Abstract
Over the past decades, the modernization of agriculture in the Western world has contributed not only to a rapid increase in food production but also to environmental and societal concerns over issues such as greenhouse gas emissions, soil quality and biodiversity loss. Many of these concerns, for example those related to animal welfare or labor conditions, are stuck in controversies and apparently deadlocked debates. As a result we observe a paradox in which a wide range of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, originally seeking to reconnect agriculture and society, frequently provoke debate, conflict, and protests. In order to make sense of this pattern, the present paper contends that Western agriculture is marked by moral complexity, i.e., the tendency of multiple legitimate moral standpoints to proliferate without the realistic prospect of a consensus. This contention is buttressed by a conceptual framework that draws inspiration the contemporary business ethics and systems-theoretic scholarship. From the systems-theoretic point of view, the evolution of moral complexity is traced back to the processes of agricultural modernization, specialization, and differentiation, each of which suppresses the responsiveness of the economic and legal institutions to the full range of societal and environmental concerns about agriculture. From the business ethics point of view, moral complexity is shown to prevent the transformation of the ethical responsibilities into the legal and economic responsibilities despite the ongoing institutionalization of CSR. Navigating moral complexity is shown to require moral judgments which are necessarily personal and contestable. These judgments are implicated in those CSR initiatives that require dealing with trade-offs among the different sustainability issues.
Highlights
Modernization of European agriculture since the 1950s has contributed to a rapid increase in crop yields and livestock productivity
The paradoxical yet recurrent pattern of the agriculture in the West is that the wide range of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, originally seeking to reconnect agriculture and society, frequently provoke debate, conflict, and protests
These patterns provide the essential empirical inspiration for the hypothesis that the apparent failure of CSR initiatives to resolve the numerous tensions between agriculture and society is due to the state of moral complexity as a premier character of Western agriculture
Summary
Modernization of European agriculture since the 1950s has contributed to a rapid increase in crop yields and livestock productivity. The disconnect between farmer and consumer has made consumers increasingly dependent on such initiatives from producers and retailers to gain insight in how their food has been produced, based on what farming practices and values (Wiskerke 2009) These important developments notwithstanding, the contribution of the present paper is in exploring the hypothesis that the potential of the agricultural CSR to resolve the numerous tensions between agriculture and society is inherently limited. If Western agriculture exhibits moral complexity, this complexity can be less plausibly attributed to extraneous influences, of political or other nature, while being much more likely indicative of the potentially precarious and disruptive relationship between agriculture and society as theorized e.g. by Thompson (2010)
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