Both advocates of corporate regulation and its opponents tend to depict regulation as restrictive—a policy option that limits freedom in the name of welfare or other social goods. Against this framing, I suggest we can understand regulation in enabling terms. If well designed and properly enforced, regulation enables companies to operate in ways that are acceptable to society as a whole. This paper argues for this enabling character by considering some wider questions about responsibility and the sharing of responsibility. Agents (...) who are less able or willing to act well are obviously more likely to face criticism, mistrust, and adverse responses. It will be more difficult to hold those agents responsible, especially so when there are many who fail in their responsibilities or where there are wide-reaching disagreements about those responsibilities. Regulatory standards, like other norms and ways of defining responsibilities, address these problems: by restricting, they also enable social cooperation. Like other forms of holding responsible, ways of enforcing those standards against recalcitrant agents, or encouraging conformity to them, may also seem restrictive. Again, however, these practices play an important role in enabling responsible agency. This is partly because they can bolster readiness to act well in agents who experience or witness such responses. It is also because they free other agents to exercise initiative and commitment in defining their individual responsibilities in line with higher standards. (shrink)

The scale and asymmetry of commercial technology firms’ power over people through data, combined with the increasing involvement of the private sector in public governance, means that increasingly, people do not have the ability to opt out of engaging with technology firms. At the same time, those firms are increasingly intervening on the population level in ways that have implications for social and political life. This creates the potential for power relations of domination, and demands that we decide what constitutes (...) the legitimacy to act on the public. Business ethics and private law are not designed to answer these questions, which are primarily political. If people have lost the right to disengage with commercial technologies, we may need to hold the companies that offer them to the same standards to which we hold the public sector. This paper first defines the problem and demonstrates that it is significant and widespread, and then argues for the development of an overarching normative framework for what constitutes non-domination with regard to digital technologies. Such a framework must involve a nuanced idea of political power and accountability that can respond not only to the legality of corporate behaviour, but to its legitimacy. (shrink)

The term social license is generally understood as an intangible representation of ongoing approval or acceptance of a project by affected communities, which can be withdrawn at any time, distinct from a legal or regulatory license granted by a government. This paper looks at the concept through the lens of the extractive sector in the developing world and explores the history of violations of land and human rights of indigenous and rural communities living around these resources. While corporate actors often (...) maintain that acquiring a social license is voluntary and different from obtaining consent, this paper suggests instead that the idea of a license that can be withdrawn represents an assertion of power by people whose land and human rights have been consistently violated, and a recognition of that power by the corporate sector. This article will explore the relationship between the need for a social license and institutional characteristics related to land rights; the FPIC and CSR constructs as respo.. (shrink)

Pharmaceutical companies developed Covid-19 vaccines in record time. However, it soon became apparent that global access to the vaccines was inequitable. Through a qualitative inquiry as the pandemic unfolded (to mid-2021), we provide an in-depth analysis of why companies engaged with the Covid-19 Vaccines Global Access Facility (COVAX), identifying the internal (to the company) and external factors that facilitated or impeded engagement. While all producers of the World Health Organization (WHO)-approved vaccines engaged with COVAX, our analysis highlights the differential levels (...) of COVAX engagement and identifies contractual obligations, opportunities and company strategy, and reputational pressures as key explanatory factors. We discuss our empirical findings relative to the literature on political corporate social responsibility (PCSR). Accordingly, we question whether pharmaceutical companies lived up to their responsibilities as corporate citizens and conclude that they failed to fulfill the implied responsibility of combating inequitable vaccine distribution. We conclude with implications of our research for practice, in relation to the challenges of global access to Covid-19 vaccines and for access to medicines more generally. (shrink)

Medical artificial intelligence (AI) is considered to be one of the most important assets for the future of innovative individual and public health care. To develop innovative medical AI, it is necessary to repurpose data that are primarily generated in and for the health care context. Usually, health data can only be put to a secondary use if data subjects provide their informed consent (IC). This regulation, however, is believed to slow down or even prevent vital medical research, including AI (...) development. For this reason, a number of scholars advocate a moral civic duty to share electronic health records (EHRs) that overrides IC requirements in certain contexts. In the medical AI context, the common arguments for such a duty have not been subjected to a comprehensive challenge. This article sheds light on the correlation between two normative discourses concerning informed consent for secondary health record use and the development and use of medical AI. There are three main arguments in favour of a civic duty to support certain developments in medical AI by sharing EHRs: the ‘rule to rescue argument’, the ‘low risks, high benefits argument’, and the ‘property rights argument’. This article critiques all three arguments because they either derive a civic duty from premises that do not apply to the medical AI context, or they rely on inappropriate analogies, or they ignore significant risks entailed by the EHR sharing process and the use of medical AI. Given this result, the article proposes an alternative civic responsibility approach that can attribute different responsibilities to different social groups and individuals and that can contextualise those responsibilities for the purpose of medical AI development. (shrink)

How do social audiences negotiate and handle stigmatized organizations? What role do their heterogenous values, norms and power play in this process? Addressing these questions is important from a business ethics perspective to improve our understanding of the ethical standards against which organizations are judged as well as the involved prosecutorial incentives. Moreover, it illuminates ethical concerns about when and how power imbalances may induce inequity in the burdens imposed by such social evaluations. We address these questions building on two (...) event-based case studies involving Hells Angels Motorcycle Club Norway, and contribute to organizational stigma theory in three ways. First, social evaluations of a stigmatized organization by multiple audiences are found to interact, collide and combine in a labelling contest. Second, we show that labels employed in this contest are pushed to either negative extremes or positive extremes. Finally, we show when and how power represents a double-edged sword in social evaluation processes, which can be wielded either to the benefit or to the detriment of the actors under evaluation. (shrink)

In this introductory article we explore the relationship between statehood and governance, examining in more detail how non-state actors like MNCs, international NGOs, and indigenous authorities, often under conditions of extreme economic scarcity, ethnic diversity, social inequality and violence, take part in the making of rules and the provision of collective goods. Conceptually, we focus on the literature on Areas of Limited Statehood and discuss its usefulness in exploring how business-society relations are governed in the global South, and beyond. Building (...) on insights from this literature, among others, the four articles included in this special issue provide rich illustrations and critical reflections on the multiple, complex and often ambiguous roles of state and non-state actors operating in contemporary Syria, Nigeria, India and Palestine, with implications for conventional understandings of CSR, stakeholders, and related conceptualizations. (shrink)

In this research, we develop a reporting framework based on an ethical account of the Australian live sheep export industry’s current operations. We demonstrate that LSE operates within a legitimacy vacuum constituted by a repeated cycle of events that we characterize as scandal-response-obduracy with a constant factor being animal cruelty on an industrial scale. The lack of legitimacy is facilitated by an obdurate regulatory context, an absence of consumer awareness of industry practices, jurisdictional impediments to enforcement of animal cruelty laws (...) and foundational epistemic vices upon which the industry calculates an unethical cost benefit analysis of current practice. While legitimacy theory would expect demise of the LSE industry, its prolonged continuation is more than a curiosity. It presents an opportunity to understand how focus on vice epistemics and reporting of animal welfare may contribute to emancipatory change in the form of improved animal welfare in agricultural industries. (shrink)

AbstractSpirituality continues to exert a strong influence in people’s lives both in work and beyond. However, given that spirituality is often non-formalized and personal, we continue to know little about how moral reasoning is strategized. In this paper, we examine how Buddhist leader-practitioners interpret and operationalize a process of self-decentralization based upon Buddhist emptiness theory as a form of moral reasoning. We find that Buddhist leader-practitioners share a common understanding of a self-decentralized identity and operationalize self-decentralization through two practices in (...) Buddhist philosophy—skillful means and the middle way—to foreground social outcomes. However, we also find that practitioners face tensions and challenges in moral reasoning relates to agency—the ‘re-centering’ of the self as an enlightened self and the use of karmic reasoning to justify (un)ethical behavior—and contextual constraints that lead to feelings of vulnerability and exclusion. We present a model that elaborates these processes and invite further research that examines novel approaches and dynamic interpretations of the self in moral reasoning. (shrink)

Public pressure is essential for providing multinational enterprises (MNEs) with motivation to follow the standards of human rights conduct set in soft-law instruments, such as the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. But how does the public judge MNE involvement in human rights violations? We empirically answer this question drawing on an original survey of American adults. We asked respondents to judge over 12,000 randomly generated scenarios in which MNEs may be considered to have been involved in (...) human rights violations. Our findings reveal substantial gaps between public judgments and the standards set in soft law and the normative literature. We identify the attributes of episodes of human rights violations involving MNEs that influence public judgments, including the relationship between the MNE and the perpetrator, the practice of due diligence, and the type of abuse. These results provide insights as to when we might expect public pressure to drive MNE compliance with soft-law instruments, and they direct attention to specific standards that will likely require stronger, ‘hard’ law approaches or broader efforts to shift the public’s view. (shrink)

Debates about terrorism and technology often focus on the potential uses of technology by non-state terrorist actors and by states as forms of counterterrorism. Yet, little has been written about how technology shapes how we think about terrorism. In this chapter I argue that technology, and the language we use to talk about technology, constrains and shapes our understanding of the nature, scope, and impact of terrorism, particularly in relation to state terrorism. After exploring the ways in which technology shapes (...) moral thinking, I use two case studies to demonstrate how technology simultaneously hides and enables terroristic forms of state violence: police control technologies and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or drones. In both these cases, I argue that features of these technologies, combined with a narrative of precision and efficiency, serves to mask the terroristic nature of the violence that these practices inflict and reinforces the moral exclusion of those against whom these technologies are deployed. In conclusion, I propose that identifying acts of terrorism requires a focus on the impact of technologies of violence (whether they are “high tech” or not) on those most affected, regardless of whether users of these technologies conceive of their actions as terroristic. (shrink)