When a corporation does wrong, it is often very difficult to determine HOW and WHOM to punish (which is to say, it's hard to figure out exactly where the responsibility lies). Consider for instance, the BP oil spill of 2010.

In April of 2010, an explosion on an oil rig off the West coast of Florida began a deep-sea oil leak. For 3 months, oil flowed freely from an exploded pipeline into the Gulf of Mexico, allowing a total of over 210 MILLION gallons of oil to leak into the oceans waters. This led to widespread devastation of the coastlines in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, as well as the deaths of thousands of animals, destruction of local fishing industries (and shrimping, etc.), and other sorts of economic damage (such as the tourism industry).

There is no doubt that something very bad occurred. The question is: Who do we blame? How do we assign blame or punishment? It seems that we have three options:

• Blame and punish the company only (for instance, by making it pay huge fines, pay for the clean-up of their mistake, and placing future restrictions on the companys activities).
• Blame and punish individuals only (for instance, by prosecuting the CEO, or board of directors, or the employees on the oil rig who failed to follow the regulations that would have prevented the explosion, etc.possibly fining those people, or sending them to jail).
• Blame and punish both the company AND certain individuals.
• What do you think the right course of action is in a case such as this? Does your answer have any implications for whether or not companies can be thought of as having moral responsibilities/being morally blameworthy INDEPENDENT of the responsibilities/blameworthiness of the individual people who make up that company? Explain