Duties and General Will of a Company

A company has a corporate-legal duty towards its shareholders, but a moral duty towards its customers (general public) and employees. The former often gets the better of the latter in a company fighting neck to neck rivalries in the market. Consequently it develops a general will (as Rousseau calls it) which is skewed in favour of shareholder profits. A company can effectively shift its attention from crude profits to social good when it achieves competitive advantage over its peers by a good margin.

Isiah Berlin famously gave two concepts of liberty : negative liberty or the ‘freedom from’ an external interference, and positive liberty or the ‘freedom to’ do something which really matters. It is only with corporate maturity and stability that positive liberty gets priority over negative liberty in the corporate’s mission document. It is then that corporate profits fall in line with the aspirations of economic growth that general public have.

• written by Raman Butta

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