Corporate social responsibility and the value of corporate moral pragmatism

Abstract

The question of corporate social responsibility today is widely acknowledged to have become a pragmatic one. That is to say that considerations over how corporate social responsibility should be have become prioritised over discussions concerning whether it should be. In this paper I evaluate whether this recently attained pragmatic disposition gives cause for enthusiasm. This evaluation begins by outlining the manner in which the notion of corporate moral personhood, read here largely through the conceptual framework of corporate conscience, has been opposed, in principle, to Milton Friedman's contractually derived critique of corporate social responsibility. Having identified the nature of the opposition offered by advocates of the conscientious framework to Friedman's contractual framework the paper then demonstrates, via Nietzsche, the manner in which these supposed opponents can actually be understood as fundamentally interconnected. The paper then turns, penultimately, towards a discussion of the manner in which the pragmatic opposition to Friedman is primarily based upon the popularisation of the belief that he is wrong to define the social responsibilities of business in the way that he does. The paper is brought to a close through an evaluation of moral pragmatism, as it has been recently conceived, within this particular context.