Abstract
For years business ethics has limited the moral duties of (transnational) enterprises to negative duties. Over the last decade it has been argued that positive duties also befall commercial agents, at least when confronted with large scale public problems and when governments fail. The argument that enterprises have positive duties is often grounded in the political nature of commercial life. It is argued that agents must sometimes take over governmental responsibilities. The German republican tradition argues along these lines as does Nien-Hé Hsieh. Agents in commercial life are bound by positive duties because at some point they become citizens that must take on the responsibilities of the state. In this paper we leave undisputed the claim that corporations must acknowledge positive duties. However, we demonstrate that the political grounding fails, at least in the sense that this theory insufficiently acknowledges a long standing liberal tradition that vindicates apolitical markets and clear borderlines between politics and economics. We carve out an alternative route to the grounding of one specific positive duty—the duty to further justice. Our argument is based on the moral nature of commercial agents (including corporations) and tries to demonstrate that the duty to further justice ensues from liberalism. Taking a Kantian perspective, it conceptualizes the duty to further justice as a moral duty, orientated toward the political domain. It is grounded in the obligation to attain moral autonomy in the civil condition.
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Notes
Technically speaking Ruggie distinguishes legal norms and social norms (2009, p. 13; see also 2010, p. 12). He does not talk about moral norms, explicitly. However, it seems that Ruggie interprets “social norms” in a way that equals or includes moral norms. This happens for example when he refers to the U.N. charters for a listing of human rights that corporations must take into account.
Even if it also must be demonstrated that corporations can be political agents and that a politics can be conceptualized independently of morality.
Donaldson (1989) constitutes an exception. He does reject positive duties for corporations on account of their limited personality.
“Wo der Markt seiner Eigengesetzlichkeit überlassen ist, kennt er nur Ansehen der Sache, keine Ansehen der Person, keine Brüderlichkeits- und Pietätspflichten, keine der Urwüchsigen, von den Persönlichen Gemeinschaften getragenen menschlichen Beziehungen. … Der freie … Markt … gilt jeder Ethik als unter Brüdern Verworfen.”
Scherer and Palazzo do not use the term “orthodoxy”. They oppose “liberalism”. However, the core of what we refer to as orthodoxy, they refer to as liberalism. We do not follow them in their choice of terms. We think orthodoxy is a variant of liberalism. It does not equal liberalism. In fact, later on we try to use liberalism against orthodoxy.
To repeat: this is a formal argument that does not oppose the idea that in substantive terms, the dividing line between private and public may shift.
There is one difference between the two approaches that we think is non-essential to our argument. Following Rawls, Hsieh clearly works from a federalist position. The world consists of various societies and human beings are primarily citizen of one such society. This means that in Hsieh’s thinking the owners of some international corporation owe a duty of assistance to people of burdened society (A) because the government of the corporate home country (B) fails to fulfill its duty to host country A. Scherer and Palazzo seem to take a more unitary cosmopolitan stance. As market agents are operating at the international level they are cosmopolitan citizens or citizens of all the countries in which they operate. Hence, they must assume political duties whenever any of these governments fail.
It is true that the prudent agent will realize that many agents will have motivational issues in living up to the duty to further justice. However, motivation is a separate matter. For now we are only underpinning the proposition that the prudent agent has reason to will that everybody acknowledges this duty.
As the concept “right” has so many meanings in moral theory, we write it with a capital R when we specifically employ it as an abbreviation Kant’s concept “the doctrine of right”. We do the same with Virtue as an abbreviation of “the doctrine of virtue”.
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank Jeff Frooman, Donald Loose, Jeffery Smith, Bert van de Ven and Ruud Welten for their thoughtful comments on earlier version of this paper.
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Dubbink, W., Van Liedekerke, L. Grounding Positive Duties in Commercial Life. J Bus Ethics 120, 527–539 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-013-2003-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-013-2003-9