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Ethics is fundamentally a science of social and collective responsibility. Ethics concerns human behavior as responsible or accountable. Because of the nature of social interaction, certain members of the society will bear greater authority, and hence, greater individual and social responsibility than others. In our world, personal responsibility and social responsibility are hardly separable. Personal responsibility becomes responsibility for the world because the person and the world are inseparable. In this chapter, we use the term responsibility from a legal, ethical, moral, and spiritual (LEMS) standpoint as some promise, commitment, obligation, sanctioned by self, morals, law, or society, to do good, and if harm results, to repair harm done on another. Hence, responsibility from a moral perspective is trustworthiness and dependability of the agent in some enterprise. Its inverse is exoneration – the extent to which one is excused from commitment and repairing the harm done to others by one’s actions. We apply the theories and constructs of executive responsibility to two contemporary cases: (1) India’s Super Rich in 2014 and (2) the Fall and Rise of Starbucks. After exploring the basic notion of responsibility, we present a discussion on the nature and obligation of corporate responsibility into three parts: Part I: Classical Understanding and Discussion on Corporate Responsibility; Part II: Contemporary Understanding and Discussion on Corporate Responsibility, and Part III: A synthesis of classical and contemporary views of responsibility and their applications to corporate executive responsibility.

This chapter addresses one of the most crucial areas for critical thinking: the morality of turbulent markets around the world. All of us are overwhelmed by such turbulent markets. Following Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2004, 2010), we distinguish between nonscalable industries (ordinary professions where income grows linearly, piecemeal or by marginal jumps) and scalable industries (extraordinary risk-prone professions where income grows in a nonlinear fashion, and by exponential jumps and fractures). Nonscalable industries generate tame and predictable markets of goods and services, while scalable industries regularly explode into behemoth virulent markets where rewards are disproportionately large compared to effort, and they are the major causes of turbulent financial markets that rock our world causing ever-widening inequities and inequalities. Part I describes both scalable and nonscalable markets in sufficient detail, including propensity of scalable industries to randomness, and the turbulent markets they create. Part II seeks understanding of moral responsibility of turbulent markets and discusses who should appropriate moral responsibility for turbulent markets and under what conditions. Part III synthesizes various theories of necessary and sufficient conditions for accepting or assigning moral responsibility. We also analyze the necessary and sufficient conditions for attribution of moral responsibility such as rationality, intentionality, autonomy or freedom, causality, accountability, and avoidability of various actors as moral agents or as moral persons. By grouping these conditions, we then derive some useful models for assigning moral responsibility to various entities such as individual executives, corporations, or joint bodies. We discuss the challenges and limitations of such models.

In this chapter, I analyze the notion of corporate responsibility from the person-centric perspective. I offer a four-dimensional exposition in terms of which I examine the corporate moral personhood view. These four dimensions are explained and critiqued to arrive at a definition of moral responsibility and status appropriate to corporations. I suggest that a corporation cannot be construed as a person in the sense in which individuals are persons. Since a corporation cannot be an independently existing entity, it cannot have an independent moral personality of its own as individual persons have. Therefore, I argue that a reasonable construal of corporate moral personhood has to exploit a different point of view altogether. With this difference of standpoint, I develop what is called the institutional personhood view. I argue that corporations do acquire a sort of collective institutional moral personality.

The purpose of this article is to develop a moral identity perspective on Barnard's conceptualization of executive responsibility.

The paper uses a prospective study design, as an alternative to a transitional grounded approach, to develop a theory-based framework to compare textual patterns in Barnard's writings. By using Barnard's conceptualization of executive responsibility within the identity control theoretical framework, the paper analyzes the challenges of executive moral identification.

The paper develops a theory-based, yet practical, typology of moral identification of responsible executive leaders.

Although this proposed typology appears rather parsimonious, it is recognized that issues of moral behavior are certainly complex, and therefore should be addressed in a requisite manner in future model developments.

The paper posits that Barnard's conceptualization provides a useful channel to address the critical domain at the intersection of responsible executive leadership, identity, and ethics relative to the issues of CSR, diversity management, gender equity, and community involvement. The paper considers the typology of moral identification to be an operative conduit for subsequent empirical research and practical guidance for executive leadership development.

This study aims to explore how the flow of moral responsibility in supply chains can be understood through an analysis of material, monetary and information flows.

Social responsibility, foliated networks and morality are used to present a conceptual framework that suggests responsibility links in supply chains.

By understanding the flows of material, money and information, it is possible to see how different types (liable and political) of responsibility can be identified. Conventional supply chain flows are thus connected with moral responsibility.

Responsibility issues in supply chain management need to include supply chain links created by monetary and information flows, as well as material flows.

Supply chain actors need to consider responsibility across their entire supply chain, which includes material, monetary and information flows.

Foliated transportation networks, moral disengagement and different types of responsibility are combined in a novel way to facilitate a better understanding of responsibility in supply chains.

Undertaking responsibility is basic to moral behaviour. However, the explicit act of undertaking responsibility may be derived from various motives. The purpose here is to investigate to what extent organisations tend to bound the level of responsibility and to disclose some of the different motives of undertaking responsibility. This is done by employing four different theories of behaviour which relate to conformity, compliance, needs and moral development. Although none of these theories directly treats the question of responsibility, an attempt is made to apply each to it. By way of a summary, six generalised types of responsibility are suggested: responsibility based on anxiety, shame, guilt, arrangement, ethics and freedom. Furthermore, an organisational boundary line of responsibility is suggested.

Weapons systems and platforms guided by Artificial Intelligence can be designed for greater autonomous decision-making with less real-time human control. Their performance will depend upon independent assessments about the relative benefits, burdens, threats, and risks involved with possible action or inaction. An ethical dimension to autonomous Artificial Intelligence (aAI) is therefore inescapable. The actual performance of aAI can be morally evaluated, and the guiding heuristics to aAI decision-making could incorporate adherence to ethical norms. Who shall be rightly held responsible for what happens if and when aAI commits immoral or illegal actions? Faulting aAI after misdeeds occur is not the same as holding it morally responsible, but that does not mean that a measure of moral responsibility cannot be programmed. We propose that aAI include a “Cooperating System” for participating in the communal ethos within NSID/military organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to address the topic of the social responsibility and the scientist from a philosophical perspective. This is a (relatively) neglected topic, as philosophers have tended to focus on moral responsibility. Nevertheless, it is important, and timely.

Analytical, based on the author’s previous work. This is not an empirical study.

That it is essential for scientists to adopt a global outlook with respect to their social responsibilities. This is in (stark) contrast to the conclusion that would be reached for moral responsibility.

In addition to offering some concrete proposals (see below), a general approach to the question is offered that will be useful for further work.

Were the suggestions for socially responsible science put into practice, then this would entail a re-orientation of some parts of scientific research; for instance, a moratorium on weapons research.

The long-run social implications of not re-orienting science, for instance not to focus even more effort on climate change, will be negative in the extreme.

The social responsibility of science has always been important, but it is even more important today. By focussing on global responsibility, this paper offers a new approach.

This paper has a twofold objective: (1) to examine how trust and distrust mediate the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and irresponsibility (CSI) perceptions and word of mouth recommendations; and (2) to show that moral norms moderate this mediating relationship.

Two experimental studies test the proposed model. Study 1 performs a single-factor experiment with three levels of corporate social responsibility (positive, neutral, negative) to test the mediation hypothesis (N = 180, 66% females, mean age = 22.3). Study 2 validates the mediation findings and examines the role of moral norms as moderators (N = 240, 50% females, mean age = 39.5).

Study 1 reveals that trust in the company partially mediates the effects of CSR on word of mouth (WOM) recommendations. Study 2 shows that consumers who adhere to higher moral standards follow distinct paths to negative WOM. Specifically, these consumers tend to spread negative comments when they expect the firm to behave irresponsibly. When unsure about future corporate behaviour, they are less likely to spread negative WOM.

This is the first study, to the authors' knowledge, to demonstrate how moral norms shape the effects of distrust in the corporate culprit on word of mouth recommendations. Accordingly, this research proves that conceptualising trust and distrust as separate constructs is useful in explaining consumer reactions to corporate social irresponsibility.