Several European and North American states encourage or even require, via good Samaritan and duty to rescue laws, that persons assist others in distress. This paper offers a utilitarian and contractualist defense of this view as applied to corporations. It is argued that just as we should sometimes frown on bad Samaritans who fail to aid persons in distress, we should also frown on bad corporate Samaritans who neglect to use their considerable multinational power to undertake disaster relief or to (...) confront widespread social ills such as those currently befalling public health (obesity) and the environment (climate change). As such, the corporate duty to assist approach provides a novel justification for sustainable business practices in such cases. The paper concludes by arguing that traditional stakeholder approaches have not articulated this duty of assistance obligation, though a new utilitarian stakeholder theory by Thomas Jones and Will Felps may be coextensive. (shrink)

Are corporations ever morally obligated to engage in counterspeech—that is, in speech that aims to counter hate speech and misinformation? While existing arguments in moral and political philosophy show that individuals and states have such obligations, it is an open question whether those arguments apply to corporations as well. In this essay, I show how two such arguments—one based on avoiding complicity, and one based on duties of rescue—can plausibly be extended to corporations. I also respond to several objections to (...) corporate counterspeech. (shrink)

In ways accentuated by the global coronavirus pandemic, corporations constitute vital instruments of the acts of beneficence needed by the people of the world to make progress in public health and increase collective and individual well-being. This article contributes to understanding the variety of moral forces that may lead corporations to commit acts of beneficence, including Friedman’s business case for corporate beneficence, the duty of beneficence as developed by business ethicists, and Dunfee’s social contract account of corporate obligation. Whereas Mejia (...) recently contributed to scholarship on corporate beneficence by expressly adopting shareholder primacy’s conception of corporate governance, this article embraces a stakeholder-oriented, managerialist picture of corporate governance. I extend the literature on beneficence by incorporating what I argue is the intuition underlying Dunfee’s contractualist formula of minimal contribution, namely that management’s duty to do good is awakened and unshackled to the extent management judges the corporation can afford to commit acts of beneficence, all stakeholders considered. The all-stakeholders-considered case for corporate beneficence compels management to act, I argue, when inaction would undermine the moral integrity of managers personally committed to promoting the well-being of humanity. (shrink)