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Silence as Complicity: Elements of a Corporate Duty to Speak Out Against the Violation of Human Rights

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

Florian Wettstein
Florian Wettstein*
Affiliation:
University of St. Gallen
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Abstract:

Increasingly, global businesses are confronted with the question of complicity in human rights violations committed by abusive host governments. This contribution specifically looks at silent complicity and the way it challenges conventional interpretations of corporate responsibility. Silent complicity implies that corporations have moral obligations that reach beyond the negative realm of doing no harm. Essentially, it implies that corporations have a moral responsibility to help protect human rights by putting pressure on perpetrating host governments involved in human rights abuses. This is a controversial claim, which this contribution proposes to analyze with a view to understanding and determining the underlying conditions that need to be met in order for moral agents to be said to have such responsibilities in the category of the duty to protect human rights.

Keywords

human rightsmultinational corporationssilent complicitycorporate powercorporate responsibility
Type
Special Issue: Human Rights and Business
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , January 2012 , pp. 37 - 61
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 2012

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