Clearly I am going to have to read this carefully, and decide whether it is actually deployable in the thesis. I suspect it might not be!
With all this in mind, the point to emphasize is that, whilst Chinese society has probably never complied with what Rawls means by ‘decent,’ it is arguably getting closer (Angle, 2005; Keping, 2008). Further, it needs to be noted that, when Eric Schmidt, the former chair and CEO of Google, and Jared Cohen, the director of Google Ideas, used a 2010 article in Foreign Affairs to advocate a ‘coalition of the connected’ that would unite Western governments, NGOs, and MNCs in the recognition that technology “can be an effective vehicle to promote the values of freedom, equality, and human rights worldwide” (Schmidt & Cohen, 2010:76), they effectively encouraged liberal societies to “shape all not yet liberal societies in a liberal direction” (Rawls, 1999b: 82).
This position, whilst more or less congruent with the cosmopolitanism that informs ‘Political’ CSR (e.g.. Crane et al., 2008: chap. 7; Scherer & Palazzo, 2010: 911), is not consistent with Rawls’s concern to ensure that liberal peoples (and supposedly liberal MNCs), “observe the duty of non-intervention,” and refrain from unnecessarily and/or illegitimately interfering in the affairs of non-liberal, but decent, societies (Rawls, 2001: 37). Given this point in particular, I suggest that a ‘Rawlsian’ Pohtical CSR is significantly different from ‘Political’ CSR.
(Whelan, 2012: 724-5)
Whelan, G. (2012). The political perspective of corporate social responsibility: a critical research agenda. Business Ethics Quarterly, 22, pp. 709–737.
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