When urgency matters. On non-discretionary corporate social responsibility

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1 Human Systems Management 27 (2008) DOI /HSM IOS Press When urgency matters. On non-discretionary corporate social responsibility Miguel Alzola Department of Legal and Ethical Studies, Fordham University, 113 W. 60th Street, New York, NY 10023, USA Abstract. Business firms have been addressing concerns raised by management scholars and social activists regarding the social responsibilities of business firms in the last 50 years. Yet, many companies and business executives frame the issue in the language of discretionary donations or acts of charity. In this article, I shall argue that the significant normative question is whether and how business corporations ought to address those growing societal concerns as a matter of duty. In addressing this question, the article examines four normative justifications namely, the principles of Membership, Ability, Contribution and Fair Play for grounding moral responsibilities and identifying agents of justice. I shall argue that none of the aforementioned principles provide a comprehensive account of how to allocate responsibilities among non-state institutions. Consequently, I shall propose a multi-principled theory that arranges the application of these four principles according to the circumstances of justice and the degree of urgency of needs. Keywords: Justice, corporate social responsibility, moral principles Miguel Alzola is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Legal and Ethical Studies at Fordham University. He holds a BA (Magna Cum Laude) from the School of Economics, UNICEN, an MPhil in Practical Philosophy from the Department of Philosophy, University of Buenos Aires, and a PhD in Business Ethics from Rutgers University. During , Prof. Alzola was a Fulbright Fellow. He received doctoral scholarships from the Prudential Foundation and Johnson & Johnson. He won the Ethics and Social Responsibility Award from IARSE (2005), the Society for Business Ethics Founder s Awards (2005, 2006 and 2007), and the Young Scholar in Philosophy Award from the Society for Analytic Philosophy. His areas of specialization are Ethical Theory (particularly Virtue Ethics) and Applied Ethics (particularly Business Ethics). His current research focuses on virtue ethics and moral psychology. He is also pursuing research that deals with collective agency and the moral responsibility of groups. Within this field, his topics of research include human rights obligations, corporate political activities, transnational bribery, and wartime responsibilities. His most recent article Character and environment: The status of virtues in organizations (2008) has recently appeared in the Journal of Business Ethics. Professor Alzola teaches courses in moral and political philosophy, applied ethics and corporate social responsibility. 1. Introduction: Social and moral responsibilities Questions about the social role of business corporations are certainly old. They have been present in various forms over the centuries in the Ancient, medieval, mercantile, industrial and corporate eras. They also have a growing place in management literature and the MBA curriculum. The academic literature associated with this phenomenon has flourished recently. Corporate social responsibility [6,9,35], stakeholder theory [16,21], sustainable development [26,52,64], corporate governance [30], and corporate citizenship [38, 39] are not only important components of the academic agenda but common talk in the economic press and corporate statements of missions and values [1]. What these and other theoretical frameworks have in common is that they highlight obligations and virtues attached to business executives (and business firms) that go beyond the law and the classic purpose of shareholder value. The list of issues associated with these labels varies with time and place, but generally includes concerns with reducing the impact of business in the natural environment, respecting the rights of customers and workers, and taking care of broader social issues such as problems of public health, education, and poverty. A classic way to summarize these responsibilities goes along the lines of Carroll s definition: The social responsibilities of business encompasses the economic, legal, ethical, and discre /08/$ IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved

2 274 M. Alzola / When urgency matters tionary expectations that society has of organizations at a given point in time ([8], p. 500). Many of the responsibilities entailed by this definition are traditionally associated with state obligations, that is, national and state governments are the primary agents of justice. That is why some authors notably Milton Friedman resist the very idea of the social responsibility of business. Still, business ethicists, political philosophers, and human rights activists target multinational corporations (MNCs) as remedial agents of justice when state institutions are incapable to realize the needs of their communities and citizens [4,11,47]. The fact is that many business firms have already reacted to these growing social expectations, as has been extensively reported in management literature [37,56]. Let me use some old examples to illustrate this claim. Take for instance the development of the Sullivan Principles in 1977, a corporate code of conduct promoted by African American preacher Rev. Leon Sullivan who was also a member of the board of General Motors, to apply economic pressure on the government of South Africa in protest to its system of apartheid, which eventually gained wide adoption among United States-based corporations. 1 Another case is the development and free distribution of Mectizan, the drug produced by Merck to treat river blindness in developing countries. And, more recently, the donation of the antifungal Diflucan that Pfizer distributed to treat special infections in countries where the HIV/AIDS virus was prevalent in rates of 1% or higher. These and other firms engaged in relieving the suffering of human beings whose needs and rights were unprotected and exploited. However, what is puzzling is that those corporate initiatives were widely applauded because, one might say, many people believe they were not morally required. That is, these firms did not have a duty to do it. This particular way of describing what business corporations do as a matter of discretionary gifts is intriguing from a moral point of view. Business corporations may use social initiatives to distract public attention from their basic responsibilities; for example, philan- 1 In 1999, a new Global Sullivan set of Principles were jointed unveiled by Rev. Sullivan and United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, which in contrast to the original focus on South African apartheid, were designed to increase the active participation of business firms in the advancement of human rights and social justice at the global level. See: org/gsp/default.asp and principles.htm. thropy and charity are perfectly consistent with gross involvement or complicity in human right abuses or illegal behavior [66]. Second, rather than studying actual corporate practices, the interesting normative question is whether and why business firms ought to respond to some social expectations as a matter of duty. This research question entails the understanding of CSR as moral responsibilities, that is, a number of obligations and permissions that a firm has as a result of its existence and continued operation in a community, including the global community. Prof. Donaldson describes this problem as a normative revolution in stakeholder theory, which entails two related claims. First, any economic system or institution stands in need of normative justification. Second, as a social artifact, the existence of any corporation stands in need of normative justification (Donaldson in [1]). 2 Many actors, individual and collective actors, state and private institutions, may be morally responsible for alleviating pain and helping a community but, in this paper, I shall be primarily concerned with the responsibilities of business firms among those actors. I shall not be discussing here the longstanding question of the purpose of business firms. Neither shall I address the important issue of the intrinsic or extrinsic worth of shareholders and stakeholders. Furthermore, I shall not be able to discuss the central issue of the ontological status of business firms. 3 The modest goal of this short paper is to provide an account of whether, why, and how business firms should be held responsible, as a matter of normative obligation, for promoting social, economic, and environmental well-being. My focus shall be on those social needs that are typically associated with positive duties, that is, duties to perform a certain action such as a donation or gift as opposed to negative duties, which are duties to refrain from doing something such as refraining from torturing someone [29,59]. I shall look at four normative justifications which have considerable philosophical pedigree namely, the principles of Membership, Ability, Contribution and 2 Prof. Edward Freeman as well as other experts resist the distinction between normative and descriptive social responsibilities and reject the need of a normative foundational justification [1, p. 13]. Such an argument cannot be accepted without a careful examination of the fact/value distinction that I will not be able to provide here. Most of the literature on the philosophy of science confirms Donaldson s view, but one may count the work by Hilary Putnam and others in support of Prof. Freeman s views (see [48]). 3 Hence, any reference in this paper to the responsibility of corporations or corporate responsibilities will be an indirect way of speaking about the responsibilities of the individual human beings who are members of the corporation.

3 M. Alzola / When urgency matters 275 Fair Play for identifying agents of justice and distributing social responsibilities among business firms and other non-state institutions. I shall defend the claim that none provide a comprehensive account of how to allocate responsibilities for meeting human deprivations. Consequently, I propose to build a multiprincipled theory that arranges the application of these principles according to the circumstances of justice and needs, circumstances that can be described by the Rawlsian distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory and the degree of urgency of the human deprivation. I shall illustrate my case with well-known cases of business firms operating in the global arena. The paper is divided into four sections. In Section 2, I shall briefly lay out four normative principles and enumerate the main objections against them. Then I shall elaborate on the reasons why they lead us astray. In Section 3, I shall introduce my proposal of setting priorities in the application of these principles. Section 4 concludes. 2. Four normative principles for allocating social responsibilities The principles presented in this section have a rich philosophical tradition. They will not say much about the scope and extension of the responsibilities of corporate agents. It is contentious whether business firms have a duty to avoid depriving, to help protect from deprivation, and/or aid the deprived fellow [15,57]. But these principles will not shed light on that question. Similarly, the four principles do not express moral responsibilities as a matter of degree but merely describe those responsibilities as all-or-nothing. The question is whether or not a business firm can be held responsible and so identified as a remedial agent of justice. To begin with, the Principle of Membership captures the special responsibilities that any member of a relevant community has towards those fellows who are deprived. Shared activities and commitments, a common history, common identities, and other such sources justify the existence of one s special duties to one s comembers. Business firms, when treated as individuals (see footnote 3), have those duties by virtue of their (artificial) membership in our moral community. Treating corporations as members of the moral community is entirely consistent with the aforementioned academic traditions of corporate social responsibility [6,8], stakeholder theory [16,21] and corporate citizenship [23,38]. The Principle of Membership treats corporations as moral agents, a claim that entails the assumption that the existence of corporations is normatively justified if they serve and promote desirable social goals. Our communities need business corporations, which explains why society has granted them special privileges i.e., unlimited longevity and limited liability [15] which yield special moral obligations that go beyond the purely economic and legal duties of business firms. As members of moral communities, business firms must further the well-being of other members of the community. The traditional view on corporate social responsibility the view famously advanced by Friedman, Levitt, Hayek and others only accepts the existence of corporate duties to avoid harming people, but denies that firms have any positive duty to aid either other human or corporate agents. In contrast, a broader conception of the Principle of Membership provides a justification for international initiatives such as the U.N. Global Compact, which calls on corporations not only to avoid complicity in human rights violations but also to assume positive obligations of protection and promotion of positive human rights, that is, obligations to help the deprived. 4 Something needs to be said about the scope of these duties. Co-members are entitled to some help from other fellows. But how much? Duties of membership cannot be unlimited. They must recognize some limitations with regard to how burdensome they are because they entail positive obligations; thus, they may be costly. Hence, it might be problematic to call upon corporations to help other members of the community to the exclusion of other important stakeholders, especially their owners. Ultimately, without corporations there are no corporate duties. If the existence of a corporate agent is threatened by overly demanding moral obligations, the extension of those obligations should be redefined. There are at least two further complications with the Principle of Membership. First, it cannot explain the existence of any duty regardless of communal bonds and, second, it does not provide a criterion for distributing responsibilities within the community. For example, when a business firm engages in exploitation of illegal immigrant workers or when it is the only agent able to help e.g., Merck and river blindness we tend to believe there is a corporate duty regardless of whether individuals and corporations are linked by some sort of communal tie. Regarding the internal dis- 4 It can also explain why companies operating in the extraction, manufacturing, and utilities industries are more inclined to invest in citizenship programs than investment banks and other companies that are less tied to local communities [10].

4 276 M. Alzola / When urgency matters tribution of responsibilities, the objection is that the strength of communal ties may help to justify special duties to a subset of the whole community which is not clearly specified by the Membership principle. For example, it might be said that despite its involvement in tsunami relief efforts in Sri Lanka and Indonesia, Tata Group, the Indian business conglomerate, owed special moral obligations to help Indian victims over the local people of Indonesia and Sri Lanka. Second, the Principle of Ability at least the version in use here holds that if we are in a special position to avoid or relieve a great harm at no comparable cost to us, we have a duty to help [55,60]. To illustrate the intuitive plausibility of the principle, philosophers use the example of the drowning child. Imagine that on the way to his office a CEO pasts a shallow pond when a child has fallen in and appears to be drowning. To wade in and pull the child out of the pond would be easy but the CEO would get his clothes wet and muddy. By the time he goes home and changes, he will have missed an important business meeting. According to Ability, the CEO is under a duty to rescue the child, even if by doing so he imposes some costs on his company and its owners. The Principle of Ability emphasizes aptitude and skill as the criteria to aid; thus, it predicates that the duty should be allocated according to the capacity of each agent to help. In its utilitarian version [27, 60], those capacities should be exercised where they can do the most good, but the principle also has nonconsequentialist versions [24,55]. Assuming that Ability applies to business firms, 5 the principle offers a solution to the problem of the lack of competent duty bearers for human deprivations in non-affluent countries. Yet, the principle is open to a number of objections, such as its overdemandingness, the problem of lack of compliance of other agents, the problem of distance in morality, and the lack of historical background. I shall briefly discuss these objections. First, preventing great harm or producing great benefits at no comparable cost to one may be excessively demanding for the duty holder and it may distract her from her pursuing a worthwhile life. As a response, one might say that Ability need not be overdemanding. The limits 5 That is controversial assumption that I shall not be able to address here. As I said in footnote 3, there is a longstanding debate among business ethicists about whether corporations can be held collectively responsible and if so, what such responsibility entails in terms of positive and negative duties. For a discussion of these points see [15]. Elsewhere, I have defended the view that corporate obligations can be reduced to a residual form of the obligations of their owners and managers (see [3]). of the principle are settled according to the degree of the impending harm, the agent s knowledge, her ability, and her cost [24]. The principle cannot be overdemanding because when the situation poses a large burden on an agent she is no longer under a duty to help. The old dictum that ought implies can applies to this case. Second, it is said that lack of (or partial) compliance of other agents is an excuse to limit one s duties. In other words, the claim is that one s duty to help does not increase when others are not doing their share [41]. In response, we might say that if sacrifices are determined by the ratio of the harm prevented to the costs, others non-compliance or partial compliance does not set any limit to sacrifices. Third, there is the problem of distance in morality. Many of us think that we should not treat the interests of people in a strictly impartial way and, consequently, that we are allowed to give priority to the interests of those whom we have special ties rather than a needy stranger. A response to that objection is that Ability need not be interpreted completely to the point of view of the universe. There may be a domain of permitted partiality that is vital to accomplish the goal of individual flourishing and institutional integrity according to which we are not required to give equal weight to everyone s well-being. A final objection to Ability is its exclusive attention on capable agents, to the neglect of historical background. In that respect, this principle does not provide special reasons as to why, for example, Union Carbide Corporation should be held more responsible to aid the victims than other companies that were not at all involved in the Bhopal disaster in Evidently, the principles of Membership and Ability may lead to contradictory solutions. Take the case of US based pharmaceutical companies. There is some evidence that US based MNCs tend to contribute relatively little to social initiatives outside the United States. Those firms might argue that by devoting resources to, say, the HIV AIDS relief in North America, they discharge their moral and political responsibilities in Third World countries [17]. While this position may be justified by appealing to the Principle of Membership, theprinciple of Ability leads us to reject the fact that a company has closer relationships with local stakeholders as a reason for special moral obligations. A more compelling need will trump a close tie according to Ability. Third, there is a widely held view that an agent is responsible for addressing deprivations when she has contributed or is contributing to bringing those deprivations about. This notion is captured by the Princi-

5 M. Alzola / When urgency matters 277 ple of Contribution, which highlights the causal and moral role played by the agent in the genesis of a harmful state of affairs [18,32]. My version of the principle conflates causal and moral responsibility. 6 Abusiness firm contributes to harming someone if and only if the corporate conduct is causally relevant to and is more than a mere antecedent condition of a situation that puts others under threat of deprivation. What is the content of corporate responsibilities according to Contribution? The agent owes aid and reparations to the victims, which involve preventing the deleterious state of affairs to happen and bringing the victim to the level of well-being she would have enjoyed if she had not been harmed [36,43]. According to the Principle of Contribution, aiding and compensating the victims is not an act of charity but a compensation for the harm done. For example, Bayer s Cutter Biological division owes reparations to more than 100 hemophiliacs who contracted HIV as a result of the corporate decision to continue selling an old, less safe medicine in Asia and Latin America to clear out large inventories. The medicine was no longer sold in the US and Europe. When we can empirically establish that an agent is the cause of someone else s deprived condition, the principle provides a direct criterion to allocate remedial duties among agents. In spite of its initial appeal, the Principle of Contribution faces a number of objections. First, in many cases e.g., natural disasters no identifiable agent has caused the harmful state of affairs. Second, in other cases, the actions of many agents are associated with those deprivations, thus making it difficult to determine whether and to what extent different individuals and business firms have contributed to wrongdoing. Another objection is that the Principle of Contribution excludes the consideration of the capacity to carry out the duty of compensation. For example, unlike JPMorgan Chase, Lehman Brothers, Union Pacific, and other slave-owner companies which are still alive, many firms that were morally responsible for enslaving African Americans in the United States no longer exist or are insolvent and therefore lack the ability to discharge their duties to redress the victims and their descendants. The fourth principle is a cousin of the Principle of Contribution, thefair Play Principle according to which explicit or tacit acceptance of benefits, even from uninformed parties, calls for some compensatory 6 Unlike causal responsibility, moral responsibility entails an evaluation of the agent s conduct because he had the intention to bring about the harm or negligently failed to prevent a foreseeable bad state of affairs to happen (see [20]). exchange [49,58]. Business firms bear responsibility for human deprivations from which the companies directly or indirectly benefit even if they have not directly contributed to the conditions that make the harm possible. Normally, corporations operate for a reason, namely, they benefit from their operation in a certain place. The existence and continued operation of a business firm let us infer profit making. Then, when a firm operates in non-affluent countries under conditions that facilitate human right violations, exploitation, and misery, we are entitled to assume that some benefits are associated with the presence of the firm in such a community; otherwise, it would not be operating there. If the assumption is sound, then it follows that often these firms profit from burdensome conditions that characterize the society in which they operate [34]. To the extent that this assumption is correct, these firms have fair play duties associated with fulfilling unmet social needs. The cases discussed so far are quite uncontroversial. But what if a business firm happens to operate in a country where exploitation and injustice is widespread even if they do not indirectly profit from such abuses? Some authors argue that in those cases firms are responsible for their participation in facilitating or maintaining shared social rules and practices that contribute to human rights violations [68]. Or, they may indirectly contribute to the financial health and social legitimacy of an authoritarian government. Fair play duties comprise a (backward looking) responsibility to compensate the victims and protect them from further deprivations and a (forward looking) responsibility to contribute to reforming unjust institutions and avoiding perpetuation of processes of social cooperation that produce human deprivations. Let me illustrate this point with the example of Nike, Gap and other firms in the garment industry. Even if not directly involved in human right abuses, Nike, Inc. contracts with factories that allegedly use sweatshop labor in countries like China, Vietnam, Indonesia and Mexico. Hence, the company has according to the principle fair play duties to contribute to the effective abolition of child labor in those societies. Fair Play helps resolve one of the objections of Contribution, namely, the problem of identifying duty holders when more than one agent has made significant direct and tacit contributions to a harmful state of affairs. It also prevents agents from using lack of contributory fault as an excuse. In other words, even if Nike is not directly using child labor, even if Ford had strong affirmative action programs in place in South Africa during the apartheid era, they are both part of a system that perpetuates and

6 278 M. Alzola / When urgency matters Table 1 Principles of responsibility Criterion Pros Cons Membership Being a member of a community Direct link/ties Overdemanding entails the duty to help Duties without bonds other co-members Internal (in group) responsibilities Ability Being able to relieve harm at no Capable agents Overdemanding comparative cost to oneself Lack of others compliance entails a duty to help Distance Lack of historical background Contribution Contributing to harming someone creates Direct allocation No identifiable or many agents a duty to compensate the victim Lack of capacity Fair Play Accepting benefits from an unjust Responsibility for Collective Harm No identifiable agents system entails a duty to help the No excusing conditions Scope of fair play duties victims of the unjust system (constructive engagement) Lack of capacity legitimizes human exploitations and both have certain moral responsibilities. The main objection against the Fair Play Principle as a criterion for allocating responsibilities is the problem of identifying the duty holder when links between deprived victims and unfair social practices is remote. In such cases, the duty to respond might be diffused among many actors whose levels of responsibility for the harm remain undetermined, as it can be noted in child labor issues in the garment industry in Southeast Asia. In addition, there is some uncertainty about the content of fair play duties regarding the longstanding question of whether business firms should pursue constructive engagements with national governments that are involved in exploitation or, rather, they should directly leave the country. Due to systematic human rights violations, Levi Strauss pulled out of Myanmar and China. Rather than engage in collective action to reform institutional processes that produce structural injustice, it might be argued that the moral responsibilities of business firms should be discharged merely through disassociation and refusal to participate in such institutions. 7 A related objection is 7 According to what I take to be the best interpretation of this principle, business firms do have fair play duties to engage in cooperative and coordinated action to achieve global justice as part of their moral responsibilities for operating under and profiting from structural conditions that produce human deprivations. And they have an obligation to help support mechanisms that enable those affected by activities of business firms to dispute corporate decisions in areas that relate to fulfilling those obligations [34]. For example, following the model of the Sullivan Principles in the case of apartheid in South Africa, apparel manufacturers operating in Southeast Asia should jointly apply pressure for enforcement of child labor laws and other labor rights regulations. the question of how this duty to join others to organize collective action is fulfilled if other morally responsible agents do not comply with their fair play duties. Finally, like the Principle of Contribution,theFair Play Principle is blind to considerations of ability to carry out actions that are associated to fair play obligations. Fair Play does not provide a satisfactory answer to these challenges. 8 A summary of the preceding analysis in presented in Table 1. 8 Special Issue Editor Alan Singer suggests that the plausibility of the Fair Play principle is open to the objection that violence has been sometime licensed by political accords in the name of stability and ideologically acceptable anticipated outcomes, among others, the co-creation of conditions suitable for FDI and for local enterprise (personal communication). From that, he believes, it follows that every business currently benefits from at least some past episodes involving severe human rights violations and hence that, according to Fair Play, all businesses (indeed all of us) bear responsibility and therefore ought to provide compensation. I am perfectly fine with that conclusion if the premises in which it relies are sound. There is a huge amount of literature on issues of legal reparations to African Americans in the US, for example, which highlights the importance of tracing back past wrongs and tacit complicity with human right abuses to the present, where some agents should bear the responsibility for the past and enduring consequences of such abuses. The result is that most White Americans should be held responsible to some extent for those abuses and hence they should compensate the victims of such an unjust system and their descendants. This result might or might not be counterintuitive but seems to be morally justified. I shall not be able to develop this point in length here but would refer to the legal and philosophical literature on black reparations in the US [7] as well as the literature on legal reparations to indigenous Australians and Canadians, and of course, the literature on war reparations [5,12].

7 M. Alzola / When urgency matters A multi-principle theory As it has been described, in the end the strengths of each principle are offset by its considerable shortcomings. Even if we could offer a successful defense of each principle against the objections, I argue that none is suitable as a comprehensive criterion for finding correlative duty-bearers for addressing human deprivations. Therefore, I propose to construct a multi-principled theory, which arranges the application of these principles in order to identify who should bear the burden of helping. One way to build such a formula is to identify the most adequate principle in different scenarios of justice and aid. I shall provide an account of these scenarios appealing both to the Rawlsian distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory and to the degree of urgency of the involved deprivation. The proposal is illustrated in Table 2. On Rawls conception, ideal theory describes a wellordered institutional arrangement such that institutions are both just and known to be just, and individuals both accept and comply fully with the requirements these institutions impose on them. In ideal theory, the state fulfills its function as primary agent of justice [50]. Since this is a strict (or full) compliance theory, Rawls does not need to address issues of corrective justice in ideal theory. But circumstances may fail to be ideal in at least two different ways. First, background institutions may not be just; second, individuals may not fully comply with the standing requirements on them. When facing non-urgent needs in non-ideal theory, it may be feasible to allocate the burden of help fairly by building better state institutions, by re-establishing a new global social contract for business firms, and by working with other actors to reform social structures that produce human deprivations [15,67]. In such a scenario, without urgent needs, the principles of Contribution, Fair Play and Membership would have priority over the Principle of Ability in order to allocate moral responsibilities among business firms. Table 2 Principles and priorities in ideal and non-ideal theory Degree Circumstances of justice of human deprivations Ideal theory Non-ideal theory Non-urgency Rawlsian justice Contribution Fair Play Membership Urgency Rawlsian justice Ability In contrast, the existence of dire human deprivations in non-ideal theory may demand immediate remedies, especially when weak state institutions lack the capacity to provide the conditions for the realization of basic rights. Then, when facing urgent needs in nonideal theory, the Principle of Ability rather than the principles of Membership, Contribution or Fair Play will provide the most immediate and effective solution to human deprivations because it highlights the identification of capable agents, regardless of the fairness of the basic structure of society, the compliance of other agents, their contributions in bringing about the harm, and the benefits they derive from participating in institutional processes of social cooperation. In any event, Membership, Contribution and Fair Play will help to distribute responsibilities among capable agents, which may be called a secondary distribution. 9 Let me illustrate how this proposal would work with a practical case. Assuming that the HIV AIDS epidemic in Sub-Saharan Africa corresponds to circumstances of urgent needs in non-ideal theory, my account suggests that in the short term, the Principle of Ability trumps Contribution, Fair Play and Membership. Hence, it yields immediate responsibilities for those agents who are in the best position to provide the conditions to stop human deprivations and rescue victims. Activists as well as academicians claim that the bestpositioned agents are the pharmaceutical firms [17,53]. If so, it follows that until we can establish the causes of the global health crisis and until the interests of inventor firms, HIV patients, and generic drug producers are aligned and harmonized, the Principle of Ability may demand pharmaceutical firms to allow poor countries to issue compulsory licenses and/or to offer their anti-aids medicines to a level affordable by the local population. As we have seen in the last section, there are limits to the allocation of moral obligations on the basis of Ability, which are set by the very definition of this principle, namely, the importance of the human deprivation and the costs associated with those duties for the agent. Furthermore, the responsibility of pharmaceutical firms does not reduce the moral obligations of affluent states and taxpayers and other wealthy 9 Emergencies and urgency are one reason-generating considerations but there are others. For example, when there are no social institutions that might provide the conditions for the fulfillment of human needs, Membership will probably take priority over Ability, Contribution and Fair Play. When background institutions are unjust, Fair Play should have priority. And in cases human rights violations or exploitation, Contribution must be the main criterion to attribute responsibilities for reparations.

8 280 M. Alzola / When urgency matters companies. They may have to compensate pharmaceutical firms for resources these firms provided for the relief effort. Yet, the difference between exclusive and shared competence matters morally. If no other institution is equipped as well as pharmaceutical firms to respond, they have a unique ability that yields special moral obligations. According to Ability, the duty to rescue increases if the agent is the only person in a position to save the victim Conclusion: Human needs and corporate agents of justice I have argued for the understanding of corporate social responsibilities as moral responsibilities and claimed that there are four normative principles to hold business firms as morally responsibly agents for advancing the well-being of their members, the community, and the natural environment. I have introduced and examined these principles the principles of Membership, Ability, Contribution and Fair Play and concluded that none the them provide a full account of how to ground and distribute responsibilities among business firms. Hence, I propose to build a multi-principled theory, which arranges the application of these four principles in accordance to the circumstances of justice and the degree of urgency of the need. The main conclusion is that in a situation of urgent deprivations and non-ideal conditions, the burden of providing for help should be placed according to the principle of Ability, over the principles of Contribution, Fair Play and Membership. Yet,Contribution, Fair Play and Membership will help to make a secondary distribution among those agents that are already capable. 10 I argue that this rationale provides the best moral justification for both saving the child from the swimming pool and for Merck s decision to develop and donate Mectizan, which was mentioned at the beginning of this article. One might object that if a particular firm ranks high on Contribution, as might be the case with a firm that contributed to the spread of AIDS in Africa, but that firm is not equipped to intervene effectively against AIDS, the primary obligation to intervene falls on a drug company that may be perfectly innocent (in terms of the principle of Contribution). In response, my account entails that the contributing firm has an obligation to provide compensation to the capable drug company. Would the same be true in every case in which one firm has made the Contribution and another has the Ability? I shall not be able to address this question in depth here, but the answer would be negative, in cases of non-urgent situations in which people can wait for the fairest solution. In the case that I am discussing (Merck and Mectizan) it seems that any party had any an obligation to help reimburse Merck if my account for the allocation of moral responsibility is sound. I am aware that these remarks on the priority of principles according to the circumstances of justice and the urgency of deprivations are frustratingly brief. Fuller development is necessary in order to assess the practical significance of this account. 11 Yet, I am confident that this paper contributes to ground the allocation of social responsibilities and promotes the discussion of the remaining task, namely, the consideration of the moral standing of business corporations and the ontological foundations of their responsibilities. Acknowledgements For perceptive comments on an earlier draft, I am grateful to Ed Hartman, Jim Griffin, Howard McGary, David Ardagh and Nien-hê Hsieh. I am also indebted to the participants at the 2nd International Conference of the International Center for Corporate Accountability (ICCA), 2006 Society for Business Ethics Annual Meeting, and 33rd Conference on Value Inquiry for lively discussions and comments on the manuscript from which this short article draws. I also benefited from comments by Special Issue Editor Alan Singer. All errors and omissions remain entirely my responsibility. References [1] B. Agle, T. Donaldson, E. Freeman, M. Jensen, R. Mitchell and D. Wood, Dialogue: Toward superior stakeholder theory, Business Ethics Quarterly 18(2) (2008), [2] M.A. Alzola, Human rights, principles of responsibility, and circumstances: Should multinational corporations discharge the duties that correlate with welfare human rights?, Rutgers University, New Jersey, 2008 (unpublished manuscript). [3] M.A. Alzola and M.A. Santoro, Piercing the moral veil of the corporation, in: Society for Business Ethics Annual Meeting, Honolulu, HI, August [4] D. Arnold, Human rights and business: An ethical analysis, in: Business and Human Rights: Dilemmas and Solutions, R.Sullivan, ed., Greenleaf, London, [5] C.R. Beitz, Justice and international relations, Philosophy and Public Affairs 4(4) (1975), [6] H.R. Bowen, Social Responsibilities of the Businessman, Harper & Row, New York, [7] B. Boxill, The morality of preferential hiring, Philosophy and Public Affairs 7 (1978), Elsewhere, I provide a more comprehensive account of corporate human rights obligations, which defends the status of welfare rights as human rights, and I utilize the aforementioned four principles to distribute human rights responsibilities (see [2]).

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10 282 M. Alzola / When urgency matters [52] D.A. Rondinelli and M.A. Berry, Environmental citizenship in multinational corporations: social responsibility and sustainable development, European Management Journal 18(1) (2000), [53] M.A. Santoro and T.M. Gorrie (eds), Ethics and the Pharmaceutical Industry, Cambridge University Press, New York, [54] T.M. Scanlon, Preference and urgency, The Journal of Philosophy 72(9) (1975), [55] T.M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, [56] A. Scherer, G. Palazzo and D. Baumann, Global rules and private actors towards a new role of the TNC in the global governance, 2004 (unpublished manuscript). [57] H. Shue, Basic Rights, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, [58] A.J. Simmons, The principle of fair play, Philosophy and Public Affairs 8(4) (1979), [59] M.G. Singer, Negative and positive duties, The Philosophical Quarterly 15(59) (1965), [60] P. Singer, Famine, affluence and morality, Philosophy and Public Affairs 1(1) (1972), [61] R.C. Solomon, Ethics and Excellence: Cooperation and Integrity in Business, Oxford University Press, New York, [62] T. Sorell, Morality and emergency, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 103(1) (2002), [63] D.F. Thompson, Moral responsibility of public officials: The problem of many hands, The American Political Science Review 74(4) (1980), [64] United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future: Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, published as Annex to General Assembly document A/42/427, Development and International Co-operation: Environment August 2, 1987 (retrieved, ). [65] C. Wellman, Welfare Rights, Totowa, Rowman and Allanheld, New Jersey, [66] P. Werhane, Corporate social responsibility/corporate moral responsibility: Is there a difference and the difference it makes, in: The Debate over Corporate Social Responsibility, S. May, G. Cheney and J. Roper, eds, Oxford University Press, New York, [67] I.M. Young, Responsibility and global labor justice, Journal of Political Philosophy 12(4) (2004), [68] I.M. Young, Responsibility and global justice: A social connection model, Social Philosophy and Policy 23(1) (2006),

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