Commentary on Donaldson’s Social Contract for Business

John Kultgen is irritated at Tom Donaldson, not without cause. He wants a stationary adversary, but Donaldson does not oblige. Donaldson's method is of the impartial teacher who refuses to commit himself for fear he will prejudice his students by imposing his position on them. The result is not a lack of clarity, but the appearance of evasiveness (of which Kultgen accuses Donaldson in Note 3). Thus Corporations and Morality, at best a philosophic treatise, is contaminated by rampant textbook-ese and Donaldson's unwillingness to state uneqivocally he believes in the existence of a social contract of business. My own reading overlooks Donaldson's quirk and takes his argument on its face: in my view, he asserts there is a social contract for business. Therefore, Kultgen's trilemma seems non-existent; what attracts my attention is Kultgen's argument Donaldson's notion of a social contract for business rests on an unsupported existential claim. Unlike Kultgen, I see little fault in the assertion. Indeed, I find the evidence for the existence of such a contract so pervasive and persuasive, I can even work for the moment with both Donaldson's and Kultgen's premise which is written or in law does not ? by definition constitute a social contract. Kultgen bases much of his argument on the title of Donaldson's central chapter, Constructing a Social Contract for Business, which he believes implies that the task is to create one de novo, not decipher one already at hand. Kultgen's rendering to me a misreading of the word construct. The lexical model which comes to mind is Berger and Luckmann's usage in the title of their seminal work, Tlie Social Construction of Reality. Implicitly, society (more than, as Kultgen argues, the individual in society) constructs the reality with which each of us lives. So is it, I believe Donaldson submits, with the corporation. Society creates the social contract with business. It is the unwritten rules, mores, customs, and standards of a society ? the so called indirect obligations to which the corporation is obliged to adhere; if it does not, it is in violation and, in the long run, in jeopardy. (In a sense, is what Adam Smith meant when he spoke of the invisible hand, whose invocation by Donaldson Kultgen does not mention.) The sentence Kultgen