The Facelessness of Evil: Towards a Rationale for Corporate Criminal Liability

Abstract

Why do we assign ethical intentions or mechanisms to certain businesses, which by design do not possess intentionality in the same way as actual businesspeople do? Are these merely opportunistic shortcuts from the judges or the law, in search of sizeable assets to implement reparation or levy a fine? On the contrary, the article will attempt to describe how the unethical aspect of some decisions could not be satisfactorily explained in terms of the intentions of individuals, but rather as being the products of the value system, or corporate culture, proper to the legal entity itself notably because the sense of individual responsibility is diluted and scruples assuaged. Therefore, not only can businesses in themselves can be assessed in terms of ethics, but the reality of a literally faceless business is congruent to institutionalised wrongdoing.