Ethical Foundations of Corporate Social Responsibility. The Contribution of Christian Social Thought

Abstract

We need to start from a general understanding of what a business is. Businesses are made up of people and things (money, capital equipment, assets in general), and are organized according to certain legal forms and principles. Human ingenuity has arrived at this combination of elements in order to achieve certain goals. As such, business structures represent a combination of natural and artificial (or man-made) components; natural components include the people in the business and their work, whereas artificial components include the policies the business adopts, as well as the legal form it has. The business is therefore a complex form, neither purely natural nor purely artificial.