ABSTRACT

This chapter reviews the rhetorical charge of doing no harm and doing the right thing by blending together corporate social responsibility (CSR)/Sustainability professionals' viewpoints on ethics, sifting through multidisciplinary literatures about ethics and morality, and offering normative recommendations for moving forward. In business, ethics is an activity and a form of social practice. Revealing some universal agreement about ethics in CSR/Sustainability and public relations' role amidst political and economic dynamics is no small feat. Optimally, CSR/Sustainability should be embedded throughout the organization, both philosophically and operationally; a move that often requires new ways of doing business that seem strange at first blush. Critics denounce ethics in a context of business management or public relations in the service of CSR/Sustainability as an oxymoron. Considering public relations only as a means for generating positive publicity negates its maximum value for providing ethics counsel and insider-activism as part of a management team engaged with CSR/Sustainability programs.