Human rights as a normative basis for stakeholder legitimacy

Abstract

This article discusses the appeal of human rights as a normative basis for stakeholder claims in the context of international business. This appeal to human rights has proven to be an effective way to legitimize (in the sociological sense) the claims of stakeholders due to their proclaimed universal validity and the media interest in stories about human right violations. A problem for corporations that have to deal with claims based on human rights is that there seems to be little room to weigh these claims against the corporation’s interest and other stakeholder claims, since human rights are believed to override self‐interest. Furthermore, stakeholder theory as it stands, does not provide for a criterion to weigh human rights claims against the claims of (other) stakeholders. Following recent versions of stakeholder theory, claims based solely on human rights do not even qualify some person or group as a stakeholder. So the position of human rights‐based claims within organizational ethics remains unclear in stakeholder theory. The question this article tries to answer, is whether a corporation has a moral obligation to fulfil claims that are based solely on human rights and how this relates to the obligations a firm has to its stakeholders.