Corporate Executive, Disasters and Moral Responsibility What would be your main and supporting ...

John Bishop is mistaken in claiming that corporate executives can be held morally accountable for disasters they could not reasonably be expected to have prevented.
Bishop holds that, although professional responsibility is to be distinguished from moral responsibility, professional responsibilities may include moral responsibilities. Professional responsibility thus includes moral and non-moral elements. He states that a typical professional responsibility is to be successful in fulfilling the requirements of the job. Thus, a corporate executive has a professional responsibility to avoid disasters. A corporate executive's professional responsibility also includes the moral responsibility of seeking to avoid disasters. He concludes on this basis that, even in cases where a corporate executive could not reasonably be expected to have prevented a disaster, we are justified in holding the executive accountable for the disaster on moral grounds.
Larmer criticizes Bishop's claim on three grounds.

• Any decision to hold corporate executives accountable in such cases is based not on moral considerations, but on purely non-moral aspects of professional responsibility, i.e. any judgement that the executive has failed to meet her professional obligation is grounded not in the fact that she has failed to meet the requirements of morality, but in the non-moral insistence that executives be successful in what they undertake.


• Bishop assumes that because professional responsibility is often understood in a fashion that holds individuals accountable for events over which they had no control, such a concept of professional responsibility is morally acceptable. This ignores the issue of whether we should accept such a notion of professional responsibility. (Note: This criticism links to the following criticism.)


• The notion of professional responsibility is dependent upon the notion of moral responsibility. Professional responsibility ultimately derives from moral responsibility. Thus, any assignment of professional responsibility for a disaster implies that there is at least the possibility of ascribing moral responsibility for its occurrence. (Probably what drives the notion that we may hold professionals accountable without inquiring into moral responsibility is that in complex situations it is very difficult to judge accurately degrees of moral responsibility.