How the UN's Ruggie Principles set corporate responsibility

Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash

Business administration professor and acting director of the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, Nien-hê Hsieh believes corporations should use common sense when considering their moral obligations. The UN Ruggie Principles, he recently told Quartz, were meant to create a “kind of minimal floor” for businesses to ponder action or inaction in the face of world events.

For instance, they can ask themselves, are there significant human rights violations. They can ask if they themselves are undermining the functioning of the institutions that are needed for society to function well. And they can ask what it really means to be a member of society as a business. What kind of society does business need or want? How can it help bring that kind of society into being?

Those are all questions posed by Professor Hsieh. He didn’t, however, explain the colloquialism UN Ruggie Principles.

They are, in fact, the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Right…