Three years ago I was involved as an observer in the drafting of the ISO 26000 guide on Social Responsibility. The guide was prepared by an international working group of 450 representatives of business, labour, government, NGOs and other interests from 99 countries and 42 international organizations.  The early drafts of the guide contained language suggesting that an organization’s responsibility to do something about human rights varies with (among other things) its ability to influence the perpetrators of human rights violations. One passage, for example, stated that

"there will be situations where an organization’s ability to influence others will be accompanied by a responsibility to exercise that influence…. Generally, the responsibility for exercising influence increases with the ability to influence."

This struck me as intuitively right. Companies (and other organizations) often have special relationships either with third parties who are in a position to violate human rights (governments, suppliers, security contractors, etc.), or those whose rights are violated (employees, local community members, etc.). In such circumstances it seemed intuitive that, if companies had leverage over third parties through their webs of relationships, they ought to exercise such leverage to improve the human rights situation even if they, themselves, were not contributing directly to any human rights violations.

I was surprised, therefore, when the United Nations Secretary General’s Special Representative on business and human rights, Professor John Ruggie, objected strenuously to this aspect of the draft ISO 26000 guide.  He argued that a company’s size, resources and power do not determine its human rights responsibilities, otherwise big corporations could be called upon to protect and promote human rights simply because they had the ability to do so despite having no connection to or involvement in the human rights abuses in question. This, he argued, would require assuming, in moral philosophy terms, that “can implies ought.” He also argued that this approach was conceptually vague, difficult to operationalize, and susceptible to strategic gaming by companies and governments alike.

In response to Professor Ruggie’s concerns, the leadership of the ISO 26000 working group rewrote the portions of the guide dealing with influence and leverage. Many references to responsibility arising from and increasing with the ability to influence other actors’ decisions and activities were removed.  The changes were endorsed by the working group at its final meeting in Copenhagen in the Spring of 2010, and later that year the final version of ISO 26000 was published with the approved of a large majority of ISO member bodies.

This was not the end of the story as far as I was concerned. I still found appealing the proposition that corporate leverage—a company’s ability to influence the actions of third parties through its relationships—gives rise to corporate responsibility in certain circumstances. I turned to the business ethics and moral philosophy literature for confirmation of my intuition. To my surprise, no one seemed to have tackled this question head on. Plenty of scholars had touched on aspects of the problem—the general relationship between power and moral responsibility, the concept of “silent complicity,” the idea of corporate “spheres of influence,” and so on—but no one had presented a systematic moral argument for the proposition that leverage, in certain circumstances, gives rise to responsibility.

Corporate "leverage" gives rise to responsibility where there is a morally significant connection between the company and a rights-holder or rights-violator, the company is able to make a difference, it can do so at modest cost, and the threat to human rights is substantial.

So I set out to supply the argument myself. Drawing on venerable moral debates about a bystander’s duty to come to the rescue of someone in distress and on excellent work by contemporary business ethicist Florian Wettstein about positive moral responsibilities to speak out against human rights abuses, I developed a theory of leverage-based corporate human rights responsibility. I argue that leverage gives rise to responsibility where four conditions are satisfied: (1) there is a morally significant connection between the company and a rights-holder or rights-violator, (2) the company is able to make a contribution to ameliorating the situation, (3) it can do so at modest cost, and (4) the threat to human rights is substantial.

While the proposition that leverage equals responsibility remains highly controversial in the global business community and was rejected by Professor Ruggie in his work as UN Special Representative, I believe it is both morally sound and consistent with leading global frameworks for corporate social responsibility, including the UN Global Compact, ISO 26000 and Professor Ruggie’s own Guiding Principles on business and human rights, endorsed this past summer by the UN Human Rights Council.

If you are interested in reading more about my argument, the paper is available from SSRN (click on "One Click Download") and is forthcoming soon in the Business Ethics Quarterly. I welcome your comments.