Both are responsible, insofar as either or both of them act, individually and collectively. The legal reasoning that Professor Barry cites does not count decisively against the notion of corporate moral responsibility, for corporations are routinely held accountable, and subject to fines, reparations, and other sanctions, for misdeeds performed on their behalf. What would count against my view, I suppose, would be a preponderance of legal precedents in which only individual employees were held accountable and where no penalties of any kind were ever exacted against corporations. Drucker's marketing perspective on business confirms and presupposes the logic of individual and corporate moral responsibility. After all, creating a customer means participating in a moral relationship.
Customers are persons who have freely chosen to do business with a proprietor.
They have chosen to do so because they believed his claims regarding the goods or services he had on offer, and they act upon those beliefs by freely handing their money over to him. Because customers are those with whom a proprietor has a relationship, even his desire for profit gives him an incentive to maintain their trust, by acting consistently to keep his promises. Keeping one's customers by living up to their reasonable expectations is the surer path toward profit maximization than is seeking opportunities for exploiting others on a one-time only basis. As Aquinas showed, fraud and theft are immoral precisely because they represent fundamental breaches in the conditions of moral agency normally obtaining in the interaction bet-ween buyers and sellers. This is as true of business corporations as it is of individual persons.