Kantian Accounts of Corporate Socia

Kantian Accounts of Corporate Social Responsibility
A lthough I have discussed corporate social responsibility on a number of occasions including Business Ethics co-authored with Ronald Duska and in Management Ethics as well as in Chap. 6 of this volume, I have never speci fi cally used Kantian ethics as the ground for the discussion. Recently there have been two contributions to the discussion of corporate social responsibility. The fi r st is by Jeffery Smith. 52 In Business Ethics: A Kantian Perspective , I had argued that a business organization should be viewed as a moral community and that managers had an imperfect duty of benefi c ence to their corporate stakeholders. However, I did not elaborate on just what that duty consists of and how extensive it is. In his “Corporate Duties of Virtue: Making (Kantian) Sense of Corporate Social Responsibility,” Smith provides an argument to show that corporations have an imperfect duty of social responsibility. He does this through a careful reading of the Kantian texts on the duty of benefi c ence as well as some recent Kantian scholarship on that topic. As a result of that analysis Smith argues that “the duty of benefi c ence is a duty regarding how moral agents should deliberate about how to live”. At the corporate level, then, the duty requires that managers “integrate concern for others in their commercial dealings.” Integrating this concern into corporate decision making provides a rich account of corporate social responsibility. Smith’s contribution is an important expansion of the Kantian project to a topic in business ethics that has not often been viewed from the perspective of a major ethical theory. I am unaware, for example, of an Aristotelian account of
52 Smith, Jeffery. (2012). “Corporate Duties of Virtue: Making (Kantian) Sense of Corporate Social Responsibility” in Denis Arnold and Jared Harris (eds.), Kantian Business Ethics : Critical Perspectives. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 59–75.
68 4 Kantian Themes
corporate social responsibility. Smith’s essay is solidly grounded in the Kantian text and Kantian scholarship while providing a clear and managerially sound account of corporate social responsibility. There is no separation thesis here. I am happy to concur with his analysis and the conclusions based on it. Another paper on this topic is “A Neo-Kantian Foundation of Social Responsibility”, by Wim Dubbink and Luc van Liedekerke. 53 Many have argued that corporations have a social responsibility to improve society. However, is this responsibility a moral duty or is it voluntary-something it would be nice for corporations to do? In Business Ethics : A Kantian Perspective, I argued the traditional Kantian line that there is a genuine imperfect duty to help improve society but there was great latitude in how often the duty was to be acted upon and on what actions the duty to improve society might actually require. In “A Neo-Kantian Foundation of Social Responsibility” the authors ground the morality of social responsibility in political theory-specifi c ally in free market democratic liberalism. For them, Kant’s political theory and the political philosophy of his neo-Kantian followers provide the ground, while I tried to derive the obligations directly from Kant’s ethical theory. Dubbink and Liedekerke begin with Kant’s distinction between the duties of Right and the duties of Virtue. The former are duties imposed by law and necessary for a civil society. The latter are requirements of virtue. Are the duties of virtue morally required? Is the requirement to help others mandatory? These scholars think that at least some set of the duties of virtue are required and if that is the case, there are duties of virtue that are required and duties of virtue that are voluntary. If I understand this argument correctly, it would mean that some speci fi c imperfect duties would always be required just as perfect duties are. However, Dubbink and Liedekerke think that the focus on the imperfect/perfect distinction is not as helpful in making their point as the distinction between duties of Right and duties of Virtue. The issue for them is whether “individuals must independently acknowledge the full set of general rules, otherwise morality would no longer be about self-governance.” 54 As I understand it, they argue that some duties of virtue are always duties in the sense that they must be considered when acting. In other words, whenever the executives of a company make decisions, the duty to consider how society is affected is always present. However, in some (many?), cases any duty to improve society is trumped by other considerations. I believe this approach has much in common with the general theoretic position of Barbara Herman in Moral Literacy . In addition with respect to the content of the duty to improve society, Dubbink and Liedekerke, believe that these non voluntary duties of virtue are socially determined rather than determined by individuals acting independently and in isolation. After all the kingdom of ends is a social concept. This paper fi ts well with the renewed interest in Kant’s political philosophy and his views on duty in the Metaphysics of Morals. It is also grounded in the work of contemporary Kant