Corporate Responsibility for Wealth Creation and Human Rights, by Georges Enderle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 332 pp.

Abstract

I n his recently published book, Georges Enderle discusses wealth creation, human rights, and corporate responsibility. Enderle presents an original argument, according to which business enterprises, as organizations, must create wealth but also carry moral obligations on human rights. It is an intriguing argument, especially when compared to mainstream perspectives on corporate responsibility, usually centered on profit and shareholder returns or on stakeholder value creation. The first part of the book presents an innovative conception of wealth creation. In the following section, Enderle develops a normative-ethical perspective centered on human rights. He carefully defines the purpose of business and economy as the creation of wealth and argues that it should be guided by human rights. The last section is dedicated to showing how his perspective can be applied to the ethics of business organizations. Enderle argues that it is necessary to understand wealth in a comprehensive manner: wealth not only involves economic capital but also encompasses natural, human, and social capital. Enderle argues that the literature dealing with a nation’s wealth that considers only its monetary dimension is limited. When applied to business ethics, this notion of wealth implies, as he seeks to demonstrate throughout the book, a set of corporate ethical obligations. The author draws a parallel between wealth and public and private goods. Public goods are defined by nonexcludability and nonrivalry. The wealth of a society, according to Enderle, is defined by the same characteristics. Wealth can be seen as a combination, and not a mere aggregation, of private and public wealth because they are mutually dependent. There is no way of creating private wealth without existing public wealth, and public wealth depends on the availability of private wealth. An implication of a broader understanding of wealth as private and public is the type ofmotivation behindwealth creation. If it is true that self-interestedmotivations do not underlie preferences and choices for public goods, the creation of wealth, in Enderle’s terms, would also require other-regarding motivations to be carried out. Furthermore, the process of wealth generation has not only the productive dimension—traditionally considered by the mainstream literature—but also a distributive one. In the book, Enderle seeks to demonstrate how corporate responsibility should face income inequalities in business organizations and society at large (chapter 19). Enderle argues for a reduction of executive compensation as a means of diminishing income inequality within business firms. The discussion of inequalities and rewards echoes contemporary work in political philosophy on “limitarianism” (Robeyns 2022), the view that no one should have more than a certain upper limit of wealth 352 Business Ethics Quarterly