From “Free-Floating Responsibility” to Self-Responsibility CSR as Theoretical and Practical Context for Ethics

Abstract

Although neo-liberal economists seem to accept that people live in a systematically produced and calculated state of virtual irresponsibility, the recent past of Central and Eastern European cultures (dictatorial regimes, the Holocaust, ethnic wars, ecological disasters, financial and economic crises) demonstrates the tragic consequences of shared irresponsibility for freedom and human life. To promote ethical conduct by creating a valid conceptual frame for a responsible professional (business and economic) practice, we shall rethink the essential features of responsibility, revealed by the twentieth-century phenomenologists Husserl, Heidegger, Roman Ingarden, Sartre, Lévinas and Hans Jonas. For proving the practical validity of the term, we will present a complex and to some extent contradictory case about the knowing-doing gap in the practice of CSR.