 Due Diligence and the Profit Motive: Perfect or Imperfect Duty?Richard M. Robinson
Chapter 9 in Business Ethics: Kant, Virtue, and the Nexus of Duty, 2024, pp 159-177 from Springer Abstract: Abstract The pursuit of shareholder wealth is not a contractual obligation of management and therefore not a perfect duty. It is an imperfect duty that has practical limits that result from its trade-offs with other imperfect duties of due diligence. These imperfect duties of managerial due diligence are illustrated here through explanations of basic financial decisions: capital budgeting (the selection of long-term projects of the firm), capital structure (the selection of finance sources), and liquidity management. The ethical foundations of these imperfect duties of due diligence are drawn from Rawls’ criteria for “competent moral judges” and “considered moral judgments.” These are shown to depend on the imperfect duties to gather and utilize relevant knowledge as explained in Chaps. 3 and 4. Keywords: Shareholder wealth maximization; Imperfect managerial duty; Due diligence; Competent moral judges; Considered moral judgments; Rawls; Rawlsian criteria; Capital structure; Capital budgeting; Diversified portfolio and risk; Competent moral judges; Considered moral judgment (search for similar items in EconPapers) There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sptchp:978-3-031-63122-1_9 Ordering information: This item can be ordered from DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-63122-1_9 Access Statistics for this chapter More chapters in Springer Texts in Business and Economics from Springer |
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