15 - The Ethics of Business Organizations Is Called Corporate Responsibility

Summary

The broad vision of wealth creation and human rights developed in Part One and Two is now applied to the ethics of business organizations, which is called “corporate responsibility.” Based on Walter Schulz, the concept of responsibility is defined as a relational concept: the subject of responsibility (who is responsible), the content of responsibility (for what one is responsible) and the addressee (toward whom one is responsible). It involves an inner pole (“self-commitment originating out of freedom”) and an outer pole (“in a worldly relationship”) in critique of Max Weber’s separation of the ethics of convictions versus the ethics of responsibility. In an analogous sense, responsibility characterizes the ethics of business organizations, which is the same term used by the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. The chapter develops several ethical explications of the Guiding Principles and concludes with the concept of “corporate responsibility” adopted in this book.