Personhood

The criteria we use to define a person are not irrelevant, and the point where we set the frontier of personhood is of crucial importance in determining the limits of interactions with others. This frontier determines whether our interactions are moral or merely technical. In a nutshell, harming someone else is wrongful only within the moral sphere. Outside that sphere, harm only raises technical issues regarding how we should cope with it. The purpose of this chapter is neither to defend a specific criterion and argue that a group should belong while another should not, nor to give an exhaustive view of all possible criteria and arguments for and against. Instead, it aims to showcase the most salient issues in business, with the aim of making the reader aware of the diversity of criteria and arguments in defining the moral agent. This chapter starts from the gravitation point in moral agency theory (the person) and explores the limits of different propositions for expanding this core category. The second section introduces debate over the issue of moral agency in business: the moral status of the corporation. The third section expands on this to analyze the moral status of the stakeholders who gravitate around the corporation.