For-Profit Corporations in a Just Society: A Social Contract Argument Concerning the Rights and Responsibilities of Corporations

Abstract

This article develops contractarian business ethics by applying social contract arguments to a specific question: What are the pre-legal (or moral) rights and responsibilities of corporations? The argument uses a hypothetical social contract to show the existence of for-profit corporations in democratic capitalist societies is consistent with Rawls’s fundamental principles of justice. Corporations ought to have recognised their rights to be autonomous, to pursue private purposes, and to engage in economic activities. Corporations have a responsibility to respect the freedom and human rights of all people, and not to interfere with government programs that ensure people have the education and training they need to find and keep corporate employment and that provide a safety-net that prevents destitution. If corporations have any other rights and responsibilities, those rights and responsibilities need to be established by actual social contracts, probably in the form of legitimate democratic processes.

Political Corporate Social Responsibility: Reviewing Theories and Setting New Agendas

“…In this context, applications of political theories such as Habermasian Deliberative Democracy (Baur and Palazzo *; Mena and Palazzo *; Scherer and Palazzo *; Scherer et al . *), the Rawlsian Theory of Justice (Bishop *; Cohen *; Hsieh *; Mäkinen and Kourula *) and Neo‐Gramscianism (Levy *; Levy and Egan *) can offer alternative macro‐level frameworks for theorizing political CSR.…”

Distributive Justice with Production and the Social Contract. An Experimental Study

“…Secondly, our study gives more substance to the 'social contract approach' to business ethics. With this expression we refer to the so-called Social Contract tradition in Business Ethics (Wempe 2005), as most notably represented by Donaldson (1982), Donaldson and Dunfee (1999), Phillips (2003), Evan and Freeman (1988), Freeman (1994), Bishop (2008), Lütge (2012Lütge ( , 2015. More specifically, however, we draw on Sacconi's view of the firm as an institution that can be normatively reconstructed as the result of a constitutional agreement among its essential stakeholders (Sacconi 2000(Sacconi , 2006(Sacconi , 2011a.…”

Irresponsibility through Corporate Eyes: Reporting of Human Rights Compliance by Spanish Listed Companies

“…Most papers examine the issue from a legal point of view, rather than seeing it as a managerial issue. It has been established that human rights, as detailed in the Universal Declaration adopted in 1948 by the United Nations, represent a global normative framework for all organisations, given that they are regarded as core values applicable to all religions and cultures (Bishop, 2008;Carasco and Singh, 2008). In addition, non-state actors (such as Amnesty International or the Centre for Business and Human Rights) have also campaigned to hold corporations accountable to human rights standards (Chandler, 2009;Sullivan, 2003;Watts, 2005).…”

“…The economic motivation cannot be the ultimate reason: companies should comply with Human Rights because they have to, not because it is profitable to do so (Wouters and Chanet, 2008). Human rights should be regarded as hypernorms, applying prior to the law: firms must not violate them, whether or not they are recognised in national laws (Bishop, 2008), or whether or not this impacts positively the bottom-line (Wouters and Chanet, 2008). This is a controversial but a key issue from a conceptual point of view.…”