Can Corporate Social Responsibility Help Us Understand the Credit Crisis?

The financial crisis which started in the United States in 2007 and which has spread throughout the world has many causes, one of which is the abundance of unethical behavior on the part of many of those who made the financial decisions, such as regulators, supervisors, managers and employees, and also on the part of a not insignificant number of their customers. In this paper, we will seek to shed light on the crisis's ethical content and show how the generalized practice of corporate social responsibility within financial institutions could have helped reduce the magnitude of the crisis, perhaps not systemically but definitely in some of the organizations that have been most affected by the crisis. For this to happen, however, a particular concept of social responsibility would have to have been applied, a responsibility with an ethical basis - or, more specifically, a voluntarily assumed ethics that was capable of giving rise to self-generated duties among financial decision-makers.