Shareholders and organizational wrongdoing

In Organizations as Wrongdoers, Stephanie Collins maintains that shareholders are members, and parts, of organizations. As such, they stand to be implicated in organizational wrongdoing. In this paper, I suggest that there are alternative ways of making sense of how shareholders (sometimes) incur moral obligations in light of wrongdoing by companies in which they own shares. Such obligations can be seen as implications of shareholders having property rights in companies (despite legal protections of limited liability) and implications of plausible general principles about the morality of benefitting from injustice. Neither of these approaches require treating shareholders as being parts or members of companies. I then present some independent reasons for doubting whether shareholders really stand in membership or parthood relationships to firms in which they own shares. This depends on some reconstruction of more abstract claims Collins makes about parts “realizing a structure” of a whole, and how exactly the ideas of parthood and membership make for distinct (if coextensive) concepts. Finally, I argue that if shareholders must count as members of firms, then so too must some other agents that Collins wants to treat as nonmembers, such as self-employed contractors.