3.1 Speaking as-if

First, we speak as if we trust corporations. Our source of evidence here is the widespread reporting and testing around which corporations are the most trusted. For instance, there is no shortage of online reporting of matters such as ‘top 10 most trusted companies in the world’ (Cooper, Reference Cooper2023). The terms ‘most trusted companies’, ‘most trustworthy companies’, and ‘best companies’ often appear interchangeably in these surveys. We would draw out two points as salient based on such common practices in ordinary language. First, that corporations can be trusted is taken as a background assumption of the reporting. There is a presumption in the minds of the authors of the headlines and articles that it will make sense to their readers to speak of ‘trusting corporations’. Given the ubiquity and continued presence of public discourse about trusting corporations, we take it that the presumption is borne out. Whilst of defeasible value, we take it that this offers some evidence that the notion of trust in corporations is in good standing among survey respondents and the general public.

Staying within the domain of talk of trust, it’s worth noting that the questionnaires and empirical probes that underpin empirical research are explicitly asking people to respond to questions around trust in corporations. Participants appear to have no difficulty in doing so. Consider a prominent example. The Edelman Trust Barometer is an annual survey that tracks changes in levels of trust internationally. One probe they ask 32,000 respondents from 28 countries to respond to is: Please indicate how much you trust global companies headquartered in the following markets to do what is right (Edelman Trust Barometer, 2024).

Given the data and the range of responses, there is clear prima facie evidence that the responders understand the prompt and are able to proceed. (Indeed, the Edelman survey respondents consistently report trusting corporations more than they trust governments, NGOs, and the media.) We thus think it reasonable to start from the position that judging by public discourse (as opposed to philosophical debates), we speak as if we can trust corporations.

3.2 Behaving as-if

Second, we think that individuals and corporations behave as if we can trust corporations. We will begin with the behaviours of individuals. As above, if someone breaks our trust we will feel betrayed. We thus take it that if people behave as if betrayed in putative cases where a company breaks that trust, that is defeasible evidence that we have on our hands a genuine case of trust. There are numerous instances of people behaving as if betrayed in such cases. We borrow from Grégoire and Fisher (Reference Grégoire and Fisher2008):

We concede, of course, that such cases do not show definitely, and beyond all doubt, that customers like Mr Dorosin feel betrayed by the companies with whom they have a relationship. Nonetheless, we do think that this is a highly plausible reading of the case and of others like it. We also note that Grégoire and Fisher (Reference Grégoire and Fisher2008, p. 248) go on to develop a model ‘that incorporates perceived betrayal as the means to understand why customers retaliate and examine the controversial effect of a strong relationship on responses to service recoveries’.

A significant body of empirical research has documented perceptions of individuals who feel betrayed by firms. In general, consumers do not trust firms that have a record of unethical corporate conduct (Leonidou et al., Reference Leonidou, Leonidou and Kvasova2013). This deficit of trust may come about when consumers come across product issues, eg. malfunctioning products, brand imitations (D’Astous and Gargouri, Reference D’Astous and Gargouri2001); pricing issues, eg. price fixing, price discrimination (Tsalikis and Seatons, Reference Tsalikis and Seaton2008); promotions issues, eg. deceptive or offensive advertising, advertising of harmful products (Bakir and Bitell, Reference Bakir and Vitell2010; Darke et al., Reference Darke, Ashworth and Main2010); and mistakes, eg. poor service quality, regular errors (Zhong et al., Reference Zhong, Su, Peng and Yang2017). Further, customers who feel betrayed by firms have pursued a range of approaches for punishing firms, including complaints to the media, engaging in aggressive debate with service staff, and publishing negative reviews (see Huefner et al., Reference Huefner, Parry, Payne, Otto, Huff, Swenson and Hunt2002; Ward and Ostrom, Reference Ward and Ostrom2006).

Moving to the behaviour of corporations, our attention will be focused on the general approach that corporations take to the way they present themselves to the world through the likes of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategies, as well as the way that they endeavour to position themselves with respect to stakeholders. For instance, in an empirical evaluation of the efficacy of CSR initiatives, Chen et al. (Reference Chen, Khan, Hongsuchon, Ruangkanjanases, Chen, Sivarak and Chen2021, p.16) report that, ‘economic, legal, and philanthropic CSRs were found to be in a significant relationship with customer trust’. And, businesses themselves report the value of trust. An Ipsos Mori report (2017) gives the mission statements of a range of business as follows:

The report itself is titled ‘Building trust builds company performance’.

Further, the vocabulary of trust is routinely used by corporations in their attempts to acknowledge wrongdoing and apologise after major ethics scandals. After the Wells Fargo Cross-Selling scandal, for example, the company explicitly attempted to repair and rebuild trust after its employees had opened as many as 2 million accounts without customer authorisation over a five-year period (Barrett, Reference Barrett2023). And when Cambridge Analytica used the personal data of millions of Facebook users for political advertising without informed consent, Mark Zuckerberg took out full-page ads in American and British newspapers to apologise for what he called a breach of users’ ‘trust’ (MacKensie, Reference McKenzie2018).

We thus have evidence that both corporations and individuals behave as if individuals trust corporations. Again, this evidence may be defeasible, and we will discuss challenges later on, but we think that we have enough to be going on with.

3.3 Theorising as-if

Third, and finally, then, we believe that researchers also theorise as if corporations can be trusted. Our evidence for this assertion is gathered from outside the philosophical canon. Nonetheless, we do not see hard and fast boundaries between academic disciplines. Further, we do not think that philosophers should ignore or disregard findings or substantive theoretical positions in other disciplines.

There is no shortage of literature within which the nature and extent of trust in businesses is explored. Strategies for building and maintaining public trust in business have been the subject of long-standing, interdisciplinary scholarly attention (Harris et al., Reference Harris, Moriarty, Wicks, Harris and Wicks2014; Uslaner, Reference Uslaner, Harris, Wicks and Moriarty2012; Pirson et al., Reference Pirson, Martin and Parmar2017; Poppo and Schepker, Reference Poppo and Schepker2010). Trust has been recognised as a pivotal feature of productive institutional interactions in business (Fukuyama, Reference Fukuyama1995; Davis et al., Reference Davis, Schoorman, Mayer and Tan2000), as well as a source of competitive advantage (eg. Barney and Hansen, Reference Barney and Hansen1994; Jensen, Reference Jensen2003). Others have examined trust in business (Tan and Lim, Reference Tan and Lim2009) and the impact of events such as the 2008 global financial crisis on trust (Sapienza and Zingales, Reference Sapienza and Zingales2012), eg. with respect to consumers’ trust in banks (Bennett and Kottasz, Reference Bennett and Kottasz2012). Notably, this is a relatively new area of research (eg. Rousseau et al., Reference Rousseau, Sitkin, Burt and Camerer1998), with the literature growing considerably over the past two decades (Korsgaard et al., Reference Korsgaard, Cooper, Mayer, Poppo and Zaheer2025).

Our foray into the wider literature is not intended to be exhaustive. We are but sampling from a voluminous literature. And that is, of course, rather the point. The range and volume of theoretical and empirical work exploring the nature and extent of trust in business is quite so vast that we think that we have yet more evidence for the claim that agents trust corporations – in the form of theorising as-if trust in corporations occurs frequently.

Putting it altogether briefly: people speak, behave and theorise as-if they trust corporations. This is surely sufficient evidence to justify the assumption that we do, in fact, trust corporations. In any case, given the material presented in sections 2 and 3, we take it that we have evidence for both of our premises. We have given evidence from the philosophical literature on the nature of trust to support premise one of the argument: If x trusts y, then y is a moral agent. We have then given three tranches of evidence from practice for the claim that businesses may be trusted. We thus think we have a defence of the premises and so we a reason to think that corporations are moral agents.

3.4 Why consider scope?

It may seem to the reader that we are quite impressed by the extent to which we talk, behave and seem to think as if we trust corporations. We have considered each of our talk, behaviour and wider research. And we have emphasised the breadth of each of these phenomena. That may be surprising. After all, an opponent who isn’t moved by the fact that we speak as-if we trust corporations may well not then be moved by the fact that we speak that way a lot. Similarly, an opponent who isn’t moved by the fact that we behave as if we trust corporations isn’t going to be moved by the fact that we behave that way a lot. Why, then, do we focus on volume as we do?

Our claim is that the behaving and theorising that we do about trust in corporations is misguided if (eg.) in fact talk about trusting corporations is elliptical for just trusting individuals. By way of example, the Edelman Trust Barometer, cited earlier, reports that respondents trust corporations more than they trust CEOs. Sapienza and Zingales (Reference Sapienza and Zingales2012) conducted empirical work that purported to show that levels of trust in banks is different from levels of trust in bankers. And Ingenhoff and Sommer (Reference Ingenhoff and Sommer2010) also show that levels of trust in CEOs comes apart from trust in the corporations they lead. As Pouryousefi and Tallant (Reference Pouryousefi and Tallant2023) argue, this appears to be widespread. Trust in corporations seems different to trust in the individuals who comprise them. We think this pattern is repeated in the evidence that is available.

Indeed a burgeoning body of empirical research has been demonstrating this precise distinction between trust in corporations and interpersonal trust (Gillespie, Reference Gillespie, Lyon, Mšllering and Saunders2015; McEvily and Tortoriello, Reference McEvily and Tortoriello2011). As it happens, measuring trust in corporations is often more complicated than trust in interpersonal settings. To appreciate this point, consider two recurring measurement challenges. When asked directly about their levels of trust towards corporations, responders may treat their trust in individual members of the corporation as a stand-in for trust in the corporation, or they may have a different understanding of the form or normative relevance of organisational ‘trust’ than the survey designers. Empirical researchers in this area have sought to counter these issues, for example by using a factorial vignette survey methodology that measures the determinants of trust and their importance to normative judgements indirectly (eg. Pirson et al., Reference Pirson, Martin and Parmar2019). Similar empirical measurement approaches have drawn attention to the lack of trust, to corporate distrust, and to organisational repair after perceptions of trustworthiness are undermined in large-scale organisational failures (eg. accounting frauds such as Enron and Parmalot, and catastrophic organisational finance collapses during the 2008 financial crisis) (eg. Gillespie and Dietz, Reference Gillespie and Dietz2009). Thus, in addition to the talk and theorising of corporate trust discussed in 3.3, a well-established empirical body of research seeks to measure and quantify corporate trust.

Now if talk, theorising, and evidence about corporate trust were found only once, perhaps we could write it off. Twice, maybe the same. At that scale we might look for a kind of paraphrase strategy to explain away expressions or perceptions of trust that were directed at corporations as collective entities. But – and this is why scale matters – this phenomenon is widespread. People appear to trust corporations and appear to trust them to different levels than that to which they trust the individuals who comprise them.

We thus consider our point to be akin to a point about triangulation. The more items of evidence that we have that the relevant attitude – that of trust – is being directed at corporations (rather than merely individuals) – the more compelling the case is that the attitude really is directed at corporations. Of course, if philosophers will not consider any evidence, then things become rather harder, but we hope that all of our interlocutors in this debate will accept some evidence as relevant to the target of our attitudes.

3.5 What is novel?

We need to clarify the structure of our argument. One might think that we move from the fact that we speak and act as if we trust corporations to the conclusion that corporations are moral agents. However, we can only get to that conclusion if the form of trust in question is trust in a rich moral sense. After all, if we merely rely on corporations, then it does not follow that corporations are moral agents.

Some of the evidence that we have presented in favour of the idea that what we have is (moral) trust and not mere reliance is that we direct reactive attitudes towards corporations. For instance, in 3.2 we discussed the fact that people sometimes feel betrayed by corporations and that we resent them.

But why think that yields an interesting, novel argument? Here is a more direct argument. If we bear reactive attitudes towards corporations, then we are already treating them as moral agents. After all, we may only be betrayed by an entity (in the moral sense) if the entity is a moral agent. So, why do we need to discuss trust at all? Why not go direct from the attitudes to the moral standing of corporations?

The point is interesting, but we think it misses the mark. First, we think the reactive attitudes are only a part of the story. For instance, if we revert to 3.2 and consider the evidence we presented there, we see that only a part of our reason for thinking that the kind of trust in play is moral trust was that reactive attitudes are in play. A further part of the evidence for trust in the moral sense being relevant came from the discussion of the behaviour of the corporations and their way of presenting themselves as trusted in an explicitly moral sense. To repeat but one of the positions reported in the Ipsos Mori poll:

And, of course, much of the theorising about trust that we rehearsed in 3.3 also treats it as moral.

But set that to one side. There is a further line of argument here. In the previous section we suggested that the breadth of evidence available helps us to triangulate the concern; it helps us to show that the target of people’s attitudes really is corporations and not merely the people that make them up. Their speech, their behaviour and our theorising point us in that direction. Now if that point is about triangulating the relevant attitude, then we take it that the point about reactive attitudes is intended to clarify its nature. To be sure, we might allow that there is an attitude that is targeted towards corporations but still insist that it is not (moral) trust. By showing the presence of the reactive attitudes we endeavour to clarify the nature of that relation. It really is moral trust. And, given the points about triangulation (3.4) it really is targeted at corporations.Footnote ⁵

There is, we think, one final response to the suggestion that we have a direct route from reactive attitudes to corporate agency. We believe that we can (but probably shouldn’t) adopt reactive attitudes towards things that don’t exist. We cannot trust them. That being so, data on the reactive attitudes is less telling than might otherwise be the case.

For instance: in a novel, we might feel betrayed by them if it turns out that our favourite character was a turncoat all along. We might feel grateful to Santa around Christmas time. It is relatively jarring to offer a correction to either: ‘you didn’t really feel betrayed, the character doesn’t really exist’. That is no kind of a correction. Equally, ‘you didn’t really feel grateful to Santa because he isn’t real’, is not a correction either of us have offered or would offer.

In contrast, we don’t think we can trust entities that don’t exist. Our argument for this is as follows. We take trust to be reliance ‘plus’ some other feature. In doing so, we mimic Baron (Reference Baron2025: 3–4):

Baron goes on to note no fewer than seven different accounts of this extra feature.

We think that the issue arises as follows. We think that feelings of betrayal are luminous in a way that we do not think that facts about reliance, are. If we are aware of feeling betrayed by Santa, then that is not something about which we can be wrong. We can, of course, be incorrect: we may not have been betrayed by Santa, but we cannot be wrong about the feeling thereof. In contrast, reliance requires a little extra. Reliance (but not the feeling of betrayal) requires us to engage with particular features of the world. We cannot correctly be said to rely on an airline to take us across the Atlantic if we do not buy tickets or travel to the airport. If we merely sit at home, mindlessly scrolling on our phones, we are not relying upon the airline at all. We have failed to engage with the world in the right kind of way to do that relying. And we think that point generalises. To rely upon something, we have to engage with the world in a particular way. We have to satisfy the conditions for ‘relying upon’. And we think that this point plays out in cases where the relevant object does not exist.

We cannot rely upon Santa for presents for we cannot organise ourselves with respect to Santa, such that Santa is the entity that might bring us presents. We cannot rely upon our favourite character in a novel to help us with the shopping, because we cannot organise ourselves with respect to them in such a way that they are the entity that might help us with our shopping. We simply cannot rely on them for they do not exist.Footnote ⁶

Thus, if trust is ‘reliance plus’, and reliance requires the existence of an entity, then whenever there is trust, it requires the existence of an entity (for trust is reliance, augmented with something else – but reliance nonetheless). But if affective states (like feeling betrayed) do not commit us to the existence of their target, then that we feel betrayed is no guide to ontology whatsoever. We can feel betrayed by Santa even if Santa does not exist, in a way that we cannot rely on (or trust) Santa if he does not exist. That being the case, we think that there is no ready move from a reactive attitude to the existence of an entity that is the object of that attitude, though if our modest commitments for a theory of trust are accurate, then there are such arguments from trust to ontology.Footnote ⁷

5.1 Philosophical trumping

Here is our first objection. We have said that the data supports an argument in favour of realism about corporate moral agency. This is certainly what we claimed in section 3 where we used evidence to support the claim that the second premise is true. But, this isn’t how we should do philosophy (or so goes the concern). Rather, we should remain philosophically pure. If our philosophical theorising tells us that p, then so be it: p. When doing philosophy, we should be sensitive to philosophical considerations, not these kinds of empirical investigations. Nothing more and nothing less than philosophical purity will suffice. And since what we’ve provided here aren’t philosophical concerns – they are arguments based upon evidence – so much the worse for what we have said.

We don’t find ourselves moved by this kind of concern. We are reminded of Lewis’ response to those who would reject mathematical truths on the grounds of philosophical theorising.

We accept, of course, that mathematical truths may play a deeper and more powerful role in our lives than our beliefs about trust in corporations. Nonetheless, we think it would be presumptuous in the same way to object to the second premise on grounds of only philosophical reasoning. We refer the reader back to sections 3.3 and 3.4: very large sections of other disciplines are focused on the question, not of whether we trust corporations, but how to measure it; how to theorise about it; how to generate it. We really do not see that it would be appropriate to meet those disciplinary findings with an assertion that these results are irrelevant, because they have not been generated by philosophers using a philosophical method. We suggested, instead, that our philosophical theories should be developed in accord with the evidence, rather than by trying to resist it as a rule, and offer error theories for it. And the evidence here looks fairly straightforward.

There is of course a closely related response; a more compelling version of the objection. Philosophers should be cautious about treating non-philosophical research as evidence when dealing with complex philosophical questions. Take, for example, the common belief that colours are intrinsic properties of physical objects. While this may be widely held, it doesn’t provide strong grounds for philosophers or physicists to endorse the view – especially since, on closer analysis, it turns out to be mistaken (or at best, only defensible in a loose or elliptical sense). So, more argument might be needed here.

We are happy to supply the argument. We agree with our imagined interlocutor that mere common belief should not be taken to undermine a philosophical research programme. Thus, if all that we could advert to is the fact that it is a common belief that individuals trust corporations, then we would demur. This would not be the basis for an argument.

But we do not think that is where we find ourselves. It is not only that people speak as if corporations are trusted, nor merely that they behave in such a way as to trust corporations, nor merely that we theorise (in psychology, economics, sociology, business, etc.) that we trust corporations – it is the sum of all of these factors. What we have is not merely philosophy opposed to some loose folk intuition, but philosophy opposed to everything else. We think that gives us some evidential basis to think the philosophers in the wrong. To return to the original statement of the complaint, we judge the situation to be one where the physics (our best confirmed theories) endorses a view that philosophy opposes. More often than not in other discourse, we take that to be reason to reject the philosophy; we think the same should be done here.

5.2 Why trust?

Our second objection. We’ve centred our argument on trust. But why focus on trust? Surely there are a whole host of related social beliefs and attitudes that individuals have towards corporations, many of which will have a normative element. If we already have these other beliefs towards corporations, then we are already treating corporations as denizens of the moral world and as moral agents. Why, then, do we need to take such a tortured route and consider trust as we have here?

Here we again double back to the literature on mathematical realism. A familiar inferential pattern from that literature runs that if we believe that it is true that (for instance) ‘there is a number between 5 and 7’, then there had better exist an entity – a number – that lies in between 5 and 7. This quick and dirty inferential pattern very quickly leads us to the conclusion that there are mathematical objects. Nonetheless, it’s rather too quick for many. It feels as if there is some kind of linguistic trick in play such that we’ve derived the existence of mathematical objects from nothing more than a façon de parler (see Melia Reference Melia1995 for discussion). Instead, more sophisticated arguments are brought to bear that purport to show (variously) that our best scientific theories make ineliminable reference to the existence of mathematical objects, or else that mathematical objects play some essential explanatory role in our best theories (see, among others, Colyvan, Reference Colyvan, Zalta and Nodelman2024, and Baker, Reference Baker2009).

Our thinking here is similar in kind, if not in detail. We have not merely pointed to the fact that people speak as if corporations are moral agents. That, we take it, would be to do nothing more than engage the same kind of cheap trickery we saw present in the inferential pattern that attempted to demonstrate the existence of numbers from the truth of ‘there is a number between 5 and 7’. What we have tried to do instead is to show that, not only do we appear to think and talk as if we trust corporations, individuals and corporations also behave in such a fashion as if corporations are trusted, and that we theorise in the same way.

Our move is, then, no mere linguistic trick. We speak as if people trust corporations, to be sure. But we also behave as if they do. And fields other than philosophy purport to study trust in the wild. We thus think that, precisely because of the fact that trust is such a powerful driver of discourse and behaviour, and because it has been so widely studied, it is a promising bedrock for an argument that purports to show that corporations are moral agents. Certainly, ours is intended to be a more sophisticated and powerful argument than one that merely notes that we sometimes speak as if corporations are moral agents; that argument could simply be seen as an inferential trick that relies on a façon de parler.

5.3 Trust or ‘trust’?

In motivation of our first premise, we noted a distinction between trust in the sense of mere reliance and trust in a rich, morally loaded sense. However, in our interrogation of matters outside of the philosophical literature, we have stayed quiet on this issue. For our argument to go through, the same sense of ‘trust’ must be in play in both premises. So, asks our opponent, what evidence do we have that the evidence that we have of trust in corporations is of trust in the moral sense?

So far as we can tell, the evidence here is robust. Here we defer to work by Pouryousefi and Tallant (Reference Pouryousefi and Tallant2023: sections 3.1 and 3.2) about the impact of the global financial crisis on the public’s trust in banks. In their overview of some of the empirical work on trust, and its bearing on philosophical reasoning about trust, they draw out two points. The first is that, just as people trust banks, they also hold them morally accountable for the 2008 financial crisis (see Boatright, Reference Boatright2013; Herzog, Reference Herzog2019; Silver, Reference Silver2018; Sorell, Reference Sorell2018). The second is that individuals appear to show the right kinds of reactive attitudes to corporations to signal the presence of trust.

Now, to be sure, it may not be that all of the sources in the wider literature are concerned with trust in the moral sense. Perhaps some are concerned with trust only in the sense of mere ‘reliance’. We don’t know of any way in which to test the entire corpus. Indeed that may not be possible given that the vast body of empirical literature on trust (carried out by non-philosophers, including psychologists, social psychologists, sociologists, and organisation studies scholars) makes no sharp distinction between Trust and trust, or trust versus mere reliance (Tallant and Donati, Reference Tallant and Donati2020). Nonetheless, we think that this earlier work by Pouryousefi and Tallant, and its exploration of that wider literature, gives us good reason to think that much of it is concerned with trust in the rich, moral sense. That being so, we think that the evidence base is persuasive.

5.4 So what?

Last, then, so what? Suppose everything we’ve said is true. What of it? Why think that this is remotely interesting? If one is not naturally inclined towards social ontology, then what can we say to make this argument seem pressing?

Unlike some philosophical positions, we think that there are genuine consequences in play. We take it that if we’ve erred, then one of our premises is false. If it is the first, then it would we have reason to reject a claim frequently drawn in the philosophical literature about trust – that trust is present in cases where the trustee has moral agency. That would be interesting to philosophers, we assume.

And the denial of the second premise would be even more interesting. As we’ve noted above, there are vast tracts of literature outside of philosophy that operate on the basis that individuals do trust corporations. Individual patterns of behaviour and multi-million-dollar marketing budgets are spent on the basis that individuals do (or at least can be persuaded to) trust corporations. If that is wrong, then there are tangible real-world consequences to be had. If, in fact, we trust individuals and not corporations, then perhaps we should instead reconfigure the marketing budgets to ensure that those individuals who are being trusted are front and centre. After all, if it is people not corporations who we in fact trust, and there is a close correlation between trust and sales performance (as is often claimed), then it may ultimately be far more powerful to focus on the integrity of an individual within a corporation, rather than the corporation itself. In either case, whichever premise is denied, we think that the result, here, should be of interest. As such, our position is not without consequence.

There are also other consequences. At the very least, for us to trust firms, they must be viewed as moral agents. And, to return to the start of the paper, they must be able to betray our trust. This places particular constraints on what kinds of thing corporations would have to be: they would have to be capable of taking decisions and taking actions. And they should be treated as such. For instance, if corporations are to blame for breaches of trust, then corporations should be punished – rather than just the individuals who lead them. The social metaphysics that follows is interesting and controversial.

This conclusion is also important for two debates in the philosophical literature – one area of which is of course social ontology, where a movement has been gaining traction for some time that acknowledges corporations as social agents that merit metaphysical attention, and, relatedly, as entities that bear moral responsibilities (eg. Collins Reference Collins2019, Reference Collins2023). (We don’t think we should simply acquiesce to the opponent who would have us reject social ontology out of hand.) A long-standing line of inquiry in that debate questions whether we can reliably be realists about corporate agency. Our argument offers support for the realist camp by attending to practical interactions between individuals and corporations. The other debate is in the philosophy of trust, where philosophers have thought carefully about trust and trustworthiness in groups (eg. Hawley, Reference Hawley, Faulkner and Simpson2017; Fricker, Reference Fricker, Lackey and Sosa2006; Mathiesen, Reference Mathiesen2006). If corporations are moral agents, as we argue they are, then we should start to theorise about their moral significance within relations of trust and distrust – something philosophers have for the most part been wary of doing thus-far.