Business Ethics Journal Review

Much of the attention of ethics scholars has focused on balancing self interest with the interests of others, equating self-interest with profit, or at least its acquisition, and presenting a dilemma to both companies and the stakeholder groups that socially responsible business practices might serve. We are in significant agreement with Porter and Kramer’s silver bullet to correct decision making based solely on increasing profit: the creation of “shared value.” However, we suggest three significant points of deviation from this thesis, resulting from our discomfort with features of the mental model(s) that Porter and Kramer use to structure their argument.

Wayne Norman argues that there should be more similarity or unity between the justifications for markets and the extra-legal norms that apply to market agents. I question two aspects of his claim. First, why does Norman refer to this view as a view about the self-regulation of market agents? Agents could self-regulate with many different norms, not necessarily norms informed by the justifications for markets. Second, asking for more similarity might create problems in terms of the liberty of market agents to pursue other morally relevant objectives. How are we to balance these other relevant objectives and the objectives of markets?

Robert Mayer argues that certain kinds of high-interest payday loans should be legally prohibited. His reasoning is that such lending practices compel more solvent borrowers to cross-subsidize less solvent ones, and thus involve a kind of negative externality. But even if such crosssubsidization exists, I argue, this does not necessarily provide a ground for legal prohibition. Such behavior might be a necessary component of a competitive market that provides opportunities for mutually beneficial transactions to willing customers. And the alternative of a governmentmandated interest rate faces severe problems of its own.

Glen Whelan (2012) attempts to advance what he refers to as a “critical research agenda” for the “political perspective on corporate social responsibility (CSR).” Although I think his is a worthy attempt to build a political conception of the business firm and could represent a great intellectual journey, I make some remarks about the meaning and scope of this research agenda. My argument is simple: Rawlsian egalitarianism provides resources for a political theory of the business firm, but one that leads us in different directions than Whelan’s political CSR.

This discussion reviews Florian Wettstein’s conclusion that multinational corporations should assume greater “positive” obligations to protect against and remedy violations of human rights. It thereafter suggests an alternative to his defense that remains open to his conclusion, but sketches a moral, rather than political, grounding of those obligations.

Joseph Heath lumps in rent-seeking with cartelization, taking advantage of information asymmetries, seeking a monopoly position, and so on, as all instances of behaviour that can lead to market failures in his market failures approach to business ethics. The problem is that rent and rentseeking, when they fail to deliver socially desirable outcomes, are instances of government failure. I try to argue that this is so, offer an amendment to Heath’s approach, and then explain why accurately describing the failure matters.