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The Perils of Multinationals’ Largess

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

Thomas Donaldson
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Abstract

In an article in the Journal of Business Ethics, Professor Kevin Jackson raised a critical challenge to my claim in The Ethics of International Business that corporations should be excused from certain rights-honoring responsibilities. Surely he is right to sound a note of caution. Not lightly, and not without deep reflection, should we let rich and powerful global corporations off the moral hook. Not lightly should we excuse the Sonys and General Motors of the world from the burdens of remedying global rights abuses. And this is the nub of the issue between Professor Jackson and me; for even though I have written that corporations should bear heavy and often unacknowledged duties in honoring human rights, I have also stipulated that these duties (unless “exceptional” circumstances obtain) should fall only in two classes, namely:

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Articles
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Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 4 , Issue 3 , July 1994, pp. 367 - 371
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 1994

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References

Notes

1 Kevin T. Jackson, “Distributive Justice and the Corporate Duty to Aid,” Journal of Business Ethics 12, 1993: 547–551. Professor Jackson’s paper is largely a criticism of a key argument in my book, The Ethics of International Business (Oxford University Press, 1989).

2 Jackson, “Distributive Justice and the Corporate Duty to Aid,” p. 548. Professor Jackson is referring to the article, “Can a Corporation Have a Conscience?” Harvard Business Review (January-February, 1982), by Kenneth Goodpaster and John Matthews.

3 Jackson, “Distributive Justice and the Corporate Duty to Aid,” p. 547.

4 I also do not mean to deny the importance or legitimacy of the common practice (more often followed in the U.S. than other developed countries) of a corporations’s giving a small percentage of its pre-tax profits to charitable causes.

5 See Amartya Sen, Inequality Reexamined. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); and Dworkin, Ronald. Taking Rights Seriously. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979).

6 See Thomas Donaldson and Thomas W. Dunfee, “Toward a Unified Conception of Business Ethics: Integrative Social Contracts Theory,” Academy of Management Review. 19, 1994; and also “Integrative Social Contracts Theory: A Communitarian Conception of Economic Ethics.” forthcoming in Economics and Philosophy.

7 As I argued in an earlier work, one of the key obligations society should impose upon corporations is that of producing goods well and efficiently and in a way that enhances employee and customer welfare. They also must shoulder the obligation of respecting all valid rights and, what is closely connected to this, observing principles of social justice (see Thomas Donaldson, Corporations and Morality, Prentice-Hall, 1982, especially Chapter 3.)

8 On this point, however, there is room to question Rawls, as I did in “The Ethics of Conditionality in International Debt,” in Millennium: Journal of International Studies Vol. 20, 2 (Summer, 1991), pp. 155–169.