The moral responsibility of corporate executives for disasters

This paper examines whether or not senior corporate executives are morally responsible for disasters which result from corporate activities. The discussion is limited to the case in which the information needed to prevent the disaster is present within the corporation, but fails to reach senior executives. The failure of information to reach executives is usually a result of negative information blockage, a phenomenon caused by the differing roles of constraints and goals within corporations. Executives should be held professionally responsible not only for trying to prevent negative information blockage, but for succeeding. It is concluded that executives are professionally responsible for fulfilling their moral obligation to prevent disasters.John D. Biship has a Ph.D. in moral philosophy from Edinburgh University (1979), and an MBA from McMaster University. He has worked for several years for two multi-national computer corporations. In 1987 he read a paper on Greed; The Limits of Selfishness in a Free Enterprise Economy at Trent University.