The ethics of corporate social responsibility.

• Date: 01 July 2012
• Author: Keeping, Janet

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What is CSR, and what is not?

Companies engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR) when they confer benefits on the communities located in or near where they work which are neither required by law nor an integral part of their primary, profit-oriented operations. Consider the mining company which offers to build a road between its landing strip and a neighbouring community in order to boost local tourism businesses. This is not CSR if there is a land claim or statute which requires the company to ensure benefits to the local community, because in such circumstances the company is merely doing what is required of it. In Canada we expect companies to obey the law. It doesn't mean they always do, but a company is not demonstrating ethical behaviour of any special significance if it is merely doing what the law demands. But if there is no such legal compulsion, building the road is a form of CSR.

Is CSR ethical?

Some people eagerly extol the wonderfulness of CSR. Others are deeply sceptical of it. But is CSR ethical? This is a tricky question because the answer depends on both the circumstances of the individual case and the particular dimension of ethics we are most concerned with. In this brief article I offer three observations which may prove useful to thinking about the ethics of CSR.

1. We need to attend to the distinction between the company's motives for CSR and the actual benefits of it for recipients;

2. Ethically better outcomes will be achieved if companies are transparent about why they are engaging in CSR; and

3. There is the danger that CSR erodes government's responsibility to provide public services.

The difference between motives and outcomes

Some people become very disillusioned with CSR when they discover that the company which has conferred a benefit upon their community is doing so only, or primarily, to...