The Routledge Companion to Business Ethics

p.96

6

Social contract theories

Pedro Francés-Gómez^*

Originating in the works of political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the modern social contract tradition received renewed attention in the twentieth century in the works of James Buchanan (1975), John Rawls (1971) and David Gauthier (1986). The underlying idea is that practical authority must ultimately be derived from individual consent. Contractarian business ethics (henceforth, CBE) takes classical and contemporary theories of social contract as models for normative business ethics theory. This chapter covers the tradition of contractarian business ethics from the appearance of Thomas Donaldson’s Corporations and Morality (1982) to current debates. ...