Assignment

1) If law and regulation embed the moral framework and businesses have no extra-legal obligations, expertise or responsibility, are businesses transgressing their proper limits when they influence legislation and/or regulation? Compare Porter and van der Linde with Fieser.

2) Fieser argues that businesses do not and should not be held to have obligations beyond what the law requires. He argues that the moral framework of businesses is and ought to be embedded in law and regulation. Do you find his arguments persuasive? Why or why not?

3) Discuss the five ways that, according to Robert Frank, socially responsible firms might compete successfully. Are Frank's arguments exclusively prudential (based on self-interested calculations)? If corporate social responsibility (CSR) is limited to doing what is right as long as it serves the corporation's self-interest, how does CSR fare according to Hooker's three tests? (Generalization Test, Utilitarian Test & Virtue Test?)