Responsibility of the Organization and Responsibility of its Individual Members : Approaches from Social Psychology, Philosophy of Law and Economics, and their Integration

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Attribution of responsibility to an individual social unit is usually discussed in terms of corrective justice, or retributive justice in the field of philosophy of law, but in essence it is a problem of distributive justice, or distribution of social bads among societal units. Therefore, to whom responsibility is attributed is the problem of the distribution of responsibility by a certain public standard on some social values, and in what manner members of an organization and the organization itself share responsibilities can be considered in terms of liberties, equality and efficiency that are all public value standards adopted by a society. Second, we conducted a mail questionnaire survey in order to investigate the public attitudes towards attribution of responsibility. Subjects are firms which experienced the enforcement of the anti-trust law. Major findings are as follows. i) Attribution of responsibility is diffuse, and subjects are not positive to attribution to an individual member in the organization. ii) If an individual member is penalized by the criminal law, subjects sympathize with him/her. iii) We cannot find that individual responsibilities overcome collective responsibilities even if an organization is large and bureaucratic. iv) In case that damages are serious to the organization, subjects tend to find an individual to whom responsibility is attributed. Third, we investigate responsibilities of attribution in terms of economic analysis of law. By economics of transaction cost and principal-agency approach, we analyze how an organization as such and its individual members bear responsibilities in case that an organization deviates from the law and the deviance brings about losses and damages. The conclusion depends on some variables. The examples of the variables are as follows. i) To what extent information about the organization is published. ii) To what extent a member adopt opportunistic behavior in relation to the organization.