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CSR - the Cuckoo’s Egg in the Business Ethics Nest

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Abstract

Corporate/collective moral responsibility is a thorny topic in business ethics and this paper argues that this is due a number of unacknowledged and connected epistemic issues. Firstly, CSR, Corporate Citizenship and many other research streams that are based on the assumption of collective and/or corporate moral responsibility are not compatible with Kantian ethics, consequentialism, or virtue ethics because corporate/collective responsibility violates the axioms and central hypotheses of these research programmes. Secondly, in the absence of a sound theoretical moral philosophical foundation, business ethicists have based their ideas on legal and political epistemologies, yet still claim to be ethics-based. Thirdly, research is often driven by an intention to prove that a specific social goal is right, not by open and critical inquiry. Finally, today, corporate/collective moral responsibility is widely accepted as the Truth as most researchers are unaware of any issues because they are untrained in philosophy. The paper identifies the confusion about the epistemic basis as a major impediment for delivering a thick concept of the role of corporations as moral agents. Thus, the paper does not argue against corporate or collective agency as such, but points out an obvious but forgotten paradox: corporate and collective personhood cannot, at the moment at least, be epistemologically grounded in the field in which business ethics claims to operate: moral philosophy.

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Notes

  1. There are two separate ideas about the source of collective responsibility that are often mixed or confused: firstly, the collective responsibility as the aggregate of the individuals’ responsibilities (collective responsibility), and secondly, the collective as a responsibility independent of the individuals’ aggregate responsibility, i.e. the idea that there is an additional moral agent, namely the corporation (corporate responsibility). A detailed discussion can be found in chapter 8 of Rönnegard (2015) or in Rönnegard and Velasquez (2017). I will argue that the three schools of moral philosophy support neither.

  2. The philosophy of science / epistemology and metaphysics (and metametaphysics) are overlapping areas of philosophy. For the purposes of this paper I will assume that epistemology (and philosophy as science) is an applied metaphysics and that metaphysics is far less structured and far less concrete.

  3. In the beginning, he called a paradigm “disciplinary matrix”, a term that while not becoming popular is very close to Lakatos’ research programme.

  4. Bernard Williams (2006: 12) applies it to economic ethics, ethical egoism, and calls it an anti-ethic.

  5. There are two separate ideas about source of collective responsibility that are often mixed or confused: firstly, the collective responsibility is the aggregate of the individuals’ responsibilities (collective responsibility), and secondly, the collective has a responsibility independent of the individuals’ aggregate responsibility, i.e. it is an additional moral agent (corporate responsibility). A detailed discussion is in chapter 8 of Rönnegard (2015) or in Rönnegard and Velasquez (2017). I will argue that the three ethics schools support neither.

  6. I believe it is worth pointing out that Gierke wrote about Genossenschaften (co-operatives) a form of organisation that since its creation in the early nineteenth century had grown exponentially in Germany. In co-operatives the goals of the members and the organisation are far more integrated than in any other form of organisation and thus, it could be argued, comes close to Michael Bratman’s (1987, 1993) or Raimo Tuomela’s account (Tuomela 1993, 2000). A thorough discussion of both scholars’ theories comes to the conclusion that even under the special circumstances they “do not enable the legitimate attribution of moral responsibility to a collective whole” (Rönnegard 2015: 105).

  7. I believe this is what many understand to stand ‘metaphysical’ for: providing leaps of faith and miracles.

  8. Domenec Melé, in the same inaugural edition of the Humanistic Management Journal, echoes many of the same ideas as Dierksmeier and also highlights the dual epistemic character of human dignity: “all humans have a common nature, which gives us an essential equality. But, at the same time, each individual is unique” (Dierksmeier 2016: 42) Melé, a virtue ethicists and Dierksmeier, a Kantian, find a common epistemic value in human dignity.

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    Matthias P. Hühn

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Hühn, M.P. CSR - the Cuckoo’s Egg in the Business Ethics Nest. Humanist Manag J 3, 279–298 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41463-018-0046-x

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