Corporate social responsibility and the value of corporate moral pragmatism

Abstract

The question of corporate social responsibility today is widely acknowledged to have become a pragmatic one. That is to say that considerations over how corporate social responsibility should be have become prioritised over discussions concerning whether it should be. In this paper I evaluate whether this recently attained pragmatic disposition gives cause for enthusiasm. This evaluation begins by outlining the manner in which the notion of corporate moral personhood, read here largely through the conceptual framework of corporate conscience, has been opposed, in principle, to Milton Friedman's contractually derived critique of corporate social responsibility. Having identified the nature of the opposition offered by advocates of the conscientious framework to Friedman's contractual framework the paper then demonstrates, via Nietzsche, the manner in which these supposed opponents can actually be understood as fundamentally interconnected. The paper then turns, penultimately, towards a discussion of the manner in which the pragmatic opposition to Friedman is primarily based upon the popularisation of the belief that he is wrong to define the social responsibilities of business in the way that he does. The paper is brought to a close through an evaluation of moral pragmatism, as it has been recently conceived, within this particular context.

Keywords:

• corporate social responsibility
• corporate moral personhood
• corporate conscience
• moral pragmatism
• Milton Friedman
• Friedrich Nietzsche

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the editors and reviewers for their many helpful comments and suggestions. He would also like to thank all of his colleagues who gave their time to various forms of the argument given here, Nick Butler not least of all.

Notes

1. Goodpaster has since elaborated upon this idea of a projectable corporate conscience, applied it to a set of contemporary examples and published it in the form of a monograph (2006). In her review of this work, Rachel Browne (2006) argues that it ‘illustrates vividly that business ethics is both possible and desirable’, whereas elsewhere, William Frederick holds the work in even higher regard, casting the notion of corporate conscience as one of the major ‘conceptual foundations of inquiry into the normative practices of large business corporations’ (2007).

2. The work of Campbell Jones (especially Jones 2003 and Jones 2007) has done much to bring such concerns to light.