The good company Rhetoric or reality Corporate social responsibility and business ethics redux英文文献.pdfVIP

American Business Law Journal Volume 44, Issue 2, 207–222, Summer 2007 The Good Company: Rhetoric or Reality? Corporate Social Responsibility and Business Ethics Redux Edwin M. Epsteinn In the hour when an individual is brought before the heavenly court for judg- ment, the person asked: Did you conduct your business affairs honestly? Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a Falsifying and cheating with the weights is forbidden. While I am weighing the goods, God is measuring me. Latin Inscription Sponza Palace, Dubrovnik, Croatia I. INTRODUCTION For millennia, religious teachings and secular ethics have sought to nur- ture socially beneficial economic behavior. The canonical literatures of vir- tually every religious tradition as well as Western and Eastern philosophy are replete with precepts and admonitions regarding what constitutes eth- ical behavior in the economic realm. To be sure, these teachings, until relatively recently, have focused on ` the behavior of individuals vis-a-vis one another. Concerns about organ- izational entities, which aggregate human energy and diverse resources to undertake economic activityFthe production and distribution of goods and servicesFis at best a century and a half old. To sharpen the point more finely, it is the emergence of large-scale business organizations in the last third of the nineteenth century within Europe and the United States that gave rise to concerns about corporate social responsibility (CSR). Early nProfessor, University of California, Berkeley. r 2007, Copyright the Authors Journal compilation r 2007, Academy of Legal Studies in Business 207 208 Vol. 44 / American Business Law Journal on,