Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T06:14:23.990Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

John Douglas Bishop
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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.

Type
Articles
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , April 2008 , pp. 191 - 212
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bandura, A. 2002. “Selective Moral Disengagement in the Exercise of Moral Agency,” Journal of Moral Education 31(2): 101–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bishop, J. D. 2000. “A Framework for Discussing Normative Theories of Business Ethics,” Business Ethics Quarterly 10(3): 563–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boadway, R. W., and Bruce, N. 1984. Welfare Economics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell).Google Scholar
Brock, G. 1998. “Are Corporations Morally Defensible?” Business Ethics Quarterly 8(4): 703–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Donaldson, T. 1982. Corporations and Morality(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall).Google Scholar
Donaldson, T.. 1989. The Ethics of International Business (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Donaldson, T., and Dunfee, T. W. 1994. “Toward a Unified Conception of Business Ethics: Integrative Social Contracts Theory,” Academy of Management Review 19(2): 252–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Donaldson, T., and Dunfee, T. W.. 1995. “Integrative Social Contracts Theory: A Communitarian Conception of Economic Ethics,” Economics and Philosophy 11: 85–112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Donaldson, T., and Dunfee, T. W.. 1999. Ties That Bind: A Social Contracts Approach to Business Ethics (Boston: Harvard Business School Press).Google Scholar
Dunfee, T. W. 1991. “Business Ethics and Extant Social Contracts,” Business Ethics Quarterly 1: 23–51.Google Scholar
Friedman, M. 1970. “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” The New York Times Magazine (September 13).Google Scholar
Hobbes, T. 1968 (1651). Leviathan (Baltimore: Penguin Books).Google Scholar
Locke, J. 1988 (1690). Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter, Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
Malcolm, J. 1994. “Do Corporations Have Rights?” Undergraduate thesis, Murdoch University. Available at www.terminus.net.au/thesis (accessed June 15, 2006).Google Scholar
Mayer, C. J. 1990. “Personalizing the Impersonal: Corporations and the Bill of Rights,” The Hastings Law Journal 41: 577–667.Google Scholar
McKie, R. 2004. “Lifespan Crisis Hits Supersize America,” Guardian Unlimited (September 19). Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1307954,00.html (accessed December 11, 2007).Google Scholar
Mercuro, N., and Medema, S.G. 1997. Economics and the Law: From Posner to Postmodernism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press).Google Scholar
Perrow, C. 2002. Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press).Google Scholar
Rawls, J. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sims, R. R. 1992. “Linking Groupthink to Unethical Behavior in Organizations,” Journal of Business Ethics 11: 651–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wempe, B. 2005. “In Defense of a Self-Disciplined, Domain-Specific Social Contract Theory of Business Ethics,” Business Ethics Quarterly 15(2): 113–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williamson, O. E. 1991. “The Logic of Economic Organization,” in The Nature of the Firm: Origins, Evolution and Development, ed. Williamson, O. E. and Winter, S. G. (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 90–116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar