Inference gaps in moral assessment: Capitalism, corporations and individuals

The paper is divided into three parts. In the first an argument is made that negative moral assessments of institutions are insufficient bases from which to infer similar negative moral assessments of the actions of the organizations that embody those institutions or the individuals that perform institution-constituted actions within those institutions. The second part reexamines arguments for organizational intentionality and hence organizational membership in the moral community that the author had presented over two decades ago and offers a revision of the author's position on organizational intentionality that is intended to be more intuitively pleasing than his former account that was based on understanding intentionality on the desire/belief complex model. The third part draws some of the consequences of the inference gaps in moral assessment for understanding the complexity of the elements of the moral world.