Group Moral Agency and the IT Department

Within a corporation, information technology (IT) departments may frequently handle sensitive information about customers and are in a particularly unique position to collectively decide upon information governance policies and practices. Individual its deny that there can be a group agency in a robust sense that can warrant ascriptions of moral agency. We argue that McKenna's individualist thesis does not take into account collectives that have the control and knowledge conditions that warrant ascriptions of moral agency, such as those of well-formed IT departments. Collectives, including corporations and IT departments, can be responsive to morally relevant reasons, such as utile maximization and can be moral agents.