The Forgotten Lot: Corporate Duties in the Face of Climate Change

Abstract

Distribution of responsibilities for addressing climate change has traditionally been aimed at individuals or states. As I will show, both these approaches face serious problems of adequately distributing responsibilities and comprehending the complexities of climate change. Therefore, I suggest that we take a different approach and prescribe part of the responsibilities to corporations, which have been largely left out of discussions. I argue for this position by debunking the perspective of the purely economic function of the corporation, as is dominant in society. Instead, corporations are part public, because they are of governmental provenance and enjoy privileges given to them by the state. As a result, corporations owe a responsibility to the state − who functions as a proxy for society − and have a respective duty of public benefit. They ought to act in the public interest and should be subject to additional normative standards.

The public function and social responsibility of corporations, together with considerations of what social and global justice demands from them, lay the foundation for the substance of these norms. I conclude by drafting three specific moral duties corporations acquire in the face of climate change, these are a duty of decarbonisation, -reparation and -promoting collective action.