Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Table of cases
- Table of statutes
- Preface
- Preface to the first edition
- PART ONE BASIC CONCEPTS, BOARD STRUCTURES AND COMPANY OFFICERS
- PART TWO CORPORATE GOVERNANCE IN AUSTRALIA
- PART THREE CORPORATE GOVERNANCE IN INTERNATIONAL AND GLOBAL CONTEXTS
- PART FOUR BUSINESS ETHICS AND FUTURE DIRECTION
- 14 The ethical obligations of corporations
- 15 Reflections on contemporary corporate governance and its future direction
- Index
14 - The ethical obligations of corporations
from PART FOUR - BUSINESS ETHICS AND FUTURE DIRECTION
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Table of cases
- Table of statutes
- Preface
- Preface to the first edition
- PART ONE BASIC CONCEPTS, BOARD STRUCTURES AND COMPANY OFFICERS
- PART TWO CORPORATE GOVERNANCE IN AUSTRALIA
- PART THREE CORPORATE GOVERNANCE IN INTERNATIONAL AND GLOBAL CONTEXTS
- PART FOUR BUSINESS ETHICS AND FUTURE DIRECTION
- 14 The ethical obligations of corporations
- 15 Reflections on contemporary corporate governance and its future direction
- Index
Summary
The social responsibility of business is to increase profits.
Milton Friedman, The New York Times, 13 September 1970Ethics deals with values, with good and bad, with right and wrong. We cannot avoid involvement in ethics for what we do – and what we don't do – is always a possible subject of ethical evaluation. Anyone who thinks about what he or she ought to do is, consciously or unconsciously, involved in ethics.
Peter Singer, A Companion to Ethics, Oxford, Blackwell (1991), vIntroduction – the nature of morality
Until now, this book has focused on the legal rights and duties of those involved in the governance of companies. This chapter examines not what the law stipulates as expected of those involved in corporate governance, but the ethical responsibilities of company officers. These levels of inquiry, though often overlapping, are quite different. The ultimate aim of the law is to guide and coordinate human behaviour, normally through the threat of coercive measures for violations of legal norms. In order to be effective at shaping human conduct, legal norms must be clear and knowable.
Morality is less prescriptive than the law – there is no official sanction or censure involved with breach of moral norms. It is also generally more open-ended and less clear. This, however, should not stifle the search for moral truths or consensual moral norms. Despite the high level of disagreement about the precise content of moral norms, an important paradigm of moral judgments is that they are (apparently) used in the same manner as factual judgments.
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- Principles of Contemporary Corporate Governance , pp. 419 - 445Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010