My aim in this article is twofold. First, I will illuminate the triangular conceptual connections between responsibility, authority, and power as they are exposed in the organizational realm; second, I will show how the three concepts are distinct. Relying on the work of Peter Strawson and his followers on responsibility for my point of departure, I will show that the connection between the inner corporational authority and its inner matching responsibility is different from the connection between the outer corporational forces (...) and influences and the CSR that they develop in reaction to these. This will expose another important distinction between two kinds of responsibility: the organizational kind, as instantiated in organizations, and the social kind, which constitutes the outer aspect of the CSR. Though many thinkers address different kinds of responsibility, a comparative perspective of these different concepts is missing. I attempt to bring three of these separate discourses together to examine them alongside one another, evaluating them in the light of their differences and similarities. This will expose a new typology of ‘responsibility’ that penetrates and illuminates the relations between corporations and society and as such enhance our understanding of organizational responsibility. (shrink)

ABSTRACTStanley Hauerwas's contribution to the study of Christian ethics is analyzed in the course of offering an overview of his work, including his early reflections on “vision,”“narrative,” and moral agency; his continuing focus on Christian virtues and practices in contrast to the ethos of moral and political liberalism; and his specific attention to the meaning of peaceableness and the rejection of violence. The essay concludes by considering Hauerwas's legacy as a postliberal theologian, a critical participant in American Protestant ethics, and (...) a conversation partner with Roman Catholics. (shrink)

The nomenclature of the Anthropocene for this geological epoch marks in a novel way the global impact of human activity on the world. Consequently, it creatively raises the alarm bell of global environmental devastation. However, the narrative implicit in the Anthropocene presents challenges to use it as a departure point for developing an ethics of responsibility, as it contains morally relevant but ambiguous etiologies, phenomenological challenges to discrete human agency, and the potential erasure of both causes and victims of global (...) environmental degradation. This challenge compounds the challenges to traditional models of responsibility-as-imputation by global forms of environmental degradation signaled in the Anthropocene. Our new epoch demands new models of responsibility. This article draws upon neglected work by Paul Ricoeur to reconstruct a twofold model of responsibility: (1) responsibility-as-imputation and (2) responsibility for the fragile other and the domains that amplify fragility. It shows that a twofold model can more completely respond to harms elicited by anthropogenic environmental degradation by maintaining the benefits of traditional models of responsibility-as-accountability while dramatically expanding the subject and objects of responsibility through attention to the fragile and thus better serving us as we navigate responsibility in the Anthropocene. (shrink)