When Do Companies Have a Positive Duty to Engage in Philanthropy? An Empirical Application of Mieth’s Five Criteria for Positive Duties of Individuals in the Corporate Context

Although the negative duties of corporations have been intensively discussed and researched, the more elusive phenomenon of positive duties such as making an active effort to help people in need represents a major research void. On the level of individual actors, clear criteria exist to define cases of ethical failures to assist a person, or in other words, of disregarding one’⁠s positive duties. The study at hand uses a framework of criteria developed to define positive duties of individuals from contemporary deontological philosophy developed by Mieth (2012). First, the framework is transferred to the corporate level to derive normative criteria for the positive duties of corporations. Second, the author uses a quantitative-empirical approach to test the framework.