‘The Government Should Be Ashamed’: On the Possibility of Organisations’ Emotional Duties
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321717739553 |
| Date | 01 November 2018 |
| Author | Stephanie Collins |
| Published date | 01 November 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321717739553
Political Studies
2018, Vol. 66(4) 813 –829
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321717739553
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‘The Government Should Be
Ashamed’: On the Possibility
of Organisations’ Emotional
Duties
Stephanie Collins
Abstract
When we say that ‘the government should be ashamed’, can we be taken literally? I argue that
we can: organisations have duties over their emotions. Emotions have both functional and felt
components. Often, emotions’ moral value derives from their functional components: from what
they cause and what causes them. In these cases, organisations can have emotional duties in the
same way that they can have duties to act. However, emotions’ value partly derives from their felt
components. Organisations lack feelings, but can have duties to increase the likelihood that their
members have relevant emotions (with the right felt components), in virtue of and in accordance
with their role in the organisation. To systematise these conclusions, I provide a taxonomy of
organisations’ – and individuals’ organisationally situated – emotional duties. This taxonomy
will enable scholars of electoral politics, international politics and public policy to systematically
integrate emotions into the study of organisations.
Keywords
normative theory, emotions, organisations, feelings, duties
Accepted: 9 October 2017
Introduction
Emotional duties are regularly attributed to organisations. Here are some examples. In
2011, a media investigation exposed the abuse of patients at Winterbourne View hospital
in England. Five years later, a parent of one of the patients spoke out: ‘The government
have had five years to do something. They haven’t done anything. I’m going to be honest
– I think they should be ashamed of themselves’ (BBC, 2016). In response, a National
Health Service (NHS) spokesperson claimed an emotional response: ‘We sympathise
with the frustrations expressed’ (Bingham, 2016). In February 2016, Labour leader
Jeremy Corbyn addressed the United Kingdom’s University and College Union: ‘We
Department of Politics, School of Social Sciences, The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
Corresponding author:
Stephanie Collins, Department of Politics, School of Social Sciences, The University of Manchester, Arthur
Lewis Building, Manchester M13 9PL, UK.
Email: Stephanie.collins@manchester.ac.uk
739553PSX0010.1177/0032321717739553Political StudiesCollins
research-article2017
Article
814 Political Studies 66(4)
have the highest tuition fees in the industrialised world – it’s not something we should be
proud of, it’s something we should be utterly ashamed of as a country’ (Morgan, 2016).
In July 2016, after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, Scottish
National Party leader Nicola Sturgeon claimed that the Conservative party had failed to
plan for the referendum’s outcome, adding, ‘The Conservatives should feel deeply
ashamed of themselves right now’ (Nutt, 2016). Governments, countries and political
parties are not the only addressees. Corporations also face such claims. For example,
there exists a Facebook Community, with 91 members, called ‘BP should be ashamed of
the mess it made in the gulf’ (Anonymous, 2016).
Perhaps these particular statements are metaphorical, rhetorical, hyperbolic, or a cyni-
cal attempt to get the public on-side. They might be ‘bullshit’: something spoken without
regard for truth or falsehood, but to further some other aim (Frankfurt, 2005). Nonetheless,
if BP were to be ashamed (assuming such a thing were possible), that would strike us as
morally appropriate. Moreover, some of these statements – such as that of the Winterbourne
View parent – are not bullshit. They express a sincere moral demand.
This article asks whether such demands can ever be legitimate. Can a government have
a duty to be ashamed? More generally, can organisations have duties to have emotions? A
positive answer requires two claims: first, organisations can have morally valuable emo-
tions; second, they can have duties over those emotions.
These claims might seem bizarre. The first claim might seem bizarre because emotions
have a ‘felt’ aspect: they are sensed, subjectively experienced, pleasurable or displeasur-
able. But organisations lack sensations (subjective experience, pleasure or displeasure).
This is possibly what the first Baron Thurlow meant when he famously said, ‘Corporations
have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned’ (quoted in Coffee, 1981:
386). The second claim might seem bizarre because duties imply voluntary control. If all
entities (human or organisational) lack voluntary control over emotions, then emotional
duties are a non-starter (organisations’ emotional duties are rejected, not always with
explanation, by Isaacs, 2011: 84–85; Kutz, 2000: 196; O’Neill, 2004: 248; Pettit, 2004:
188; Velasquez, 1983: 124).
This article will argue that organisations can have emotional duties. Specifically, I
focus on negative, object-directed, episodic emotions – like shame, remorse and guilt.1
The argument marries two distinct philosophical literatures – on organisational agency
and on emotions – and brings that marriage to bear on the political problem of how to
interpret and react to discursive attributions of organisations’ emotional duties.
The first two sections prepare the ground, explaining what organisations are and how
they have duties over actions. The subsequent discussion distinguishes the ‘functional’
aspects of emotions (judgements, goals and intentions) from the ‘felt’ aspect (sensations)
and argues that both have moral value in organisational contexts. The argument then
tackles the two sources of scepticism mentioned above. Here, I argue that organisations,
indeed, lack sensations. This is a shortcoming of organisations’ emotional duties. But I
argue that they (and their members) have the voluntary control necessary for duties over
organisations’ functional aspects.
I then systematise my conclusions by providing a novel taxonomy of organisations’
emotional duties and individuals’ organisationally situated emotional duties. This taxon-
omy is the article’s primary contribution. It constitutes a conceptual framework that can
be wielded in various subfields, for example, (1) in electoral and international politics, to
analyse the causal-explanatory role of organisations’ (lack of) emotions and of emotional
duty attributions, and (2) in public policy, to design organisations that can fulfil their
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