Why do companies pursue CSR? I concur with Christian Thauer that intraorganizational dynamics are important, but find his focus on managerial dilemmas unconvincing. I counter by suggesting that a renewed focus on managerial values can help explain CSR when external conditions are held constant.

Although Michael Porter’s and Marc Kramer’s article “Creating Shared Value” is a welcome attempt to mainstream business ethics among management practitioners, it is neither so radical nor such a departure from standard management thinking as the authors make it seem. Porter’s and Kramer’s criticism and rejection of corporate social responsibility depends upon a straw man conception of CSR and their ultimate reliance on economic arguments is too normatively thin to do the important work of reconnecting businesses with society. For these reasons, prospects for a genuine reinvention of capitalism lie elsewhere.

This paper challenges Cohen’s application of empathy to business ethics education. I argue Cohen fails to adequately address the problems of empathetic penetrability and accuracy in regards to reading other’s minds. Given these problems, I conclude empathy may be less important as an antecedent to moral action than Cohen suggests.

This discussion reviews Florian Wettstein’s conclusion that multinational corporations should assume greater “positive” obligations to protect against and remedy violations of human rights. It thereafter suggests an alternative to his defense that remains open to his conclusion, but sketches a moral, rather than political, grounding of those obligations.

Glen Whelan (2012) attempts to advance what he refers to as a “critical research agenda” for the “political perspective on corporate social responsibility (CSR).” Although I think his is a worthy attempt to build a political conception of the business firm and could represent a great intellectual journey, I make some remarks about the meaning and scope of this research agenda. My argument is simple: Rawlsian egalitarianism provides resources for a political theory of the business firm, but one that leads us in different directions than Whelan’s political CSR.

Robert Mayer argues that certain kinds of high-interest payday loans should be legally prohibited. His reasoning is that such lending practices compel more solvent borrowers to cross-subsidize less solvent ones, and thus involve a kind of negative externality. But even if such crosssubsidization exists, I argue, this does not necessarily provide a ground for legal prohibition. Such behavior might be a necessary component of a competitive market that provides opportunities for mutually beneficial transactions to willing customers. And the alternative of a governmentmandated interest rate faces severe problems of its own.

Wayne Norman argues that there should be more similarity or unity between the justifications for markets and the extra-legal norms that apply to market agents. I question two aspects of his claim. First, why does Norman refer to this view as a view about the self-regulation of market agents? Agents could self-regulate with many different norms, not necessarily norms informed by the justifications for markets. Second, asking for more similarity might create problems in terms of the liberty of market agents to pursue other morally relevant objectives. How are we to balance these other relevant objectives and the objectives of markets?

Much of the attention of ethics scholars has focused on balancing self interest with the interests of others, equating self-interest with profit, or at least its acquisition, and presenting a dilemma to both companies and the stakeholder groups that socially responsible business practices might serve. We are in significant agreement with Porter and Kramer’s silver bullet to correct decision making based solely on increasing profit: the creation of “shared value.” However, we suggest three significant points of deviation from this thesis, resulting from our discomfort with features of the mental model(s) that Porter and Kramer use to structure their argument.

When states deregulate the price of payday loans, most consumers will pay more for emergency cash than when a moderate usury cap is imposed. But advocates of price deregulation, including Matt Zwolinski, fail to discuss the distributive effects of their favored policy or to explain why most borrowers should pay more than is necessary for a cash advance. The objections Zwolinski raises against my argument for imposing a usury ceiling in this market miss the mark because they do not justify the increased cost consumers must bear when the price of a payday loan is allowed to float.

Peter Jaworski objects to my “market failures” approach to business ethics on the grounds that in some cases I have mislabeled as “market failure” what are in fact instances of "government failure." While acknowledging that my overall approach might better be referred to as “Paretian,” I resist Jaworski's specific criticism. I argue that the term government failure should not be used to describe market transactions that are made less efficient through government intervention, but should be reserved for cases in which the market mechanism has been suspended and the transaction is occurring, inefficiently, through the organizational power of the state.

This brief response to Smith focuses on his distinction between moral and political responsibility in general and how it relates to human rights in particular. I argue that the notion of political responsibility as it is used in the debate on political CSR often does not exclude morality but is based on it.

Jaakko Nevasto has offered a number of thoughtful criticisms of our attempt to show that Adorno’s work can fruitfully be brought to bear on topics in business ethics. After welcoming his constructive clarifications, we attempt to defuse Nevasto’s main objections and defend our application of Adorno, focusing in particular on the topics of moral epistemology, needs, and the possibility of genuine activity – and thus good work – within capitalist society.

Kates argues that ex ante contractualism fails to defend interference with sweatshops on moral grounds. In this commentary, I argue that Kates does not apply this approach correctly. Ex ante contractualism, indeed, successfully defends interference and thus should still be considered an appealing alternative to other moral approaches for evaluating when and how to interfere in sweatshop conditions to help workers.

Abraham Singer defends the Market Failures Approach (MFA) to business ethics from the objection that the MFA cannot account for the moral value of disruptive innovation. Singer argues that critics who attack the MFA on these grounds face a dilemma: either accept the MFA, along with its general prohibition on disruptive innovation, or reject the very idea that business and market competition should be understood as rule-governed activities at all. This commentary argues that the dilemma Singer poses to MFA critics is a false one.

Scharding (2019) argues that Bitcoin is unethical on Fichte’s (2012/1800) view because its instability makes it unable to guarantee that users can afford what they need to live. She contrasts Bitcoin with currencies controlled by central authorities that can guarantee their stability. Allison (2021) objects that not all centrally controlled currencies are stable and not all non-centrally controlled currencies are unstable. I clarify that both stability and a means of securing stability (typically, a central authority) are necessary, but not sufficient, for a currency to be ethical.

My original paper (Cohen 2012) argued that business ethics education should focus on cultivating empathetic concern. This response clarifies terminology used in that paper and responds to criticisms presented by David Ohreen (2013).

I attempt to cast doubt on Beabout’s attempt to build on MacIntyre’s ethical theory by accounting for management as a ‘domain-relative’ practice for three reasons: i) we can partially engage in practices, so if management can be accounted a practice there is no need to invoke domain-relativity; ii) management does not seem to be domain-relative in the same way that other examples of domain-relative practices might be; and iii) practical wisdom, which Beabout sees as key to management as a domain-relative practice, is adequately covered by MacIntyre’s account of politics.

Claus Dierksmeier admirably combats the misperception that Kant is a deontologist with no regard for virtue. Dierksmeier contends Kant offers a theory of virtue that can contribute in significant ways to advancing the analysis of, e.g., stakeholder theory and internal compliance programs. His plea that business ethicists should view Kant as a resource for thinking more widely and deeply about virtue seems eminently sensible. However, there are grounds for questioning whether a Kantian approach will be of much help in thinking through the ethics of real world business practices.

Dominic Martin attributes to me and other adherents of the market-failures approach to business ethics a narrow account of justification, focused solely on economic efficiency. On the contrary, I argue the appeal to efficiency and market failure is best seen as a pragmatic, Rawlsian, strategy to find common ground and a shared vocabulary for business ethicists who have long been Balkanized by overly ideological “theories.” So understood, the market-failures approach is not the reductivist program Martin portrays it to be. Efficiency and the taming of market failures should be seen as one of many grounds (albeit usually the most important) for both regulatory and beyond-compliance norms for business in a capitalist democracy.

Matthew Sinnicks has attempted to cast doubt on my efforts to extend MacIntyre’s virtue ethics with regard to re-conceiving management as a domain-relative practice. However, rather than weakening my argument, his objections provide an opportunity to clarify a key distinction, address several misunderstandings, respond to criticisms, rectify misrepresentations, and show again that MacIntyre’s virtue ethics provides a fertile framework for re-casting issues of management and business ethics, including a transformed understanding of management as a domainrelative practice.