Limited Social Responsibility of Corporation

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Limited Social Responsibility of Corporation Due to the specialty of multinational corporations that they are practicing business in different countries with different laws and cultures, started from day one the first international corporation was founded, the arguments and debates concerning the social responsibility and ethical conduct of multinational corporations have never stopped. On one hand, there are commentators believe that the only social responsibility for multinational corporations is abiding local country’s law. On the other hand there are many ethicists like Falkenberg and Donaldson insist that only abiding the local country’s law is not enough, multinational corporations should have more moral responsibility regarding human rights, and local environment. Lawrence Kohlberg developed a framework that divided corporations’ moral reasoning of conduct into three stages, pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional. In the pre-conventional stage, corporations’ behaviour is driven by punishments and rewards, so called the “stick and carrot” ethic view. In this stage, corporations do whatever they have to do to gain economic profit as long as they are not breaking the law. In the conventional stage, there are more things beside punishments and rewards that corporations need to consider when making a decision. Things like the response of local community, approval of local culture, and opinions of people who will be directly affected by the decision. Kohlberg thinks in the post-conventional stage, in addition of satisfying all the criteria above, a corporation also has to consider universal ethical rights making a decision. Andreas Falkenberg, a college professor from Norway. He is holding a strong view of corporations should take up more social responsibilities. He believes that in the first stage corporations need an extensive set of social

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