Between Bottom-line Accounting Benefits and Common Good: Building Corporate Character through the Virtuous Mean

Abstract

In this paper, I examine the idea of corporate character building through corporate social responsibility. I identify, in this regard, the stakeholder approach to corporate ethics and aver that in designing corporate social responsibility, profit-making (and maximization) ought to be conceived beyond the narrow bottom-line accounting understanding to include the gains of other stakeholders, such as host communities and customers. This is on the basis that the purpose of the corporation or business firm goes beyond profit-making to include the improvement of people’s lives and the well-being of society. To advance this view of profit-making, I deploy the notion of the mean in Virtue theory as a framework that provides for how corporations may seek to balance the immediate purpose of profit-making while also ensuring the mediate or remote purpose of the good of other entities whose lives are affected by their operations.