Society for Business Ethics 2024 Annual Meeting

Paper Abstracts: Session 9

Session 9A: Who Owns The Corporation?

• Defending That Shareholders Own The Corporation
  • Who owns the corporation is a very important question, with implications for economics, corporate law, management, and business ethics. Among the general public it is usually taken for granted that shareholders are the corporation’s owners. Several influential legal and corporate governance scholars have provided a battery of arguments criticizing this view, arguments that have become widely accepted by the business ethics community. In this paper I seek to challenge some of these arguments and to vindicate the public opinion.
• Corporation As Principal: The Ethics Of Governing The Self-Owning Firm
  • Lynn Stout has forcefully argued that the shareholder primacy view of the corporation misunderstands corporate law. She argues against the common view that corporations contain an agency relationship between shareholder-principals who hire directors to serve as their agents. Shareholders, she claims, do not own the corporation, and thus cannot serve as the principal in the corporate agency relationship. Rather, the corporation owns itself, and the corporate agency relationship is best understood as agent-directors (and executives) making decisions on behalf of the corporate entity-principal. The purpose of this paper is to explore the normative implications of Stout’s understanding the corporate entity as the principal in an agency relationship. We argue that Stout’s account of the business corporation ends up being insufficiently sensitive to real constraints on corporate purpose. Duties of directors and executives to the corporate principal constrain in significant ways the purposes that it is permissible for agents of the corporation to pursue.
• Reading Milton Friedman Liberally: Friedman And The Doux Commerce Thesis
  • The present manuscript is a proposal on how to read and teach Milton Friedman’s famous 1970 piece, “The Social Responsibility Of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” Namely, my argument is that his thesis can only be fully understood, appreciated, and adequately responded to if two conditions are fulfilled. The first is the more minor point that one ought to read him in a generous or openhanded fashion, according to the principle of charity. The second is that to do so, one ought to read him against the backdrop of what used to be referred to as a liberal education, with an emphasis on the doux commerce thesis. In other words, we need to read him liberally in two senses of the word. Reading and teaching him in this way does not necessitate that the reader go on to endorse his account of managerial responsibility. It does, however, help the reader to better understand the stakes in the argument and to appreciate its force. It also points to some interesting reinterpretations of the corporate social responsibility debate.

Session 9B: Human Rights And Collective Moral Responsibility

• Unmasking Exclusion: A Normative Critique Of Human Rights, Due Diligence And Its Implications For Business And Human Rights
• Mopping The Floors Or Putting A Man On The Moon? Self-Narrative And The Scope Of Individual Moral Responsibility For Collective Actions
  • Much of what we do, we do together. This raises the question of what moral responsibility individuals have for collective actions. Recent discussions have largely ignored the psychology of participants in collective behavior. Some people act through their collective as if it were a tool; some see themselves as mere cogs in a machine; others see themselves as helping their collective achieve its ends. I argue that these perspectives affect an individual’s moral responsibility for the actions of their collective. These perspectives vary independently of the individual’s level of power, causal impact, or hierarchical position in the collective. Instead, they reflect the self-narratives people adopt as they engage in collective activity. Self-narratives play an important role in coordinating collective behavior; they also have a deep and pervasive impact on individuals’ experiences and intentions. I build on these considerations to present a narrative-based account of individual moral responsibility for collective actions.
• Individual-Systemic Responsibility For Climate Change: A Normative-Ethical Analysis
  • Our common-sense responsibility concepts, it has been argued, prevent us from generating effective solutions to the climate change challenge. In response to this problem, I propose a new principle, namely individual-systemic responsibility, designed to address four key issues: harm recipient identifiability; identifiability of cause-harm relation; ‘just’ attribution and distribution of responsibility; and, blameworthiness. Individual-systemic responsibility is applicable to all social agents, from individual consumers and citizens to global corporations, under a general norm of equality in care and participative justice. This principle can be used to identify leverage points in steering social interdependencies from climate-harmful to climate-benign practices; to generate an order of (dis)engagement, when combined with considerations of opportunity and means; and to provide a normative basis for engaging social agents (from individual consumers to global corporations) in systemically responsible behaviors and practices.

Session 9C: Boycotting, Political Advocacy, And Russia

• What Makes A Boycott Impermissible? A Practical Reasoning Approach
  • In this paper I want to reset the vantage point for analyzing boycotts away from one that asks whether a boycott serves the intrinsic value of democracy (Hussain, 2012) to one that asks whether a boycott serves the intrinsic value of commercial freedom. The shift in direction, as I will explain, brings the center of the problem into better focus, and expands the pool of possible solutions. In doing so, I will specify a moral logic for practical reasoning that helps sort out moral conflicts among values in boycott problems, a logic that rests on a process of practical reasoning (Horty, 2012; Mullins, 2020). These conclusions contrast with Hussain’s conclusions at key junctures. First, my approach expands the domain of boycott cases to include non-traditional nation state structures, such as in the instance of pro-Palestinian boycotts. Next, my approach holds that boycotts such as the American Family Association’s boycott of companies such as Walt Disney for its perceived non-Christian policies are morally permissible. On the account I will offer, many boycotts may be morally wrong, misguided, or factually inaccurate, without thereby being morally impermissible.
• Does Corporate Political Advocacy Wrong Shareholders?
  • Corporations are increasingly taking stands on contentious social and political issues such as racial justice, abortion, and LGBTQ+ rights. Critics of such corporate political advocacy often allege that it is incompatible with corporate obligations to shareholders. This essay argues that those critics are mistaken. More specifically, this essay examines whether corporate political advocacy violates two important rights of shareholders: the right to have the corporation managed in their interests, and the right against being compelled to support political speech with which they disagree. I argue that corporate political advocacy is often fully compatible with both of those rights. In other words, I argue that corporate political advocacy is often consistent with managers’ fiduciary duty to shareholders, and that it typically does not constitute compelled speech.
• To Withdraw Or Not To Withdraw. The Responsibility Of Multinational Companies In The Russo-Ukrainian War
  • In this paper, I argue that the question of whether multinational corporations (MNCs) should withdraw from Russia due to the Russo-Ukrainian War is not straightforward. I examine the moral responsibilities of MNCs in the context of this conflict, highlighting the complexity of their potential roles as economic and political agents. I distinguish between companies directly contributing to human rights violations, which have a moral duty to withdraw, and those providing essential goods or services, which have a duty to continue operations. Additionally, I explore the position of companies that are neither directly involved in the conflict nor essential to the wellbeing of the population, suggesting that both decisions – stay or leave – are morally permissible, as long as they fulfill a duty of reparation. By critiquing the simplistic view that all MNCs should withdraw, I emphasize the importance of a nuanced approach that considers the specific impact of each corporation’s actions on human rights.

Session 9D: Emerging Scholars 4

• Business Realism: A New Movement In Business Theory
• Because Bright Lies Shine On: Epistemology For Organisations – A Research Project On The Derivation Of Organisational Epistemic Responsibilities And On Opportunities To Foster Reliable Information Exchange
• Who’s In, Who’s Out, And How Do Values Come Into Play There? Exploring Partner Selection Dynamics In Multi-Stakeholder Collaborations For Tackling Grand Challenges

Session 9E: Panel 6

• Results Of The Global Survey 2022-2024 From Africa, Europe, South America And North America