Corporations in the Moral Community
Author: Peter A. French
Publisher: Harcourt Brace College Publishers
Published: 1992
Total Pages: 194
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: Peter A. French
Publisher: Harcourt Brace College Publishers
Published: 1992
Total Pages: 194
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: Thomas Donaldson
Publisher: Englewood Cliffs, N.J. : Prentice-Hall
Published: 1982
Total Pages: 225
ISBN-13: 0131770144
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: David Rönnegard
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2015-05-12
Total Pages: 225
ISBN-13: 9401797560
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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: Eric W. Orts
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017
Total Pages: 246
ISBN-13: 0198738536
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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: A. C. Fernando
Publisher: Pearson Education India
Published: 2009
Total Pages: 265
ISBN-13: 8131786692
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Is profit-making the only goal of a business? Should an unbridled market mechanism drive corporate enterprise? To what extent should corporations compensate for the manifest and hidden costs that are incurred by the society at large? These are some of the questions that have engaged specialist economists, business barons, corporate heads and management experts for decades. Corporate Ethics, Governance, and Social Responsibility: Precepts and Practices addresses these issues and deals with three key concepts impacting contemporary businesses: business or corporate ethics, corporate governance, and corporate social responsibility.
Author: Marion Smiley
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2009-09-15
Total Pages: 297
ISBN-13: 0226763250
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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: Norman E. Bowie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2017-02-16
Total Pages: 235
ISBN-13: 110712090X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book applies the latest studies on Kantian ethics to show how a business can maintain economic success and moral integrity.
Author: Linda K. Trevino
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2016-09-13
Total Pages: 491
ISBN-13: 111919430X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Revised edition of the authors' Managing business ethics, [2014]
Author: Peter A. French
Publisher: Wadsworth Publishing Company
Published: 1995
Total Pages: 442
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Peter French, drawing on his extensive experience in the fields of business and applied ethics, has created a comprehensive view of corporate ethics that focuses on the nature of a corporation, how it is defined, and who are the players. By introducing the idea that corporations--not just the people running them--are moral actors, he offers a unique theory of a corporation.