alt Hacker NewsA thing can have limited agency and the ability to act, but still not consider morality as an input guiding those actions. An autonomous robot, or a wind-up toy, for examples.
A thing can have limited agency and the ability to act, but still not consider morality as an input guiding those actions. An autonomous robot, or a wind-up toy, for examples.
I'm not sure that I'd consider a robot (which I'm not sure can actually be autonomous) or a wind-up toy as actually possessing any form of agency, per se -- these are things under the control of some person or persons, who are responsible for its action, and whose intentions are the only ones applicable to its behavior.
In the case of a "company", I wouldn't even necessarily call it a thing per se, as much as I'd regard it as a kind of reificiation, a shorthand used to refer to a pattern of human activity as by a single name for the sake of convenience. It may be that the actual people involved, for whom the "company" is merely an organizational model they're using to coordinate their activities, often have motivations and intentions that they allow to supercede their moral consciences, but that's still on them.
Attributing either blame for malice or credit for productive results to the organizational model itself, as though it itself possessed agency, seems to be a very fundamental error.