A Philosophical Take on Responsibility as a Contribution to the Discussion of Businesses Responsibility

Abstract

The topic of this paper is responsibility, which has many ontic conditions, including, among many others, appropriate ethical qualification, intellectual disposition and rationality of action, but whose primary one is freedom, which is constitutive of all activity by subjects, both personal and legal ones. Freedom, therefore, has a special effect on the inner structure of an individual or organisation. My first aim is to define more closely the category of responsibility, on the basis of the most important intuitions of Roman Ingarden and Karol Wojtyła, and to consider the applicability of their ideas to the modern understanding of the ethical business. It becomes clear that Ingarden's philosophical distinction between responsibility "before the act" and "after the act" and Wojtyła's concept of responsibility "for" someone and for oneself can serve as fundamental reference points in various forms of management and in the choice of business strategies. I argue that the current polarisation of views on the responsibility of businesses (even though supported by complex networks of arguments) is sterile, or perhaps even spurious. What truly matters is not the legal status of a company, but what its basic responsibilities are and the essence of its responsibility.