Editorial

Abstract

This issue of Journal of Global Ethics contains a collection of accepted articles from among our refereed submissions and a special section focused on a matter of continuing concern, the COVID-19 global emergency. We open with the refereed articles of three authors, two of whom focus on governance in the context of the business management paradigm that is called corporate social responsibility (CSR). CSR has been proposed as a model for self-regulation by the businesses themselves. It has been under some form of consideration since before Milton Friedman presented the familiar claim that ‘the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits... to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.’ CSR extends the claim on management’s responsibilities far beyond that limit, and it similarly makes a more expansive claim than a third familiar model, stakeholder theory, which requires management to consider those who are especially affected by a management decision. So, CSR is different in kind than both of these: it is intended to include as part of the corporate objective a regard for social purposes and social problems that businesses may alleviate through their activity. Businesses might be called upon to weigh the opportunity to reduce the opportunities for government corruption that would arise if they were to implement more costly accounting systems, for example. As different concerns have come under discussion, the specific responsibilities that are appropriate to consideration under a CSR approach have been a changing subject that extends into consideration of environmental concerns and wealth inequities especially in this century. CSR discourse is reconfigured within the two articles, presenting turns that are recent innovations in the business ethics literature, and that are generally unfamiliar within discussion of global ethics. Michael Aßländer, in ‘Subsidiarity, wicked problems and the matter of failing states’, and Juliette Schwak, in ‘Foreign aid and discourses of National Social Responsibility: evidence from South Korea’, both apply the approach of CSR to governance, rather than to business management, and each takes the conversation in a very different direction. Michael Aßländer applies concerns of social organization to business entities, extending the corporate objective to the ideal of a ‘corporate citoyen’/citizen. The ideal of subsidiarity is embodied in the principle that ‘societal tasks should be solved by subordinate entities in society if these entities have the competencies to solve such problems,’ and Aßländer hazards that the ideal may be applied to corporations as responsible problem-solvers. Aßländer continues a discussion begun in the pages of this journal by Tjidde Tempels, Vincent Blok, and Marcel Verweij in 2017 (13:1). Aßländer notes that ‘subsidiary responsibilities are often task-related and not always predefined by clearly classified competences,’ and considers the extreme case of failed states, which present conditions of compromised governance in which corporate citizens may even have a generative role in producing order. In this context and in others, the competitive characteristic of business activity may be applied: as Aßländer suggests, ‘actors having similar problems may test different solutions and, thus, compete with each other for the best solutions, which then can serve as models for other cases.’