Making profits or being socially responsible?

Are corporate social responsibility and profit-generating mutually exclusive? I do not think so.

Business is the central of our living but on the other hand, it produces many ethical problems. In Bernd Carsten Stahl’s “Ethical Issues of Information and Business” he addressed the relationship between business and ethics and found that there are numerous connections between them. There are several approaches to address business ethics, one is the stakeholder approach while the other one is corporate social responsibility (CSR), which “is based on the recognition that companies benefit from society and thus needs to reciprocate.” However, Bernd mentioned that CSR raises some debates. Ethicists argue that companies utilize CSR as a corporate strategy, and it now becomes a tool for marketing and generating profits. 

The CSR reminds me of a non-traditional investment segment called ESG which is a growing investment choice that considering environmental, social and governance issues and risks into traditional investment evaluations.

https://www.blackrock.com/ch/individual/en/themes/sustainable-investing/esg-integration

According to J.P. Morgan, these issues not only have a positive social impact but also may affect a company’s long-term financial performance, while ESG is a way to evaluate it. BlackRock with $7 trillion in assets is the largest fund manager, and the company is going to focus on sustainable investing. In contrary to some ethicists’ argument, I think BlackRock is a great example of a company that promotes CSR as well as being profitable. A company is valuable only when it provides something that our society needs. As BlackRock leads the ESG investment, more and more funds on the street will build their ESG portfolios. This action encourages and influences other corporations to think about sustainable investing while growing their business. 

There is no doubt that the original propose of CSR is about social responsibility, and I do agree that some companies may utilize it as a tool for marketing themselves and generating profit. But we can see more and more companies such as BlackRock actually takes social responsibility into action. I want to speak for CSR: CSR and corporate profitability are not mutually exclusive.