As large multi-national corporations and businesses start to take over a majority of the world’s industries and the production of goods and services, the question of ethical business practices is coming more and more to light.
It’s interesting that the concept of social responsibility for businesses is absurd to Friedman, who emphasizes the difference between individual decisions and a business’ decisions, and the impossibility for an individual to make a ‘socially responsible’ decision for a company without violating the intentions of his/her stakeholder. He argues that each person acts for himself, and not as an agent for the company to make decisions, socially responsible or not, and emphasizes the conflict of interest. Although it’s true that in many cases a “socially responsible” choice may not be in the best interest of a company as it may raise costs, this does not mean that a business as a whole is unable to make these decisions and incorporate them into it’s mission statement. For example, the goal of a certain non-profit organisation working to provide business education to small business owners in a developing country would be to bring about positive social change. Yes, they would be “spending the customers’ money”, but since their mission would be known and professed, I don’t see why this would be a problem.
In recent years, there have been many incidences of the selling of personal data or information to external companies. Hong Kong’s MTR corporation and more recently, google are some of these companies.
It is impossible to draw the line between where something beneficial to the community starts and ends because there’s always something more socially responsible a company can do; but that doesn’t mean a company can’t strive to be more socially responsible in some aspects. Here, a more ethical or socially responsible decision would obviously be to ask for consumers’ consent to the sharing of private information, and this also extends to transparency and honesty when it comes to making these privacy settings known. Even though this may lead to a loss of profit and not be beneficial to the company in that sense, it doesn’t justify the action and in many cases the wellbeing of society and individuals is way more important- after all, google provides services to the community, and so should also be liable to provide good services, and that includes basic ethics.
Read the articles here:
The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Profits: http://site.ebrary.com/lib/ubc/reader.action?docID=10187339&page=171
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