Introduction

Do investors have an obligation to not invest in corporations that contribute to human rights violations? – even when such divestment neither causes changes in the corporations, nor prevents the violations? These questions go to the heart of what over the last forty years has become known as ‘Socially Responsible Investing’ (SRI).

This name may be new, but both divestment and such worries about the practice are old. Appeals to divest from multinational corporations go back to the seventeenth century, against one of the earliest forms of economic globalization: the international slave trade. The present reflections address questions that have accompanied SRI since this very first case. Is there a justification of divestment that holds up even in the face of general breaches of the norms? Can such a justification avoid reliance on controversial religious views? And are there any grounds to believe that such divestment may be effective against human rights violations, even in the absence of a powerful hegemon that sanctions violations of the norms?