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Business Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility: Translating Theory into Action

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Sustainable International Business

Part of the book series: Contributions to Management Science ((MANAGEMENT SC.))

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Abstract

Ethics in business embodying fairness, justice, and human rights principles has the potential to unlock, reveal, and address the unethical, unfair, and obscure business practices that constitute barriers to the development of sustainable societies and economies. Hence, corporate social responsibility, following the significant value of business ethics, constitutes a critical determinant of promoting the key ethical features of a company’s culture, such as transparency, diversity, inclusion, and equality; governance; volunteerism; and philanthropy in the market. Through this lens, this chapter seeks to articulate the crucial role of ethics in framing responsible business conduct that is translated into action through corporate social responsibility schemes. To this end, the chapter elaborates on the concept of ethics and its key components, as well as on the two predominant ethical theories facilitating the deployment of corporate social responsibility within the framework of business ethics. Looking ahead, as a way of effectively addressing unethical and unjust corporate practices, this chapter concedes that ethics can serve as a stepping stone for voluntary initiatives for corporate self-regulation, primarily involving corporate social responsibility.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It should be noted that business ethics and professional ethics are closely related, in that professional ethics concerns (1) the professional conduct, namely the conduct of a professional actor toward a client, a consumer, or a patient, and (2) the ethical issues arising in a business environment regarding the rights and duties, the rightness, or wrongness of an action. To exemplify, if we resort to the conduct of a healthcare professional toward a patient, then the ethically appropriate conduct could be determined by the application of a set of four core principles that guide the actions and behavior of a healthcare professional, namely (1) respect for patient autonomy; (2) beneficence; (3) non-maleficence; and (4) justice. Specifically, a variety of substantive ethical concerns could be defined by one or some combination of the above principles, such as patient’s rights and claims, human well-being, loss of life, consultation, benefits and harms, the system of justice (distributive or discriminatory), public safety, and patient’s autonomy (Beauchamp & Childress, 2001; Gewirth, 1986; Chadwick, 1997; Gillon, 2003; Mason & Laurie, 2006).

  2. 2.

    The “Nolan Committee on Standards in Public Life” (named after the first chairman of the committee) was founded in 1994 with the duty to examine the ethical requirements of conduct for the holders of public office (Chapman, 1995; Committee on Standards in Public Life, 1995, p. 2).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hellenic Open University, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Anastasia Sofia Alexiadou

  2. International Hellenic University, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Anastasia Sofia Alexiadou

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  1. Anastasia Sofia Alexiadou
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Northumbria University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK

    Pratik Arte

  2. University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

    Yi Wang

  3. University of Houston-Downtown, Houston, TX, USA

    Cheryl Dowie

  4. University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

    Maria Elo

  5. Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark

    Salla Laasonen

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Alexiadou, A.S. (2023). Business Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility: Translating Theory into Action. In: Arte, P., Wang, Y., Dowie, C., Elo, M., Laasonen, S. (eds) Sustainable International Business. Contributions to Management Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43785-4_15

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