Moral agency in charities and business corporations : exploring the constraints of law and regulation
Abstract
For centuries in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, charities have been widely regarded as admirable and virtuous organisations. Business corporations, by contrast, have been characterised in the popular imagination as entities that lack a capacity for moral judgement. Drawing on the philosophical literature on the moral agency of organisations, we examine how the law shapes the ability of charities and business corporations headquartered in England to exercise moral agency. Paradoxically, we find that charities are legally constrained in exercising moral agency in ways in which business corporations are not. Implications for charities and business corporations are then explored.
Citation
Burt , E & Mansell , S F 2019 , ' Moral agency in charities and business corporations : exploring the constraints of law and regulation ' , Journal of Business Ethics , vol. 159 , no. 1 , pp. 59-73 . https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-017-3750-9
Publication
Journal of Business Ethics
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0167-4544Type
Journal article
Rights
© The Author(s) 2017 This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
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