Abstract
This article shows how taking a constitutional economics perspective can clarify the idea of responsibility. Applying constitutional economics, the authors distinguish between within-game (or sub-constitutional) responsibility when playing a game and context-of-game (or constitutional) responsibility for developing the conditions under which a game will be played. These two conditions are interpreted as comprising not only the institutions (rules of the game) but also discourse about the game, its deficiencies, and reform options. Accordingly, the authors’ concept of “ordo-responsibility” distinguishes between “governance responsibility” and “discourse responsibility.” This concept is used to critically discuss the conventional dichotomy between state and non-state actors. The authors examine the capacity of private actors to engage in political processes of rule-setting and rule-finding. The article thus provides important conceptual clarification for the debate on corporate social responsibility.
The authors thank two anonymous reviewers as well as the editor for constructive and very valuable comments. The authors also thank participants of the 2006 conference “Business Ethics, Social Integration and Corporate Citizenship” in Valencia, Spain, for comments on a conference paper that first developed some of the ideas of this article and that has been published as Beckmann and Pies (2008) in the according conference volume.
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Notes
- 1.
For example, in soccer, the duration of the game could be changed from 90 to 60 min, the number of players could be changed from 11 to 5, or off-side positions could be made legal. Any such change in rules would basically result in a different game. The constitutional perspective takes this second level of choice into consideration.
- 2.
There is a long tradition in ethics according to which it is wrong to hold someone responsible for something the person cannot influence. This idea can be traced back to the Roman Corpus Iuris Civilis. At around 100 A.D., Aulus Celsus Cornelius wrote in the Digest (50, 17, 185): “Impossibilium nulla obligatio est.” Cf. Spruit (2001, p. 985). However, the classical Latin expression of this idea that nobody is bound beyond ability is much better known: ultra posse nemo obligatur (to say one should implies one can).
- 3.
From this perspective, the given preferences do not refer to normal market goods but to “commodities” or “basic goods” such as “health,” “the good life,” etc. (cf. Becker 1996). Consequently, this approach does not look at a “preference” for, say, aspirin, but instead treats aspirin (its existence, its effects, its price, etc.) as one of the constraints that channel how rational actors try to best satisfy their desire for the basic good “health.” If a rational actor learned about a new and better drug than aspirin and therefore changed his or her medication, the rational-choice perspective would not treat this as a case of transformed preferences but as a change in behavior triggered by altered information constraints.
- 4.
By this logic, even rational actors with strictly given meta-preferences have an interest in participating in discourse in order to learn about and adapt to the social constraints and interdependencies that determine the possibility space of their behavior. This is of particular importance when it comes to addressing the collective self-harm in a social dilemma. To overcome a social dilemma through collective action, the actors need to know how the others perceive and evaluate the situation. Here, it makes a huge difference whether the actors interpret their situation as one of pure conflict—a zero-sum game—or as a precarious positive-sum game (cf. Schelling 1980, 2006). To be sure, from a rational-choice perspective, discourse alone may be insufficient to solve a social dilemma, but far from simply being “cheap talk,” discourse can help facilitate an agreement to (re-)form institutional incentives in a mutually advantageous way.
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Beckmann, M., Pies, I. (2016). The Constitution of Responsibility: Toward an Ordonomic Framework for Interpreting (Corporate Social) Responsibility in Different Social Settings. In: Luetge, C., Mukerji, N. (eds) Order Ethics: An Ethical Framework for the Social Market Economy . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33151-5_14
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