Moral Agency in Charities and Business Corporations: Exploring the Constraints of Law and Regulation

Abstract

For centuries in the UK and elsewhere, charities have been widely regarded as admirable and virtuous organisations. Business corporations, by contrast, have been characterised in the popular imagination as entities that lack a capacity for moral judgement. Drawing on the philosophical literature on the moral agency of organisations, we examine how the law shapes the ability of charities and business corporations headquartered in England to exercise moral agency. Paradoxically, we find that charities are legally constrained in exercising moral agency in ways in which business corporations are not. Implications for charities and business corporations are then explored.

The Ethical Dimension in Corporate and Management Behavior

“…Along this line, it is possible to view different academic papers of special interest which have been published in recent decades (Burke and Logsdon 1996;Burton and Mansell 2019;Carroll 1989Carroll , 1999Crane et al 2014;Donaldson and Dunfee 1994;Freeman et al 2004;Hart 2005;McWilliams and Siegel 2001;Porter and Kramer 2006;Windsor 2006), all of them feature business ethics as the central focus of their research and they can be divided into two major aspects, both with the same interest (Donaldson and Dunfee 1994, 252-253): which investigates based on a legislative focus which is essentially founded on philosophy and which it supports to profoundly explore the matters related to ethics in corporations, in empirical techniques, and in the specific theoretical framework of management and market studies.…”

To Be or Not to Be Governed Like That? Harmful and/or Offensive Advertising Complaints in the United Kingdom’s (Self-) Regulatory Context

“…1 By routinely playing the risks of private offences off against the rewards of positive public outcomes (Jones and van Putten 2008;Parry et al 2013; see also Charry et al 2014;Pratt and James 1994;West and Sargeant 2004), the non-commercial sector provides particularly compelling insights into the systems of governance over which the UK's Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) presides. It stands to reason that given the absence of the profit motive, the non-commercial sector foregrounds ethical considerations that are not reducible to the profit motive (Burt and Mansell 2019).…”

Rethinking Corporate Agency in Business, Philosophy, and Law

“…A consensus has not been reached, and while interest in the subject has somewhat subsided (Moriarty 2016), it has not disappeared (e.g. Moore 1999;Danley 1999;Velasquez 2003;Altman 2007;Ashman and Wistanley 2007;Watson, Freeman and Parmar 2008;3 Dubbink and Smith 2011;Rönnegard 2013;Lampert, 2016;Bowie 2017;Burt and Mansell 2017).…”