• What is moral responsibility?

We explain what responsibility is and how it can be judged from ethics and philosophy. Also, its importance in the corporate world.

The State only intervenes on moral responsibility when there is criminal responsibility.

What is moral responsibility?

Moral responsibility is the degree of guilt orresponsibility who owns a person or one organization in the face of something that is considered morally reprobate, that is, lacking ethics or contrary to the notion of welfare that is managed collectively.

It differs from other forms of liability, such as legal, in that the rule infringed does not come from outside, such as legal or criminal regulations, but from inside the subject, that is, it comes from their conscience. For that same reason, for someone to be morally responsible for an act committed, they must comply with:

• Being able in oneself to discern good and evil, that is, to take a position moral, and to make decisions accordingly.
• To have acted freely, consciously and voluntarily, that is, without having been coerced or forced by forces superior to their Will.
• Having committed the action or inaction in such a way that she was in a position to make a choice and contemplate in herself the immorality of the act.

At the same time, this type of responsibility can be judged from two different types of ethics, with different results:

• From a consequentialist ethic (that is, one that looks at the consequences of the act), the moral value of the act committed will depend on whether it had acceptable consequences or not.
• From a deontological ethic (that is, one that is fixed on the duty to be), the actions will or will not be morally acceptable in themselves, regardless of whether or not they were discovered, and whether or not they hurt someone.

The theme of moral responsibility is common to different branches of the philosophy and ethics, and appears more and more in contemporary debates under public opinion, since the latter is the only one capable of exerting the repudiation or social sanction with which an immoral act is punished. The Condition and the penal apparatus will only be able to intervene in the punishment if the acts considered immoral are, in addition, considered illegal (criminal responsibility).

In the corporate world, there is talk of corporate moral responsibility, sometimes as a synonym for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), or sometimes as a tacit mandate that should govern all economic activity, and that commits the organizations to ensure the collective welfare rather than its gain individual and selfish. This, unfortunately, is not usually the case in practice in most large corporations.