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)

Duties of beneficence are said to allow for leeway to discharge them. By distinguishing between two different types of leeway, Mejia identified three structurally different duties of beneficence. In this Commentary I deploy those distinctions to clarify the nature of a fourth type of duty of beneficence, one prompted by a global pandemic, a duty with a peculiar, and seldom recognized, conceptual logic. I provide some guidelines that should orient managers when they take themselves to be fulfilling such a duty (...) on behalf of shareholders. (shrink)

In July 2020, more than 1000 companies that advertise on social media platforms withdrew their business, citing failures of the platforms (especially Facebook) to address the proliferation of harmful content. The #StopHateForProfit movement invites reflection on an understudied topic: the ethics of boycotting by corporations. Under what conditions is corporate boycotting permissible, required, supererogatory, or forbidden? Although value-driven consumerism has generated significant recent discussion in applied ethics, that discussion has focused almost exclusively on the consumption choices of individuals. As this (...) article underscores, value-driven consumerism by business corporations complicates these issues and invites further examination. We propose principles for the ethics of boycotting by corporations, indicate how these principles relate to different CSR paradigms, and show how these insights can help assess recent instances of corporate boycotting. (shrink)

Many higher-income countries have shortages of care-workers, which is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future as virtually all of these societies are ageing. The philosophical literature on this problem has concentrated mostly on the merits and demerits of different policy solutions, especially on the recruitment of foreign care-workers and on investments in care robots and other relevant technologies. However, the question of what moral duties, if any, private individuals have to help address care-worker shortages has been entirely neglected. In (...) this article, I help to fill this lacuna by arguing that some inhabitants of higher-income countries have moral duties to age abroad in order to reduce the pressure on the aged care-systems of their current societies, whereby ‘ageing abroad’ is defined narrowly as moving to a foreign country to receive residential or non-residential aged care. As I show, these duties are dependent on a number of conditions being met, including the requirement that the host populations not be made worse off. (shrink)

From where does management acquire its authority to act in the name of the corporation? The orthodoxy that shareholders alone authorise management is frequently criticised for treating the corporation as the property of shareholders, rather than as a distinct legal person in its own right (Ciepley, 2013; Deakin, 2012; Robé, 2011; Stout, 2012). However, Hobbes’s theory of incorporation in Leviathan shows this influential critique of shareholder primacy to rest on a non sequitur. It does not follow from the (correct) observation (...) that the corporation is a legal person to the conclusion that its interests are distinct from those of shareholders. Just as individuals become citizens of a state when they authorise a sovereign, shareholders are incorporated when they authorise a representative assembly to act in their interests. Shareholders thereby form a single corporate person and are ultimately responsible for whatever is done in their corporate name. (shrink)

Much business ethics and corporate social responsibility literature suggests, implicitly or explicitly, that firms ought to engage in activities that can be characterized as philanthropy, namely, expending resources beyond what is required by law and market norms to promote others’ welfare at the expense of firm profits. However, this literature has struggled to provide a normative framework for evaluating corporate philanthropy, although scholars have noted that such expenditures can potentially remedy market failures and provide public goods more efficiently. I articulate (...) two specific rationales that can justify corporate philanthropy based on considerations of welfare economics: 1) firms making strategic but high-risk investments in activities that are likely to generate positive externalities even if they prove unprofitable and 2) firms possessing a strong comparative advantage in their ability to address a social problem at lower social cost. Moreover, these rationales can be evaluated by a concept I develop called the philanthropy multiplier, indicating the ratio of net positive externalities to net costs. I suggest that firms consider publicizing their philanthropy multipliers, and I discuss theoretical and practical implications. (shrink)

In response to the growing criticisms to shareholder primacy, Oliver Hart, a Nobel Economics Prize recipient, and Luigi Zingales, a very well-known finance professor, have offered a revision to Milton Friedman’s dominant account. Seeking to incorporate social and moral concerns into the objective function of the firm, they have proposed that managers should maximize shareholder welfare instead of shareholder value. Their account has been highly influential and reflects many of the substantive and methodological assumptions of corporate governance scholars within the (...) law and economics literature. In this paper, we engage closely with their account from a normative perspective, unearthing and criticizing the implications of many of these assumptions. In doing so, we also formulate a set of principles necessary to ensure the ethical legitimacy of any proposal that puts shareholders at the center of the firm’s objective function. (shrink)