10 Propositions on Corporate Social Responsibility

1. Firms' main social worth is to reward their shareholders as far as possible, within the law. They can be useful in being open and frank in their relations with society. Almost everything else they may do is a sop to people who really don’t like them.
2 The CSR movement is driven by non-representative NGOs who (like socialists) have a redistributive agenda. Finding voters increasingly resistant to their arguments, they have moved to corporations, as a softer target.

3 Corporations are a soft target because the NGOs and the media, both anti-capitalist, have misdescribed the good the free market does whilst portraying corporations as rich and mean. Having had their reputations stolen, firms now buy them back with CSR.

4 Corporate Social Responsibility is a term designed to make firms appears as though they have a duty, an obligation to this new agenda. It posits that not sharing the agenda would be irresponsible. Actually, CSR is harmful to society’s moral life.

5 Virtue can only attach to private individuals or firms who sacrifice themselves in some way out of their own resources (of time, wealth, energy, etc). Public corporations cannot be virtuous because they own no assets, but only manage those of others.

6 Most CSR programmes are dishonest because they depend on the personal generosity of staff (usually in free time foregone) for which the firm then claims virtue and public relations credit. The credit attaches to the giver, not his or her employer.

7 Some CSR programmes more deserve the name because the firm itself is “generous”. These raise prices, or divert profits, and put the resources into “the community”, at the expense of the firms’ existing customers or shareholders (including poor ones).

8 CSR is defended as good for firms by enriching staff managerially, pleasing customers by delivering a feel-good factor, etc. If the programmes are genuinely self-interested, or reflect enlightened self-interest, that is fine but should not be considered virtuous.

9 We need firms which positively renounce CSR as currently defined, and do so as a higher form of CSR. So a bank might, like an airline, become a “Go-Bank – the ‘No Frills’ banker” for penny-pinchers, including poor people.

10 CSR programmes are often posited as “putting something back”. This is typical of the new dangerous assumption that firms are parasitic, not contributors; that their style of wealth-creation is crudely exploitative; that their operations leave a debt to repay.