Corporate And Cooperative Social Responsibility

Abstract

The paper analyses corporate ethics as a tool to ensure discipline as well as a mechanism of cooperation, self-organization in a corporate community based on joint moral values of an organization and a mechanism that can be used to implement corporate social obligations towards society. A corporation is treated in the paper as a subject of social and moral responsibility. The problem of the moral status of corporations was first formulated in the 1970s, but it is as challenging today. There are two views under analysis: 1) proper subjects of moral responsibility could be only individuals and 2) proper subjects of moral responsibility could be collectives or groups of individuals, for example corporations. The first group of researchers claim that the primary objective of a corporation is increasing profits, therefore a corporation cannot be a subject of moral assessment and cannot bear moral responsibility. They acknowledge that the employees of a corporation also do not take moral responsibility for their actions, they have no “independence” and cannot make a moral assessment of their actions as they perform the functions determined by the company objectives. The second group of researchers argue that a corporation is a subject of moral responsibility and should be conscious of its moral responsibility performing as expected by society. A corporation is regarded by the authors of the paper as a subject of moral responsibility. A corporation should solve social problems voluntarily and willingly, that is, it should recognize its moral responsibility towards different groups of stakeholders.