A Profit Cap is not yet a General Moral Duty for Companies: A Corporate Social Contract Perspective

Muel Kaptein ()
Additional contact information
Muel Kaptein: Erasmus University Rotterdam

Journal of Business Ethics, 2025, vol. 199, issue 2, No 6, 364 pages

Abstract: Abstract In both the literature and practice, it has been advocated that companies should have a profit cap. Utilizing corporate social contract theory, this article posits that under at least three conditions, companies do not have a general moral duty to cap their profits. These conditions entail that a company adheres to the contracting principles of its stakeholder relationships, that the constitutive stakeholders of the company have not otherwise stipulated in the corporate social contract, and that the macrosocial contract does not prescribe otherwise to the company. The first two conditions are company-specific and hence do not constitute a generic moral imperative, and there is currently insufficient evidence for the third, generic condition.

Keywords: Profit; Responsibility; Contract theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10551-024-05834-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:jbuset:v:199:y:2025:i:2:d:10.1007_s10551-024-05834-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10551/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10551-024-05834-5

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Ethics is currently edited by Michelle Greenwood and R. Edward Freeman

More articles in Journal of Business Ethics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().