The Provenance and Development of a Global Ethic

Global Virtue Ethics Review, Oct, 2000 by James Gazell

2) The document observed that businesses should promote the social advancement of the countries in which they operate not only by providing employment opportunities but also by raising the purchasing power of their employees and by contributing to human rights, education, welfare, and vitality of nations where they function. 3) It stated that business conduct should go beyond what is merely legal in order to foster trust through candor, truthfulness, promise keeping, and openness (with the caveat that it accepted the legitimacy of trade secrets). 4) It advised respect for international and national rules to promote a level economic competitive playing field and a higher degree of free and equal trade. 5) It extended the trade aspect of the fourth principle to urge business support for multilateral trade agreements like the World Trade Organization (WTO) (replacing General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs [GATT]), which seeks to reduce tariffs and unilateral, discriminatory commercial practices among nations). 6) It urged conservation of natural resources and, at a minimum, protection of the environment and its improvement, where possible. 7) It condemned corruption, particularly bribery and money laundering, as well as the arms trade, which entails business transactions with terrorists, drug traffickers, and organized crime. In the third--and last--section, it discussed a set of stakeholder principles and listed the stakeholders in what appeared a ranking (and widening circle) of obligational rubrics: customers, employees, owners/investors, suppliers, competitors, and communities ("Caux Roundtable: Principles for Business," 1999: pp. 2-5)

In 1988, two years after the founding of the Caux Roundtable, one of its participants--Ryuzaburo Kaku, the Chairman of Canon, Inc.--expanded upon its work. He spelled out the concept of kyosei for two purposes: first, to initiate a process of helping to furnish his organization (which a year earlier had celebrated its fiftieth anniversary) with a corporate philosophy that expressed its collective vision and would guide its future development, particularly in the twenty-first century, as a globally responsible business. He expressed a hope that it would become a paradigm for individual, corporate, and national emulation with adaptations. He wrote that businesses evolve through five phrases of widening responsibilities (Canon, Inc., 1995). In the first, corporations are "purely capitalistic," as Marx had envisioned, because their owners and managers share profits, help expand national economies, but care little about their employees. In the second phase, businesses share profits with their workers but are apathetic toward local communities and environmental protection. In the third, businesses recognize the existence and worth of stakeholders, of which he enumerated six: customers, staff, shareholders, suppliers, competitors, and local communities. Kaku listed these components in what appears to be a declining order of corporate responsibility.