Essay: Multinational Corporations that engage in global business should have no access to human right violations

Multinational Corporations (MNCs) that engage in business in the global sector must not directly engage in, contribute to, or be bystanders during human rights violations. By now this model is relatively uncontroversial—it follows the consistent application of the basic moral injunction to do no harm. Ordinarily, doing no harm simply means remaining passive; it requires only that MNCs refrain from violating human rights. Multinational enterprises are under ethical scrutiny due to lack of corporate moral reasoning. Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg demonstrates the three stages of moral development that occur in children which can also be applied to MNCs. The three stages of moral development are pre-conventional moral reasoning, conventional moral reasoning and post-conventional moral reasoning. In terms of MNCs, these stages are applied in the sense that pre-conventional moral reasoning means to do no harm because there are consequences. Conventional reasoning means to do what the others around you are doing and post-conventional moral reasoning is to always do the moral thing even if your surroundings have laws that are immoral but profitable (When in Rome…Moral Maturity and Ethics for International Economic Organizations by Andrew Wyller Falkenberg). Nowadays, a corporation does not have to explicitly break laws to be subject to ethical criticism. Some corporations now believe that it pays to be ethical in the long run. Nevertheless, I believe that the motivation to be ethical should not be grounded on profit but rather on the notion of a universal code of conduct that corporations must abide by internationally which can be accomplished through the post-conventional model.
In relation to the ethical criticism that businesses face, corporations may be under a strict obligation not to harm anyone, but they are not obligated to help anyone either. This pre-conventional notion has caused a number of non-non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to argue that corporations do have at least some positive human rights duties. MNCs have themselves become backed up by their respective governments, and with that political power comes some measure of political responsibility. Insofar as MNCs benefit from oppressive conditions in host countries, they require an obligation to ameliorate those conditions even if they have not contributed to them. What these accounts have in common is that they all characterize the positive duties of MNCs as derived rather than natural. Derived duties are focused on voluntary commitments and transactions—a relationship that relies on trade offs. On the other hand, natural duties are are beyond any type of self-interested exchange, focused solely on the duties that we owe to others simply by virtue of our common humanity. I believe that MNCs have natural positive duties with regards to human rights, as well as derived ones. Unless a MNC actively undertakes certain programs geared towards securing human rights, its routine and seemingly ‘harmless’ business activities can wind up being indirectly involved with rights violations. Bystanders are part of the problem. Thus for MNCs, the negative duty to do no harm demands that positive steps must be taken.