Political Theory Book Prize Winners

Abstract

Is Corporate Social Responsibility Democratically Irresponsible? Speaker: Ted Lechterman, co-authored with Benjamin Lange (LMU-Munich University) Chair: Jonathan Seglow, Royal Holloway, University of London The idea of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), that corporations are morally required to uphold at least certain social responsibilities, is now widely accepted among practitioners and the general public. We show that normatively justifying some forms of CSR is more difficult than commonly appreciated. Theories of corporate governance that prioritise the interests of shareholders fail to fully account for duties of justice and beneficence. This is true even of the most sophisticated recent theories of shareholder primacy. Meanwhile, we show that theories of corporate governance that assign firms a more expansive social mandate collide with democratic objections to unlimited corporate power. These challenges indicate the need for new theories of corporate governance that are equally attentive to the social responsibilities of firms and the risks of an unbridled social mandate. We offer a set of desiderata that such theories should satisfy to address the challenges revealed in this study. Representative Falsehoods Speaker: Maxime Lepoutre, Reading University Chair: Jonathan Seglow, Royal Holloway, University of London Political representatives are notoriously prone to deploying falsehoods. The vast majority of these falsehoods are wrongful; others, it has been argued, are plausibly justified. The purpose of the present chapter is to investigate what difference it makes, morally speaking, that a given falsehood is deployed by a political representative. Is the use of falsehoods a betrayal of their role as representatives—such that representatives’ falsehoods are more difficult to justify? Or can falsehoods help perform the distinctive functions of representatives, in which case justifying such falsehoods might instead seem easier, other things being equal? I argue, in short, that political representation has a deeply ambivalent relation to falsehoods. The function performed by representatives can, as is often claimed, place added moral constraints on the use of falsehoods. But, on its own, this common view remains too one-sided. It is also the case that some falsehoods are justified, not in spite of, but at least partly because they are deployed by someone acting in their capacity as a representative.