Uncovering the Dialogical Dimension of Corporate Responsibility: Towards a Transcendental Approach to Economics, with an Application to the Circular Economy

Abstract

Corporate Social Responsibility scholarship has grown significantly in recent decades, however, a philosophical reflection on what the concept of responsibility means and entails is still underdeveloped in the management literature. Typically, ethicists have opposed an “ethics of intention” (Kant), to an “ethics of responsibility” (Jonas), but this distinction seems to miss the normative dimension of a teleological ethics and its implications for the concept of responsibility. To assess a responsible behaviour, we need to start from the reflective and critical thought, i.e., the subject’s consciousness. This means that it is only by virtue of consciousness that the subject knows what responsibility is and entails in the multiple occasions in which he relates to the others and the world. Responsibility must be understood as a “response” to a “quest” for an authentic realisation. This implies that the dialogical dimension innerves the normative dimension of responsible behaviour, at the individual and social level. We aim to show how a transcendental conception, grounded on consciousness, can grasp the limit of the subject, but also of that which surrounds it. Indeed, the proper act of consciousness consists in grasping the limit, as awareness of one’s own limitedness, which defines the relationship between identity and difference, the latter indicating not only the other subject, but also the lifeworld, also interpreted as ecosystem. In light of this transcendental conception, we assess the circular economy model under these two respects: its reconceptualization of the concept of waste and resources and the notion of stewardship towards the ecosystem.