French has been a professor of philosophy at Northern Arizona University, the University of Minnesota, and a visiting professor at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia. He has held the Exxon Distinguished Research Professorship in the Center for the Study of Values at the University of Delaware, the Lennox Distinguished Professorship and Chair of Philosophy at Trinity University, and the Cole Chair in Ethics, Director of the Ethics Center, and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of South Florida. He is now Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Arizona State University where he served as the Lincoln Professor of Ethics and Professor of Philosophy, and was the founding Director of the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics from 2000 to 2013. French is best known for his work on collective and
corporate responsibility, especially his theory that corporations should be treated as members of the moral community and held morally responsible for their actions. According to Professor Jeffrey Moriarty in the
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy French is "a seminal thinker on corporate moral agency." He is responsible for developing the argument that firms have internal decision-making structures through which they act intentionally. In "The Corporation as a Moral Person" French coined the term Corporate Internal Decision Structures (CID Structures) and defined a CID Structure as an organization of personnel for the exercise of a corporation's power with respect to its ventures and interests. According to French a CID Structure produces decision-making, ratification, and action processes thereby forming a corporation into a functioning intentional morally responsible entity. He identified two sorts of rules crucial to CID Structures: organizational rules and policy/procedure rules. Organizational rules define levels of authority. Policies and procedures are recognition rules for identifying a decision or an act as having been made or performed for corporate reasons. French expanded, defended, and modified this theory in publications in subsequent years. According to Michael Kerlin in the
Journal of Business Ethics French's work on
corporate ethics is "of intellectual sophistication with real world applications." When the
United States Supreme Court issued its ruling in
Citizens United v. FEC, some philosophers and legal theorists wrote to French claiming his work had laid the groundwork for the treatment of corporations as persons and asked if he was willing to change his position on corporations and write an opinion piece for the
New York Times. French declined and responded in a paper published in the
festschrift honoring him that the Court's majority opinion does not represent his position on corporate moral personhood. French noted that Justice
Antonin Scalia wrote in his
concurring opinion that corporate speech is "the speech of many individual Americans who have associated in a common cause, giving the leadership of the corporation the right to speak on their behalf." French argued that corporations do not speak for their employees, stockholders, or others affiliated with them. There is no necessary connection between what corporate speech expresses and the beliefs, desires, interests, plans, and goals of such individuals. Corporations speak qua corporate entities and the political speech of individuals is already protected. French distinguished two distinct types of collectivities in his discussions of collective responsibility: aggregates and conglomerates. According to Marian Smiley, French defines an aggregate collectivity as merely a group of people to whom collective responsibility cannot be ascribed. A conglomerate collectivity for French is an organization of individuals whose identity is not exhausted by the conjunction of the identities of the persons in the organization. Conglomerate collectivities can be held collectively responsible. On French's account, responsibility may be distributable or non-distributable over the membership of a collectivity depending on the type. French also coined the term "the responsibility barter game" to describe the common way people negotiate with each other to try to lessen or avoid personal responsibility for bad outcomes. According to Jane E. Jadlos writing in
The Journal of Religion for French "responsibility is not a truth of some sort about the world, but a set of practices used to describe and understand individual and social behavior." French has also written on moral assessment, evil, loss of innocence, blame, shame, vengeance, moral originality, and moral belief/behavior discordance. and he is a founding and senior editor of
Midwest Studies in Philosophy, an annual series since 1976 in analytic philosophy. The first chapter of French's
War and Moral Dissonance is a memoir of his experiences teaching ethics to Navy and Marine chaplains during
Iraq War. Colonel James L. Cook of the
United States Air Force Academy in a review of that book says that French discusses ad bellum and in bello ethical lapses in the war, but delves into the metaphysical issues others ignore and examines the war's aftermath. French's treatment is philosophically rigorous, but also poetically touching...[it] combines philosophical acumen with profound empathy even for a single victim of war.” In 2006 Gettysburg College awarded French a
Doctor of Humane Letters (L.H.D.) degree for his work in philosophy and ethics. The citation read at the college’s 171st Commencement by then Gettysburg College President Katherine Will included the following: "Your book exploring the
My Lai Massacre attracted national attention for its exploration of the question of whether army units or individual members of those units are responsible for military atrocities and is widely credited as a founding work of the field of applied ethics." In 2008 the American Philosophical Association dedicated an issue of its
Newsletter on Philosophy and Law to French because of his "influence in applied ethics and having helped establish the field of applied ethics as a substantive area of research in the philosophy discipline." In 2014, the American Philosophical Association dedicated a Symposium Session on the Work of Peter French at its Central Division Meetings in Chicago. ==Selected book publications==