Business Ethics and Corporate Responsibility
Introduction
Corporate Responsibility or Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been a term coined in the previous century in order to define the social responsibilities of corporate heads and their corporations in securing the trust of its community by determining and fulfilling its roles towards the betterment of society. Simply following the rules set down by legislation would not do; corporate authorities and workers alike were demanded to be ethically inclined and considerate of how their actions affect society in general, both as residents and providers within their immediate communities. But both ethics and responsibility are vague terms, and prior to the 19th to 20th centuries, neither of them has been attached to business entities like corporations. Business ethics and corporate responsibilities, then, are much vaguer terms in that they entail more than simple and faithful provision of goods and services to people; some may even think that corporate giants and ethics do not exactly go together, or even share a superficial partnership. But these revolutionary concepts have played a major role in redefining corporations in the 21st century; these conceptual standards remain strong factors towards corporate determination of company action and assessment of overall company performance today. This paper will discuss business ethics and corporate responsibilities as sister terms, but also as discrete concepts, both of which would be subsequently discussed by using two contexts: fiscal transparency and environmental responsibility.
Business Ethics: Fiscal Transparency
Most basic definitions of the ‘corporation’ gives us little to no hint of ethical commitment; in fact, according to Berle and Means (xxiii), the corporation is basically a legal entity which possesses faculties ultimately “devoted to production,