The Moral Responsibility Of Firms

Author : Eric W. Orts,N. Craig Smith
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 246 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2017
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780198738534

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The Moral Responsibility of Firms by Eric W. Orts,N. Craig Smith Pdf

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 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. However to recognize that these "business persons" can also act morally or immorally as organizations 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 presents contributions by leading business scholars in business ethics, philosophy, and related disciplines to extend our understanding of the "moral responsibility" of firms.

Author : David Rönnegard
Publisher : Springer
Page : 218 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2015-05-12
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9789401797566

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The Fallacy of Corporate Moral Agency by David Rönnegard Pdf

It is uncontroversial that corporations are legal agents that can be held legally responsible, but can corporations also be moral agents that are morally responsible? 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. This implies that talk of corporate moral responsibilities, beyond the mere metaphorical, is essentially meaningless. Part two takes the fallacy of corporate moral agency as its premise and spells out its implications. It shows how prominent normative theories within Corporate Social Responsibility, such as Stakeholder Theory and Social Contract Theory, rest on an implicit assumption of corporate moral agency. In this metaphysical respect such theories are untenable. In order to provide a more robust metaphysical foundation for corporations the book explicates the development of the corporate legal form in the US and UK, which displays how the corporation has come to have its current legal attributes. This historical evolution shows that the corporation is a legal fiction created by the state in order to serve both public and private goals. The normative implication for corporate accountability is that citizens of democratic states ought to primarily make calls for legal enactments in order to hold the corporate legal instruments accountable to their preferences.

Author : C. Chapple
Publisher : Springer
Page : 403 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2014-10-06
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781137377982

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The Moral Responsibilities of Companies by C. Chapple Pdf

The Moral Responsibilities of Companies is a philosophical analysis of the question of whether companies can be held morally responsible for the harms they create, and what implications such a view has on the moral position of employees and shareholders in these companies.

Author : Eric W. Orts,N. Craig Smith
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2017-03-23
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780191058424

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The Moral Responsibility of Firms by Eric W. Orts,N. Craig Smith Pdf

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."

Author : Thomas Donaldson
Publisher : Englewood Cliffs, N.J. : Prentice-Hall
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 1982
Category : Industries
ISBN : 9780131770140

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Corporations and Morality by Thomas Donaldson Pdf

Author : William C. Frederick
Publisher : Dog Ear Publishing
Page : 334 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781598581034

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Corporation, be Good! by William C. Frederick Pdf

Here is the story of Corporate Social Responsibility---what it means, where it came from, where it is going, what it requires of business. Told in an eyewitness, I-was-there style by a pioneer of the study of CSR in the nation's business schools, it takes the reader through a half century of corporate scandals and fierce struggles over corporate ethics---from Ralph Nader's 1960s Campaign GM to today's white collar crimes at Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, and other Wall Street giants. It lays bare the values that drive corporate culture, explores the motivational depths of corporate strategy and policy, demonstrates how biological impulses can lead business decision makers astray, questions the relevance and ethical commitment of business school education, reveals the spiritual side of management life, and holds out hope that the New Millennium will see improvement in the ethical performance of business. William C. Frederick is one of the founders of the study of Corporate Social Responsibility in the United States and initiated some of the key concepts and analytic categories. His books include Business and Society, Social Auditing, and Values, Nature, and Culture in the American Corporation. He was president of The Society for Business Ethics and The Society for Advancement of Socio-Economics, and chaired the Social Issues in Management division of The Academy of Management. He conducted studies of management education in Spain, Italy, Egypt, Yugoslavia, Ecuador, Nigeria, and Australia, and designed and taught programs for executives in U. S. corporations. He was dean of the business schools at the University of Kansas City and the University of Pittsburgh. He received a PhD in economics and anthropology from the University of Texas. Corporation, Be Good! draws on the author's half-century of thinking about the social and ethical responsibilities of the modern corporation.

Author : Joseph Heath
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2014-08-01
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780199990498

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Morality, Competition, and the Firm by Joseph Heath Pdf

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. In a sharp break with traditional approaches to business ethics, Heath argues that the basic principles of corporate social responsibility are already implicit in the institutional norms that structure both marketplace competition and the modern business corporation. In four new and nine previously published essays, Heath articulates the foundations of a "market failures" approach to business ethics. Rather than bringing moral concerns to bear upon economic activity as a set of foreign or externally imposed constraints, this approach seeks to articulate a robust conception of business ethics derived solely from the basic normative justification for capitalism. The result is a unified theory of business ethics, corporate law, economic regulation, and the welfare state, which offers a reconstruction of the central normative preoccupations in each area that is consistent across all four domains. Beyond the core theory, Heath offers new insights on a wide range of topics in economics and philosophy, from agency theory and risk management to social cooperation and the transaction cost theory of the firm.

Author : Walther C. Zimmerli,Klaus Richter,Markus Holzinger
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2007-06-12
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9783540708186

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Corporate Ethics and Corporate Governance by Walther C. Zimmerli,Klaus Richter,Markus Holzinger Pdf

This book represents an introduction to and overview of the diverse facets of the ethical challenges confronting companies today. It introduces executives, students and interested observers to the complex trends and developments in business ethics. Coverage presents industry-specific topics in ethics. The book also provides a general, interdisciplinary survey of the ethical dimensions of management and business.

Author : Mark S. Schwartz
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 663 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2017-03-02
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781351948401

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Corporate Social Responsibility by Mark S. Schwartz Pdf

The essays in this volume examine the emergence of the concept of corporate social responsibility, and the uses that have been made of the language of corporate responsibility to explore the business/society relationship. The first section traces the emergence of the concept of corporate social responsibility as a way of understanding and framing the business/society relationship. Section two of the volume looks at "Definitions and ethical justifications" with a view to exploring current discussions of the nature, scope and source of the social responsibilities of corporations. Section three, "CSR and Management: Critical Reflections", explores the integration of CSR theories and justifications into business management and business management theories. Articles in the final section of the volume apply the concept of corporate social responsibility, and the theoretical frameworks and analytical tools to which it has given rise, to the examination and resolution of specific social issues arising out of the economic activities of corporations.

Author : Marion Smiley
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 297 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2009-09-15
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780226763255

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Moral Responsibility and the Boundaries of Community by Marion Smiley Pdf

The question of responsibility plays a critical role not only in our attempts to resolve social and political problems, but in our very conceptions of what those problems are. Who, for example, is to blame for apartheid in South Africa? Is the South African government responsible? What about multinational corporations that do business there? Will uncovering the "true facts of the matter" lead us to the right answer? In an argument both compelling and provocative, Marion Smiley demonstrates how attributions of blame—far from being based on an objective process of factual discovery—are instead judgments that we ourselves make on the basis of our own political and social points of view. She argues that our conception of responsibility is a singularly modern one that locates the source of blameworthiness in an individual's free will. After exploring the flaws inherent in this conception, she shows how our judgments of blame evolve out of our configuration of social roles, our conception of communal boundaries, and the distribution of power upon which both are based. The great strength of Smiley's study lies in the way in which it brings together both rigorous philosophical analysis and an appreciation of the dynamics of social and political practice. By developing a pragmatic conception of moral responsibility, this work illustrates both how moral philosophy can enhance our understanding of social and political practices and why reflection on these practices is necessary to the reconstruction of our moral concepts.

Author : Howard R. Bowen
Publisher : University of Iowa Press
Page : 267 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2013-12
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781609381967

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Social Responsibilities of the Businessman by Howard R. Bowen Pdf

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) expresses a fundamental morality in the way a company behaves toward society. It follows ethical behavior toward stakeholders and recognizes the spirit of the legal and regulatory environment. The idea of CSR gained momentum in the late 1950s and 1960s with the expansion of large conglomerate corporations and became a popular subject in the 1980s with R. Edward Freeman's Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach and the many key works of Archie B. Carroll, Peter F. Drucker, and others. In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008–2010, CSR has again become a focus for evaluating corporate behavior. First published in 1953, Howard R. Bowen’s Social Responsibilities of the Businessman was the first comprehensive discussion of business ethics and social responsibility. It created a foundation by which business executives and academics could consider the subjects as part of strategic planning and managerial decision-making. Though written in another era, it is regularly and increasingly cited because of its relevance to the current ethical issues of business operations in the United States. Many experts believe it to be the seminal book on corporate social responsibility. 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, University of Denver, who is Howard R. Bowen's eldest son.

Author : Tom Campbell,Seumas Miller
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 250 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2006-02-25
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781402023613

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Human Rights and the Moral Responsibilities of Corporate and Public Sector Organisations by Tom Campbell,Seumas Miller Pdf

All students and advocates of human rights will be interested in this concerted exploration of the human rights moral obligations that fall, not directly on states, but on private and public organisations. Such an approach to human rights opens up the possibility of holding corporations and bureaucracies to account for human rights violations even when they have acted in accordance with the law. This interdisciplinary and international project brings together eminent philosophers, lawyers, social scientists and practitioners to articulate theoretically and develop in practical contexts the moral implications of human rights for non-state actors. What emerges from the book as a whole is a distinctive contemporary vision of the emerging moral impact of human rights and its significance for organisational behaviour and performance.

Author : Lawrence J. Gitman,Carl Mcdaniel,Amit Shah
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2023-05-19
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 1998109313

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Introduction to Business by Lawrence J. Gitman,Carl Mcdaniel,Amit Shah Pdf

Author : Joseph Heath
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 425 pages
File Size : 40,6 Mb
Release : 2014
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780199990481

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Morality, Competition, and the Firm by Joseph Heath Pdf

"The essays by Joseph Heath collected in this volume collectively present a program in business ethics that he calls the "market failures" approach. They develop a theoretical framework that lies between two opposing positions in business ethics -- on one hand the "stakeholder" theory, which identifies moral obligations within an organization by identifying its key groups, and the self-explanatory "shareholder primacy" theory. Heath's "market failures" approach lies between these approaches and argues that firms should be guided by the ideal of a perfectly competitive market, and that ethical behavior in this context consists primarily in refraining from taking advantage of imperfections in existing markets. Heath's approach puts particular emphasis on the market as a competitively structured interaction, with different duties owed to individuals inside and outside the firm, and explains why business managers cannot have fiduciary responsibilities toward every stakeholder group. His theory draws on recent work in adversarial ethics, welfare economics, agency theory, and the theory of the ferm, in order to provide an account of business ethics that can be integrated with recent thinking about corporate law and the normative basis of state regulation of the economy"--

Author : Asli Yüksel Mermod,Samuel O.Idowu
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 383 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2013-08-29
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9783642376207

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Corporate Social Responsibility in the Global Business World by Asli Yüksel Mermod,Samuel O.Idowu Pdf

This book provides an overview of the application of Corporate Social Responsibility in businesses and corporations around the world. Primarily based on real cases, it focuses on different approaches to CSR from a global perspective. It provides a critique of the “wrong” practices often employed even by multinational organizations, and highlights the resultant negative effects. On the other hand the book demonstrates good examples that can help multinationals or even entire countries to achieve both a better reputation and increased profitability. “CSR in the Global Business World” is a rich resource of illustrative cases, serving both as a basis for ongoing research as well as for teaching purposes at the business school level.