Corporations have a social responsibility beyond just obeying the law as it serves as business ethics. Despite the fact that CSR entails the ethical, economic, discretionary and ethical responsibilities of the organizations, the business ethics often focuses on making of cooperate moral judgments and individual and group behaviors within the organizations. Therefore, business ethics would be considered as the constituent of the broader corporate social responsibility. It would enable the corporations to achieve various goals about profit making and the procedures on decision making and the best ways to achieve the goals. Since operational decision making is incapable of making moral and rational choices due to the motive of profit making which often overrides all considerations morally, there would be a need for the cooperations to think beyond the business laws. The individuals within the corporations could be responsible morally, but that would not mean a corporation, abstract social constructs, could take up moral responsibilities beyond the spheres of business laws. Despite the fact that corporations would entrench force into the fast growing civilization, they would probably not advance far. This is because it would never be obvious that the corporations would be justified morally without regarding move beyond the systems of justice (Schwartz & Carroll, 2003).
Corporations have a social responsibility beyond just obeying the law as it helps to control libertarian justice. Libertarian justice does not support limited liability but instead it offers companies a chance to have disrespect for human rights and refusal to take full responsibilities by paying for damages incurred. On the contrary, utilitarian justice does not support corporations’ limited within the laws since it’s never clear that the limited liabilities are the best for the greater good. Rawls’s theory of justice also never supports corporations’ limited within the laws since the limited liabilities could give the wealthy class responsibilities and more rights than is enjoyed among the poor (Lantos, 2001). It’s for this reasons that the cooperations should have social responsibilities beyond obedience to the law.
References
Lantos, G. P. (2001). The boundaries of strategic corporate social responsibility. Journal of consumer marketing, 18(7), 595-632.
Schwartz, M. S., & Carroll, A. B. (2003). Corporate social responsibility: A three-domain approach. Business ethics quarterly, 13 (04), 503-530.