or prospective employee will be aware that, by engaging in the core practices and behaviours of a business organisation, she will be construed as tacitly consenting to the joint pursuit of those values. Moreover, and in support of this point, if the question was put to the employee in these slightly rephrased terms, it is much harder to imagine her denying that she has exhibited a willingness to engage in this joint enterprise.

As noted above, a person may be consciously aware that she is consenting to promote certain values without having a comprehensive understanding of exactly what those values are. This may, for example, be the case for relatively new employees who have not yet fully understood how the practices and behaviours in which they participate feed through to the achievement of corporate goals. It is quite clearly possible, however, to consent to the joint promotion of values without being fully aware, at the time, exactly what those values are, provided that it is known that such values do in fact exist and that their nature will be discovered in due course.

Finally, it is worth reiterating the central mechanism at work in the model I have described: that by participating in value laden practices and behaviours individuals express their willingness to enter into joint commitments to pursue those values with others who offer similar expressions in return. The emphasis here is on participation in the relevant practices and behaviours and not simply employment within an organisation. This ensures that the model I am advocating does not return implausible conclusions regarding, for example, auxiliary employees—such as security or catering staff—who are far removed from the central processes of the organisation and so cannot plausibly be construed as sharing values in the manner I have described. This clarifies the important point that it is not any employment that generates the morally relevant relations that underpin my account of moral responsibility, but only activity within an organisation that facilitates value-sharing of this kind.

7. THE STRENGTH AND BREADTH OF ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE

This explanation of how joint commitments to value, and hence culture, are created within business organisations through habitual courses of action supports the claim that they can—and do—exist. There is another challenge, however, which I must address if such commitments are to do meaningful work in grounding moral responsibility for corporate outcomes: even if they do exist, joint commitments to value must be strong enough to be action-guiding for their participants, and they must be broad enough to capture a significant proportion of organisation members in order genuinely to influence the outputs of that organisation. Further, it might look as though my description of corporate cultures, such as Barclays’, assumes that they do have these features, while not being sensitive to the diversities and complexities of organisational life.

I am happy to accept that my characterisation of the culture prevalent at Barclays as valuing profits and bonuses over customer interests is a simplified version of the reality on the ground, and that to suggest that the culture of so large and complex an organisation can be fully captured in so straightforward and monolithic a way is naive. However, the fact that a commentator as prominent as Antony Salz finds it meaningful to talk in these terms nonetheless suggests that there is something that speaks for such an account. Indeed, there are two lines of thought that support the claim that both the breadth and strength of the culture created by joint commitments to value can be sufficient to ground a meaningful account of responsibility for corporate outcomes.

My discussion of how joint commitments can be entered into implicitly on the basis of participation in value-laden practices and behaviours provides support to the idea that a culture may span an organisation that is both large and geographically diverse—that is, that organisational culture may be broad even in modern multinational organisations. One reason for scepticism regarding organisation-wide culture of this kind is that it is hard to imagine how different individuals doing different jobs on different continents could enter into genuine commitments with each other to promote certain values. But a mechanism that requires only that each has visibility of the way that business activity is undertaken in the other location, while knowing that this is the case, makes the suggestion that such a connection can be made much more plausible. Indeed, in developing her account of joint commitments, Gilbert emphasises how it is possible that they can be formed in this way, even if the parties do not know each other or even, in large communities, know of each other (Gilbert Reference Gilbert2008, 174-179).

However, I do not want to push the case for organisation-wide cultures too hard, particularly in the cases of large, multinational corporations. In some organisations it will still be the case that cultures are relatively localised. In addition, there are many employees that it is implausible to suppose participate in corporate culture in a way that makes them responsible for the actions and outcomes of others that have been influenced by that culture—support staff that are far removed from the central operations of the business, such as cleaning and catering staff, for example. Nonetheless, understanding the connections of corporate culture in these cases can still be vital to an account of responsibility in those organisations. Strong, local cultures will be very important in explaining corporate outcomes and ascribing responsibility for them, even if it is just members of a smaller, more localised group that are implicated.

Finally, it is worth noting that, even if corporate culture is relatively weak, this does not mean that it is unimportant to an account of corporate outcomes and responsibility for those outcomes. As long as culture has some impact then it is a part of any comprehensive treatment of these questions. I am not claiming that it is always, or even often, the most important contributing factor; only that it is one that is significant and neglected in standard accounts of corporate responsibility.

8. CAUSAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE OUTCOMES OF CORPORATE CULTURE

This account of how values are typically shared within business organisations is the first step towards establishing the implications of such value sharing—and the culture so created—for the responsibility organisation members bear for organisational outcomes. Ultimately, it is the moral responsibility of organisation members in which I am interested. The language of moral responsibility is complex, but since these complexities have been well rehearsed elsewhere, I will not repeat them all here^{Footnote 15}. The particular notion that is relevant to this discussion is that which identifies the moral responsibility that individuals bear for events that have happened in the past; this has been called “retrospective” (Duff Reference Duff1998) or “outcome” (Vincent Reference Vincent, Vincent, van de Poel and van den Hoven2011) responsibility. Exactly what such responsibility amounts to in practice will depend to an extent on the context, but typically it will mean that the subject is at least a potential recipient of praise or blame^{Footnote 16}. Moral responsibility of this kind should be distinguished from the question of whether an individual is liable to punishment or to incur any costs as a result of her actions, although the two are connected. While I do not focus on the question of liability, I mention later some of the potential implications of my view in this respect. Moral responsibility for events in the past should also not be confused with causal responsibility for those events, which simply picks out a causal relationship between the thing that is responsible, and that which it is responsible for. As such, causal responsibility has no moral content. However, causal responsibility is a necessary condition for moral responsibility, and so it is important for the current investigation to show how a member of a business organisation can be causally responsible for organisational outcomes simply by participating in that organisation’s culture through value sharing. To make this question clearer: can an individual contribute causally to the actions of others, and the outcomes that occur as a result of those actions, simply by being a joint participant in the same culture?

The answer to this question, I suggest, is that he can. This causal connection can be demonstrated by showing how the relationship that is established by sharing a culture gives each member reasons to promote the shared values that are constitutive of that culture (and removes reasons not to), with the strength and nature of those reasons depending on exactly how the values are shared. The earlier discussion of the way in which values are shared in business organisations set out the nature of these reasons in some depth. Where values are shared according to the joint commitment account participants in the value sharing are provided with positive normative reasons for acting to promote the shared values, reasons based on the obligations flowing from that commitment^{Footnote 17}. Therefore, when any participant in a culture created by a joint commitment-to-value acts in line with those values, any other participant in that culture acquires a degree of causal responsibility for that action and the outcomes that arise. This is because each participant has contributed to the reasons that the actor has for acting in that way^{Footnote 18}.

However, despite this there remains a concern that the kind of causal relation described is not one that can be used to ground moral responsibility, particularly in large groups such as business organisations. In such organisations many people participate in the culture and so it looks like the contribution of any one of them is largely irrelevant to the outcomes that result. This challenge can be addressed, however, by noting that moral responsibility is possible not just in cases where an individual’s actions bear the causal relation of being “definitely essential” to an outcome, but also where they are “possibly essential” as well^{Footnote 19}. Moral assessment of an act is undertaken ex ante and so it is reasonable for an individual to be considered ‘on the hook’, morally speaking, for an outcome if it was possible at the time that she acted that her action could be causally essential to the bringing about of that outcome^{Footnote 20}. This treatment allows us to make sense of situations where we naturally want to assign moral responsibility to all contributors to an outcome even though, in fact, each of their contributions was individually unnecessary—for example, cases of over determination such as when many individuals all fatally shoot someone at the same time (Lepora and Goodin Reference Lepora and Goodin2013). It is this kind of relation that each participant in a corporate culture bears to the actions of others who are influenced by that culture, and the outcomes that result.

9. FROM CAUSAL RESPONSIBILITY TO MORAL RESPONSIBILITY: COMPLICITY

This relation between individuals in an organisation, that of “giving or contributing to reasons to act,” has the potential to ground not just the causal responsibility of one member for the actions of the others, but also moral responsibility as well. A natural way of capturing this relationship is in the language of ‘complicity.’ When agent A undertakes action O in pursuit of value V, then it is natural to say that agents B, C, and D are all complicit in that action if it is the case that all four participate in a culture together that promotes value V. ‘Complicity,’ however, is a morally loaded term, and this relation of complicity makes it possible, given certain conditions, that B, C, and D may be held at least partly morally responsible for action O and its outcomes. This conclusion is endorsed by Lepora and Goodin’s multifaceted treatment of the notion in which they distinguish a range of relations that are typically captured under the heading of ‘complicity’ (Lepora and Goodin Reference Lepora and Goodin2013). In Lepora and Goodin’s terms, the kind of case in which I am interested is one of ‘secondary wrongdoing,’ where an individual contributes causally to the actions of others without herself being a party to those actions (so making causal responsibility a necessary condition of complicity).

Secondary wrongdoing may itself be divided into different kinds, but the way that individuals influence others through participation in culture is best captured by what Lepora and Goodin call “complicity simpliciter.” This category is used to capture examples of complicity where the action “might induce or incentivise the wrongdoing [...] or encourage it [...] or make it easier to perform” (Lepora and Goodin Reference Lepora and Goodin2013, 42).

To justify this transition from causal to moral responsibility, however, it is necessary to show that the individual to be held responsible through complicity satisfies a number of additional conditions beyond simply being a causal factor in the actions of another.

10. MORAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE OUTCOMES OF CORPORATE CULTURE

Beyond being a causal factor in the actions of another, three additional conditions are typically taken to be necessary for an individual to acquire moral responsibility for those actions and their outcomes^{Footnote 21}:

1. i. The action of the third party to which an individual contributes must constitute wrongdoing (in saying this I am focusing on cases of moral responsibility for wrongdoing; of course, individuals may also be morally responsible for doing good as well );

2. ii. The individual must know (or be culpably negligent in not knowing) that she is contributing to wrongdoing^{Footnote 22};

3. iii. There must not be any further considerations to which she could appeal that would either justify or excuse her contribution.

Answers to the question of what constitutes wrongdoing in a business context have filled many pages in the business ethics literature and beyond, and I will not try to add substantively to these answers here. Notwithstanding such theoretical debate, it is at least clear that there is widespread agreement that in certain cases business activity has transgressed ethical limits—consider again reaction to Barclays’ role in the LIBOR rigging scandal, PPI mis-selling, and more recently in alleged manipulation of foreign exchange markets (Schafer and Marriage Reference Schafer and Marriage2014). To be clear, I am not, in this paper, trying to offer a comprehensive account of right action or good values in a business context. Equally, I am not trying to offer either a critique or endorsement of modes of economic organisation such as the capitalist system. These are huge questions beyond its scope. Rather, I am arguing that, given our current economic system and the role of corporations within it, it is relatively uncontroversial that some kinds of action are right and some wrong, and some values are good and some bad. The examples I give, particularly that of Barclays, are intended to illustrate the point. Moreover, this is a relevant position from which to assess the moral culpability of individuals, since it is from this perspective, within a pre-existing economic and legal system with many factors already taken as given, that they decide how to act.

Nonetheless, in order to be personally responsible for corporate wrongdoing on the account that I am offering, an individual must know that he is contributing to it; this is condition (ii), above. In the case at hand the contribution I am concerned with is that made through the incentivising effect of corporate culture. Of course, there will be situations in which it is unclear whether this condition is satisfied, either because it is genuinely hard to determine what the correct path of corporate action is, or because it is genuinely hard to establish a connection between an individual’s action and the actions that constitute corporate wrongdoing. I am not going to try to analyse such borderline cases, but rather to argue that there are many cases where it is both clear that certain activity constitutes corporate wrongdoing and that it is (or should be) clear to many of the individuals who participate in the enabling culture that they are contributing to that wrongdoing. As above, the case of Barclays provides a relatively uncontroversial example of wrongdoing. While some of the employees engaged in these activities at the time may have fooled themselves into thinking that such activity was acceptable, it is not plausible that the interests of customers who relied on the honesty of Barclays staff could be outweighed by the interests of Barclays in making more profit, or those staff in making more bonuses. Therefore Barclays employees either knew they were contributing to wrongdoing, or were culpably negligent in not knowing.

On my argument, any Barclays employee who contributed to the culture that prioritised profits and bonuses over customer interests is susceptible to a share of the moral responsibility for both the LIBOR fixing and the PPI mis-selling. But how could such individuals know that they were contributing to either of these activities? The answer here is that they could not know, ahead of time, that they were contributing to exactly these activities, unless they were directly involved in them. So, for example, the HR professional who designed the incentivisation contracts for PPI sales staff could be expected to predict the direct effects this action would have on the behaviour of those staff, but could not predict that the culture in which she was thereby participating would play a role in leading others in the organisation, well removed from her, to fix the LIBOR interest rate. Nonetheless, I am claiming that she bears some moral responsibility for both activities. The reason for this is that she does not need to know exactly which wrongdoing she will help bring about in order to know that she will help bring about wrongdoing of some kind. In cases such as this we can say that the individual has acted recklessly by engaging in activity that is highly likely to help bring about a wrong. Her complicity in that wrong is therefore reckless complicity ^{Footnote 23}. In encouraging others—through the mediating effects of culture—to promote profits and bonuses over customer interests, she can certainly know that she will contribute to behaviour that fits this description, and she can certainly know that in many cases, if not most, behaviour that fits this description will involve wrongdoing. It is therefore entirely legitimate for her to bear responsibility for whatever this behaviour happens to be. There is an element of uncertainty in the final determination of the actions and outcomes for which an individual may be held responsible in this way, but I do not take this to be a drawback of the account. Indeed, this acceptance of uncertainty seems built in to the kinds of moral judgments we make when we invoke corporate culture, such as those captured in the examples with which I began^{Footnote 24}.

It is worth emphasising the significance of these points, since it is on them that the distinctiveness and novelty of the account I am offering hangs. The HR professional who designed the incentivisation contracts for PPI sales staff thereby acquires a degree of personal moral responsibility for both the PPI mis-selling within Barclays, and also for the actions of those who manipulated the LIBOR interest rate, although this group of people was far removed in another part of the bank. On any standard account of moral responsibility within business organisations this conclusion would be implausible since the connection between the parties is too remote to ground the claim that the HR professional in any way participated in the wrongdoing. But, as I have argued, such direct participation in the wrong actions is not necessary. The relationship of value-sharing alone, entered into through taking actions which exemplify the relevant values—in this case designing incentivisation contracts in a certain way—is all that is required for complicity in the wrongdoing to be established and for individual moral responsibility to be shared.

11. EXCUSES, JUSTIFICATIONS, AND MORAL RESPONSIBILITY

The third condition that is typically taken to be necessary for moral responsibility is that there are no justifications or excuses to which the individual may appeal in her defence. To be clear, a justification allows that an act may be morally bad when considered narrowly, but offers reasons why, when a broader set of information is taken into account, it is morally acceptable; an excuse on the other hand does not dispute that the act in question is morally bad, but rather offers reasons why the perpetrator should not be the object of moral condemnation even so. This condition could, on first sight, appear to present a significant challenge to the claim that individuals in business organisations may bear responsibility for the wrongdoing of others on the basis of their contribution to organisational culture. This is because it may appear that, except in only the most outrageous cases of corrupt corporate culture, individuals in business organisations have justifications or excuses for participating in cultures that predictably risk facilitating wrongdoing.

This challenge gains force by imagining a single individual in a large business organisation, which has a strong and powerful cultural identity. Are we really to expect that individual to make a stand; to refuse to participate in the behaviours and practices expected of her? Or, on the other hand, is it not acceptable—morally acceptable—for that person to acquiesce to the dominant culture; to adapt and try to get along?^{Footnote 25} My response to this challenge has two parts. The first considers the question at the level of the culture itself. There is always the possibility, we might think, that whatever culture an organisation has, one of its members might engage in wrongdoing in an attempt to promote the values upon which it is based. In that sense participation in any corporate culture brings with it the risk that wrongdoing will be facilitated. This should not mean, however, that all cultures are therefore condemned as bad, or where wrongdoing is undertaken to promote the values of a culture that is not bad, other members should acquire moral responsibility for that wrong. In the terms set out here, participants in such cultures are morally justified in that activity, even in cases where some wrongdoing results.

This point, of course, leads onto the question of which cultures may be morally justified in this way, and which may not. This is closely related to the question of what constitutes wrongdoing in a business environment which I discussed above, and my response, here, is the same: a comprehensive account of what constitutes good and bad business values is well beyond the scope of this paper. However, this does not mean that we do not have a good sense of what an inappropriate culture would look like, particularly in the context of the pre-existing economic and legal systems in which corporations are created and run. To take financial institutions, of which Barclays is an example, it is implausible that a culture could be morally acceptable that did not place value on protecting the basic interests of the customers and clients of that institution. Moreover, that value should not be significantly outweighed by values promoting the interests of the institution or its employees, so that the former may be sacrificed in pursuance of the latter.

The second part of my response considers the case of the individual working in a morally unacceptable corporate culture. The challenge to my argument is often presented in terms that make the individual organisation member appear powerless with respect to the organisation and its culture and, moreover, resistance to that culture is portrayed as a rather extreme act of self-sacrifice. If this was always the case and a failure to acquiesce to corporate culture always (a) had no practical effect on the way that culture facilitates wrongdoing and (b) came at the cost of great personal disadvantage, then it would indeed seem hard to justify holding an organisation member morally responsible for that wrongdoing. However, this is not a very good representation either of the position people typically find themselves in with respect to business organisations, or the options that are open to them.

For a start this representation assumes that the decision to acquiesce to a corporate culture is being made from the perspective of someone who is already embedded in an organisation; however, people choose to join business organisations. In order to have a lot to lose, an individual must have invested significant personal energy in an organisation with a morally defective culture, and must also be generating significant personal rewards from doing so. This does not so much excuse him continuing to participate in that organisation, but rather makes his predicament even more morally problematic. To be charitable, we may assume that the nature of the organisation and the culture to which he is committing himself only becomes apparent to an organisation member once he has invested significantly in that organisation. Even in such a case one live option is simply to leave and find work elsewhere. While exit from a business organisation is certainly not costless, it is a more feasible option for most people than, for example, attempting to leave their political society, where conformance to a culture may, perhaps, be more excusable.

Even if we accept that someone has blamelessly committed himself to a morally defective corporate culture, and that it would be excessively costly for him to exit it, this does not mean that he does no wrong simply by acquiescing to all that it requires of him. It is still legitimate to ask what is morally required of him given that it has become clear, or at least should have become clear, that he is—or runs the risk of—facilitating the wrongdoing of others. At the very least, undertaking actions designed to improve practices and persuade other members that such changes should take place could be expected of him, while stopping short of anything that would seriously jeopardise his job. In the absence of any such mitigating action, it is hard to sustain the claim that simply following existing morally objectionable practices carries no moral responsibility^{Footnote 26}.

Despite all this, there will be cases where it is appropriate to exonerate the participant in the objectionable corporate culture, and these cases will be more or less common depending on the position we take on the issues outlined above—those that determine whether she joined the organisation blamelessly, could only exit for significant cost, and had done everything that could reasonably expected to mitigate the risk of facilitating wrongdoing. Nonetheless, she will still be participating in the objectionable culture. This action has not been rendered morally right by the circumstances described; rather the person concerned has been excused from bearing moral responsibility for engaging in a wrong act. Because of this, it may be possible to draw further conclusions regarding that person, and how we treat her. For example, while she may not be blameworthy, her role in facilitating the wrongdoing might make her liable to bear some of its costs, if such costs must be imposed on people beyond those who are blameworthy (for example, as in the costs incurred as a result of PPI mis-selling). This possibility, however, requires further justification, and I will not pursue it here.