Global Duties and International Business

Abstract

Philosophers tend to focus on the moral duties of corporate agents irrespective of really existing political structures, whereas international lawyers insist on the primary duties to states to regulate what happens inside and across their borders. Neither of these pictures fully captures the world of sovereign states, quasi-states, weak states, failed states, neo-imperial states, rising-power states, and so on, in which we currently live. Duties can have a global scope in principle, but they operate within non-global political structures in practice. Political scientists and (international) political theorists need to consider the range of global duties borne by international and transnational businesses in today’s world, in order to compliment the perspectives that can be provided by other disciplines. This panel will consider questions such as: the differences between different substantive kinds of global duty—for example, duties of justice, duties of human rights, duties of charity—and what those kinds of duty require companies to do; whether normative questions about the duties of businesses are separable from constitutive questions about the kind of world that we are in; whether, to what extent and why the duties of businesses differ from the duties of other agents (for example, states, individuals, civil-society organisations) in contemporary international politics; whether, to what extent and why the public-private distinction impacts upon discussions of the global duties of international business.

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