The Ethical Anchoring of Corporate Social Responsibility and the Critique of CSR

Abstract

The author is professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Bologna. In this chapter, he deals with two specific questions: How robust is the critique against corporate social responsibility (CSR)? Which ethical anchoring is capable of offering more solid support for CSR? Notwithstanding the plethora of studies and debates that have taken place over the course of the last quarter century, there still exists no commonly accepted definition of CSR. The author analyzes four different kinds of critique of CSR and then subsequently four different possible ethical foundations. He argues for a conception of virtue ethics.