CSR and business ethics

CSR is also a subject of reflection in corporate ethics. Here the question of good corporate behaviour is examined under sector-specific aspects and conditions. In other words: CSR also expresses aspects of business ethics, without CSR having to be equated with the concept of business ethics per se. Nevertheless, in the day-to-day practice of professional life in companies, it can certainly occur and also appear intuitively plausible that CSR and business ethics are used synonymously. This is similar to the the synonymous use of CSR and sustainability in the everyday practice of companies. However, it can be assumed that the terminology surrounding CSR has made the much longer-standing and more in-depth concept of business ethics more acceptable in practice (and perhaps also in the science of economics). For many “CSR” sounds much smoother than the unwieldy word “corporate ethics”, which is quickly associated with a raised index finger.

In practice, a synonymous or analogous use of CSR and business ethics does not detract from the presumed socio-political movement that aims to make social responsibility more of an issue for companies. Nevertheless, it should be borne in mind that if business ethics is understood as the ethical reflection and theoretical justification of ethically good actions by companies and their employees, then CSR could be understood as a practical concept or procedure by which a particular company recognizes and assumes its (ethical) responsibility in a (more or less) individual way.

The topics covered by CSR are correspondingly wide-ranging and focus on different aspects of a company's responsibility. Although individual topics, approaches and concepts of the CSR discussion have a general character, they can be examined and discussed against the background of the specific challenges of a particular sector, in our case: mining. This will be done in the following, more concretely application-oriented chapter of this book.