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Abstract
Theories of business ethics or corporate responsibility tend to focus on justifying obligations that go above and beyond what
is required by law. This article examines the curious fact that most business ethics scholars use concepts, principles, and
normative methods for identifying and justifying these beyond-compliance obligations that are very different from the ones
that are used to set the levels of regulations themselves. Its modest proposal—a plea for a research agenda, really—is that
we could reduce this normative asymmetry by borrowing from the normative framework of “regulation” to identify and justify
an important range of beyond-compliance obligations. In short, we might think of “self-regulation” as a language and a normative
framework with some distinct advantages over other frameworks like stakeholder theory, corporate social responsibility, corporate
citizenship, and the like. These other frameworks have been under attack in the business ethics literature of late, primarily
for their vagueness and their disappointing inability to distinguish clearly between genuine beyond-compliance moral obligations,
on the one hand, and charitable acts that are laudable but not morally obligatory, on the other.
- Content Type Journal Article
- Pages 1-15
- DOI 10.1007/s10551-011-1193-2
- Authors
- Wayne Norman, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
- Journal Journal of Business Ethics
- Online ISSN 1573-0697
- Print ISSN 0167-4544