Democracy and Private Discretion in Business

Wim Dubbink

Business Ethics Quarterly, 2005, vol. 15, issue 1, 37-66

Abstract: Some critics raise moral objections against corporate social responsibility on account of its supposedly undemocratic nature. They argue that it is hard to reconcile democracy with the private discretion that always accompanies the discharge of responsibilities that are not judicially enforceable. There are two ways of constructing this argument: the “perfect-market argument” and the ‘social-power argument.” This paper demonstrates that the perfect-market argument is untenable and that the social-power argument is sometimes valid. It also asserts that the proponents of the perfect-market argument are mistaken in their assumption that perfect markets are conducive to democracy. There are strong reasons to hold that perfect markets are undesirable from a democratic point of view. A proper conceptualization and differentiation of the relation between “the private and the public” can make this clear. The proponents of the social-power argument sometimes maintain that the democratic deficit can be compensated for by consulting the stakeholders affected. Against this, I will argue that the social power argument has nothing to offer affected parties. Still, it will be shown that modern theory on corporate social responsibility is not well accommodated to the democratic deficit as revealed by the social power argument.

Date: 2005
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

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:cup:buetqu:v:15:y:2005:i:01:p:37-66_00

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Business Ethics Quarterly from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().