Human rights and assigned duties: implications for corporation

As the power of the corporate sector has become particularly salient, what duties the notion of universal human rights assign to corporation? This paper develops core elements of a general scheme of Human Rights duty assignment, and studies the implications for corporations. It derives the duties of corporations generated by universal human rights and aims to address the question of what corporations ought to do.

The author makes a distinction between unconditional and conditional duties. Unconditional duties apply to every agent regardless of the conduct of others. Conditional duties reflect a division of moral labour where different tasks are assigned to specific agents, whose default activates back-up duties of other agents. Corporations face unconditional duties to not directly violate the rights of others, and not undermine the division of moral labour through practices such as tax evasion or corruption. Being unconditional, these duties cannot be deviated from by reference to the misconduct of competitors. In addition, corporate conditional duties to protect, promote or fulfill rights can be activated if the state and other designated duty-bearers fail to discharge their duties.

Key concluding points highlighted include:

• Human Rights imply duties. If these duties are not assigned to and borne by specific agents, rights are in effect not guaranteed and are hence illusory
• multinational corporations operating in poor and/or undemocratic countries may face particularly extensive obligations. The financially stronger and politically more influential a company, the more demanding positive duties are placed on it, ceteris paribus
• a company that is serious about respecting human rights thus faces great and potentially costly ethical duties when operating in authoritarian countries. These duties can be rejected only by rejecting the human rights perspective
• there is a need to keep in mind that consequentialist perspectives demand that the best possible state of affairs is pursued, rather than just something better than the current situation. This may imply that these matters need to be addressed in addition to realising other positive consequences of corporate activities in authoritarian countries