What is the relationship between blaming and responsibility?
What is the relationship between rights and responsibilities?
A question that has been debated for the past few decades is; is it corporately viable to introduce social responsibility as a proposed addition to the work ethic of business organisations.
To be intelligent about living responsibility, we must know our boundaries. There are cases in which we really are powerless to achieve the results we want. What we must do is evaluate what aspect of the situation we have control over, act on that part and let go of the rest.
Have your students visit this website and click on There they will find opportunities to become involved in activities and issues relating to personal and social responsibility.
Example II: In personal relationships, people who are most fulfilled go beyond saying, “I want … ” They ask, “What am I willing to do to get what I want?” They pay attention to the quality of the time they spend with their spouses, children and friends. They notice whether or not communication is clear, acknowledge their own feelings, are sensitive to the feelings of others, face conflicts and deal with them.
The businessmen believe that they are defending free en­terprise when they declaim that business is not concerned "merely" with profit but also with promoting desirable "social" ends; that business has a "social conscience" and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing em­ployment, eliminating discrimination, avoid­ing pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of re­formers.
In each of theseand many similarcases, there is a strong temptation to rationalize these actions as an exercise of "social responsibility." In the present climate of opinion, with its wide spread aversion to "capitalism," "profits," the "soulless corporation" and so on, this is one way for a corporation to generate goodwill as a by-product of expenditures that are entirely justified in its own self-interest.
TWENTY-YEARS AGO, Dwight Macdonald published a series of articles in on the responsibility of peoples and, specifically, the responsibility of intellectuals. I read them as an undergraduate, in the years just after the war, and had occasion to read them again a few months ago. They seem to me to have lost none of their power or persuasiveness. Macdonald is concerned with the question of war guilt. He asks the question: To what extent were the German or Japanese people responsible for the atrocities committed by their governments? And, quite properly, he turns the question back to us: To what extent are the British or American people responsible for the vicious terror bombings of civilians, perfected as a technique of warfare by the Western democracies and reaching their culmination in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, surely among the most unspeakable crimes in history. To an undergraduate in 1945-46—to anyone whose political and moral consciousness had been formed by the horrors of the 1930s, by the war in Ethiopia, the Russian purge, the “China Incident,” the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi atrocities, the Western reaction to these events and, in part, complicity in them—these questions had particular significance and poignancy.
As a person, he may have many other responsibilities that he rec­ognizes or assumes voluntarilyto his family, his conscience, his feelings of charity, his church, his clubs, his city, his country.
The first step toward clarity in examining the doctrine of the social responsibility of business is to ask precisely what it implies for whom.