Download Ethics of Corporate Social Responsibility: Altruistic, Ethical, and Strategic Approaches and more Slides Biotechnology in PDF only on Docsity! Ethics of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Docsity.com Corporate Social Responsibility • Company’s decision to significantly increase beneficial impacts and/or significantly decrease harmful impacts to stakeholders in society. • Stakeholders: investors, employees, suppliers/distributors (i.e. anyone in value chain), consumers, and residual of society. – Can also include temporal dimension: present and future generations (superset of sustainable development and intergenerational equity). ⊇ Docsity.com CSR Ethics • Ethical dilemmas? Companies have to provide a return on investment for shareholders, so can they engage in activities designed to benefit society? – Shareholders vs. other stakeholders? Docsity.com • Management and Ethics Literature Review: – Two main, extreme “camps”: (1) Corporations should profit-maximize. • Responsibility to shareholders, businesses are specialized for business and not other purposes, agency costs, existence of welfare state and corporate taxes. (2) Corporations should be responsible to other stakeholders. • Corporations are influential, extended public governance, extended stakeholder theory and game-theoretical derivation of neo-institutional social contract. – At least in some cases, there is a business case for CSR. Some possible mechanisms: corporate reputation, long- term sustainability. Is there anything we can add? Docsity.com • Begin with a version of utilitarianism close to economics, and therefore reasonable, comprehensible, and persuasive to corporations: (a) Maximize shareholder utility value, not $$$. -Thus, takes a very conservative position. (b) Preference utilitarianism. (c) Rule utilitarianism = act utilitarianism. (d) Negative utilitarianism. Docsity.com Strategic CSR • When profit intention is aligned with societal interests • Conservative position: ethically mandated all the time • Liberal position: ethically permissible all the time • SFU: ethically mandated, depending on whether utility- maximization for shareholders gives same result as profit- maximization. – Example: purchasing a tobacco company. Depends on utility indifference map, as well as future utility (because of, e.g., public pressure and corporate reputation). Docsity.com Result Altruistic CSR Ethical CSR Strategic CSR Conservative Unethical Mandated “ethical custom” Mandated Liberal Permissible Mandated Value-based Permissible SFU Situation- dependent Situation- dependent Situation- dependent Docsity.com Conservative
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