Despite its explosive growth, there is considerable disagreement about the fundamental purpose of ESG. Two types of policies associated with ESG metrics and mechanisms give rise to at least two opposing views of their purpose: “profit-maximizing policies” versus “normative sustainable policies.” This chapter advocates the second type of strategy, arguing that corporate leaders who embrace ESG should be open to adopting a purpose that may undermine or even intentionally sacrifice shareholder wealth. In defending this view, the chapter considers the question of who has the legal, political, and moral authority to decide on ESG purposes. The chapter argues that business leaders already retain a great deal of legal autonomy in deciding whether or not to adopt some version of an ESG purpose as part of the firm's overall purposes. The chapter then discusses the challenges posed by what the authors call the Political Liberal Problem, which seems to suggest that corporate leaders should refrain from promoting a particular view of the good on behalf of their constituents or stakeholders. The chapter contends that a normative sustainable view of ESG purpose depends crucially on the ability to defend the relatively autonomous moral judgment of business leaders in setting ESG strategy.

This introduction situates the volume within contemporary debates surrounding Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG). It traces the historical evolution of the ESG movement—originally conceived as a voluntary form of regulation—from its origins in the early 2000s, associated with the launch of the UN’s Who Cares Wins initiative, to current developments marked by political backlash in the United States and regulatory consolidation in Europe. The authors argue that the widespread tendency to reduce ESG to issues of financial materiality—a view they describe as “mainstream ESG”—risks undermining its ethical and social foundations. Against this backdrop, the book advances the claim that ESG cannot be meaningfully developed without serious ethical reflection. The second part of the introduction presents the chapters included in this collection along three main lines: debates about the purpose(s) of ESG; discussions concerning the tensions between profitability and sustainability; and analyses of ESG as a form of voluntary or mandatory disclosure.

The production of ethical capital, and the capacity of firms and investors to leverage their speculations about which ethical claims will be the most profitable, and which ethical risks are most profitably minimised, depends on information from labour. This chapter reveals some of the ways in which labour, and specifically labour in its role as consumer, informs markets about ethical risks. Branding strategies are co-creative dialogic processes through which consumers and firms produce images, meanings and emotional responses. The acceleration of digital technology supports the expansion and intensification of these processes through which labour co-produces brands, including their ethical dimensions.

This chapter employs a critical reading of the Integrated Reporting framework and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) standards, methodology and guidance documents. The analysis explores how key concepts like materiality, value, capital, accountability and risk are deployed in these frameworks, to understand the function this form of reporting plays in the speculative moral economy. Guided by historical accounting research and recalling the propositions developed in chapters one and two of the book, this chapter develops an understanding of how ethics are rationalised and made ready for commodification.

This chapter explores the recent consolidation and concentration of the ESG information segment of the financial sector, and the emerging regulation of this sector in the context of political contest over defining the limits of ESG. As the economic significance of ESG investing grows, these debates become more intense and have led to new rules and proposals from securities regulators defining ESG and setting disclosure requirements. These regulatory processes, often positioned as a mechanism to standardise and clarify ESG practices, are exposing the limits of the responsible capital imaginary and creating new platforms to contest the accumulation of ethical capital.

This chapter uses value theory to understand how ethics are produced through contemporary responsible investment practices, and in particular, the integration of ESG issues into investment decisions. The chapter offers an interpretation of value theory that is specific to understanding how ethics are translated into financial decision-making frameworks. This theory is then applied to empirical evidence about ESG integration in practice, to develop the argument that ESG integration produces a derivative logic of ethics, which then has implications for the organisation of capital, labour and nature.

Drawing together the preceding arguments about the contemporary moral economy, the function of ethics as risk in the context of financialisation and the alienation of ethics from the human being, this chapter highlights the productive nature of ethical capital, but also the political potential it generates.