Corporate moral agency and the responsibility to respect human rights in the un guiding principles

do corporations have moral rights?

Patricia Werhane

pp. 427-446

in: David Bevan, Regina W. Wolfe (eds), Systems thinking and moral imagination, Berlin, Springer, 2019

Abstract

In this article Werhane raises the question of whether non-persons such as organizations and corporations have basic rights, as recently argued in the United Nations Guiding Principles, referred to as the Ruggie Principles (2011). Developing a complex view of organizational rights as secondary moral rights, Werhane argues that the corporate obligations to respect human rights spelled out in the Ruggie Principles entail a conclusion that corporations themselves have moral rights too. However, such rights must be considered strictly as secondary moral rights since organizations are not independent of their human constituents.Original publication: Werhane, P.H. 2016, "Corporate Moral Agency and the Responsibility to Respect Human Rights in the UN Guiding Principles: Do Corporations Have Moral Rights?", Business and Human Rights Journal, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 5–20. ©2016 Reprinted with permission.