He has direct responsibility to his employers. IN a free‐enterprise, private‐property system, a corporate executive is an employe of the owners of the business. Most of the discussion of social responsibility is directed at corporations, so in what follows I shall mostly neglect the individual proprietor and speak of corporate executives. Presumably, the individuals who are to be responsible are businessmen, which means individual proprietors or corporate executives. The first step toward clarity in examining the doctrine of the social responsibility of business is to ask precisely what it implies for whom. A corporation is an artificial person and in this sense may have artificial responsibilities, but “business” as a whole cannot be said to have responsibilities, even in this vague sense. What does it mean to say that “business” has responsibilities? Only people can have responsibilities. The discussions of the “social responsibilities of business” are notable for their analytical looseness and lack of rigor. Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades. In fact they are-or would be if they or any one else took them seriously- preaching pure and unadulterated socialism.
The businessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned “merely” with profit but also with promoting desirable “social” ends that business has a “social conscience” and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers. WHEN I hear businessmen speak eloquently about the “social responsibilities of business in a free‐enterprise system,” I am reminded of the wonderful line about the Frenchman who discovered at, the age of 70 that he had been speaking prose all his life.
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