Social responsibility: concepts and normative ethics

The history of the conceptualisation of social responsibility reveals three main themes: The profitability of SR, SR as stakeholder theory, and ethics as a force in SR. In this paper, I will argue that all three themes are philosophically unsound and rest on suspicious assumptions. First, there is little evidence that SR increases profits; second, stakeholder theory fails to give managers practical ethical decision-making skills; and, finally, ethics should not be viewed as a subset of social responsibility, but as central to its conceptualisation. In fact, much of what is defined as corporate responsibility is innocuous; leaving managers ill equipped to solve specific moral dilemmas. Moreover, normative ethics is often lost in the conceptualisation of social responsibility. This paper calls for the rediscovery of ethics into business decision-making.