Harm and Consent

Marian Eabrasu
Additional contact information
Marian Eabrasu: South Champagne Business School

Chapter Chapter 5 in Moral Disagreements in Business, 2019, pp 79-107 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract ‘Consent’ is the cornerstone of morality in general, and more particularly of assessing the morality of business practices, given that they are defined as contractual. Consent is a key moral bottom line because it allows us to tell apart wrongful from morally acceptable interactions. Consent among parties is essential for a moral assessment of a harmful situation not only in business but also in almost all types of interaction. The same transfer of ownership from one person to another is not judged through the same moral lens if it is done voluntarily or through coercive means. The former case is generally called ‘cooperation’ and the latter ‘theft.’ The same goes for physical harm. An action involving physical violence, unanimously considered harmful, becomes morally acceptable when all parties involved give consent, such as in a boxing match or surgical intervention. That being said, this large agreement that consent is essential to determine the morality of a harmful interaction encloses fundamental disagreements concerning the precise definition of both ‘harm’ and ‘consent.’ Scholars and practitioners—but also citizens in general—are profoundly divided on the meanings of harm and consent, as they would not all locate the frontier between harmful and harmless and/or between consensual and non-consensual managerial practices in the same place. This chapter sets out a general survey of radically different conceptions of harm and consent, with the aim of showing how they shape moral assessments of business activities. The first section focuses on different approaches to harm and the next two on consent: the second more specifically on the conditions in which consent is formulated and the third on informed consent.

Keywords: Moral Assessment; Moral Bottom Line; Moral Acceptability; Harmful Interactions; Fair tradeFair (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:csrchp:978-3-319-97010-3_5

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783319970103

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-97010-3_5

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in CSR, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().