Individuals are generally considered morally responsible for their actions. Who or what is responsible when those individuals become part of business organizations? Can we correctly ascribe moral responsibility to the organization itself? If so, what are the grounds for this claim and to what extent do the individuals also remain morally responsible? If not, does moral responsibility fall entirely to specific individuals within the organization and can they be readily identified? A perennial question in business ethics has concerned the extent to which business organizations can be correctly said to have moral responsibilities and obligations. In philosophical terms, this is a question of "corporate moral agency." Whether firms can be said to be moral agents and to have the capacity for moral responsibility has significant practical consequences. In most legal systems in the world, business firms are recognized as "persons" with the ability to own property, to maintain and defend lawsuits, and to self-organize governance structures. To recognize that these "business persons" can also act morally or immorally as organizations, however, would justify the imposition of other legal constraints and normative expectations on organizations. In the criminal law, for example, the idea that an organized firm may itself have criminal culpability is accepted in many countries (such as the United States) but rejected in others (such as Germany). This book collects new contributions by leading business scholars in business ethics, philosophy, and related disciplines to extend our understanding of the "moral responsibility of firms."
In this collection of provocative essays, Joseph Heath provides a compelling new framework for thinking about the moral obligations that private actors in a market economy have toward each other and to society.
This book explores how the interrelated concepts of responsible citizenship, corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability can be interpreted, researched and taught.
In this book, a renowned author with long experience as a consultant to large firms explores the relationship between moral action and economic action with particular reference to the firm.
Part one of this book explicates the most prominent theories of corporate moral agency and provides a detailed debunking of why corporate moral agency is a fallacy.
In this volume, authors consider what defines a 'responsible' corporation, examining such debates as: the implications of corporations setting standards for such matters as products and labour conditions, and thus playing more than a market ...
Can a Corporation Have a Conscience
... and William McDonough and Michael Braungart, in “The Next Industrial Revolution” and elsewhere. 5. These estimates are from Lester Brown, Eco-Economy: Building an Economyfor the Earth (W.W. Norton & Co., NewYork: 2001), Chapter One.
In demand nationwide as a speaker and analyst on business ethics, she takes her decades of findings and shows us in The Seven Signs of Ethical Collapse the reasons that companies and nonprofits undergo ethical collapse, including: · ...
The book provides detailed explanations in the context of core themes such as customer satisfaction, ethics, entrepreneurship, global business, and managing change.
This new edition of the book includes an introduction by Jean-Pascal Gond, Professor of Corporate Social Responsibility at Cass Business School, City University of London, and a foreword by Peter Geoffrey Bowen, Daniels College of Business, ...