This paper analyses key strengths and weaknesses of the business and human rights agenda that Ruggie has developed at the UN level since 2005. Firstly, the way that it conceptualizes the duty to protect human rights is both a strength and a weakness. This counts as a strength (a) because of the priority placed on the duty to protect human rights as central to human rights practice; (b) because it removed any ambiguity that might have existed in earlier NGO-favoured initiates, such as the UN Norms, about whether states could legitimately evade human rights responsibility and accountability by placing it on companies in some contexts. However, it is a significant weakness that the Guiding Principles place the duty to protect human rights solely on states, and do not consider the circumstances in which companies might appropriately bear potentially burdensome duties associated with human rights protection. Secondly, it is a weakness of the Guiding Principles that two very distinct kinds of obligation are conflated inside of the ostensibly single category of the 'corporate responsibility to respect'. Duties that we all have not to harm others in egregious ways ('duties not to violate') are very different from the duties of moral agents to have appropriate frameworks of moral judgement and to refer to these in a valid way when acting (these are properly called 'duties to respect'). The reason why this matters is that it is not obvious that non-natural persons can have the same robust moral frameworks as actual human people. The final strength of the Guiding Principles rests not in their law or philosophy, but in their politics. The resemblance of these politics to Rawlsian constructivism is a useful middle way between either an overly realist Schmittian realm of power or an overly idealist Habermasian realm of ideal speech.
