Search results

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 focal chapter deals with the understanding of important ethical theories used in executive moral reasoning such as teleology, deontology, distributive justice and corrective justice, virtue ethics versus ethics of trust, from the perspectives of intrinsic versus instrumental good, moral worth versus moral obligation, and moral conscience versus moral justification. Ethical and moral reasoning will power executives to identify, explore, and resolve corporate moral dilemma, especially in the wake of emerging gray market areas where good and evil, right or wrong, just or unjust, and truth and falsehood cannot be easily distinguished. We focus on developing corporate skills of awareness of ethical values and moral imperatives in current otherwise highly commoditized and turbulent human, market, and corporate situations. The challenges of morality are multifaceted and diverse. Professionals usually have self-discipline and self-regulation abilities, ego strength, and social skills. Morality in the professions is not concerned with the issues of rudimentary socialization; rather, the issues involve deciding between conflicting values, where each value represents something good in itself. There are problems in both knowing what is right, good, true, and just on the one hand, and on the other hand, in doing what is right and avoiding wrong, doing good and avoiding evil, and being fair and just while avoiding being unfair and unjust. Several contemporary cases will illustrate the challenging dimensions of ethical and moral reasoning, moral judgment and moral justification embedded in executive decision processes, and corporate growth and profitability ventures.

Every human being is spiritual and has spirituality, whether it is existential and subconscious or reflective and explicitly conscious. The existential subconscious level of spirituality informs and empowers our conscious decisions, choices, and actions. In this sense, spirituality is the continuous line of action that fashions our personal and collective human and cosmic identity. Despite our native spirituality that unites and harmonizes humanity, we also experience the fallen nature of the human heart and the resulting brokenness of human relations as the major cause of crises in our lives, families, corporations and nations, and now the life-threatening ecosystems that form our common planetary home. Hitherto, we have falsely presumed that the earth and the universe are for the use of mankind – an anthropocentric concept of ecology and sustainability. Hence, we are on the verge of destroying the planet. We need planetary ethics and cosmic spirituality to change our mind-set – from anthropocentricism to cosmocentricism and from being the conqueror of nature to being a caring partner of nature. This is the essence of corporate cosmic spirituality. Human spirituality in general and corporate executive spirituality in particular seem to be the best way to understand and offer a way out of the personal, communal, and planetary disorders of our age. This concluding note of this book is a summons to all corporate executives to rise to the call of cosmic spirituality.