The broad vision of wealth creation and human rights developed in Part One and Two is now applied to the ethics of business organizations, which is called “corporate responsibility.” Based on Walter Schulz, the concept of responsibility is defined as a relational concept: the subject of responsibility (who is responsible), the content of responsibility (for what one is responsible) and the addressee (toward whom one is responsible). It involves an inner pole (“self-commitment originating out of freedom”) and an outer pole (“in a worldly relationship”) in critique of Max Weber’s separation of the ethics of convictions versus the ethics of responsibility. In an analogous sense, responsibility characterizes the ethics of business organizations, which is the same term used by the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. The chapter develops several ethical explications of the Guiding Principles and concludes with the concept of “corporate responsibility” adopted in this book.

Rarely discussed in the literature, the book defines human rights as public goods. This innovative perspective connects human rights to public wealth (see Chapter 5), characterized by non-rivalry and non-excludability and assessed as “good” – not “bad” – in ethical terms. Human rights are often understood as individual claims addressed to governments or other actors while ignoring their public good character. Some examples illustrate this widespread attitude that is only challenged when the public costs of human rights repression becomes evident. Like public goods in general, human rights can be final goods (or goals to be achieved for themselves) or intermediate goods (or means to realize other goods or rights). This means that securing human rights has far-reaching positive consequences while abusing human rights generates severe public bads by also violating other human rights and causing economic and social harm. – Due to their public good character, two wide-ranging implications follow: Human rights cannot be achieved by market institutions, but need collective actions at multiple levels of society; and self-regarding motivations alone inevitably fail to establish, fulfill and guarantee human rights, whence other-regarding motivations are indispensable.

This chapter explores corporate responsibility for less income inequality within the boundaries of the organization and with regard to society at large. Instead of examining the entire range of income distribution, the focus is on the lower and upper ends. The ‘floor’ is defined as a living wage, supported by strong economic and ethical arguments and proposed as a minimal income standard that can – and thus should – be implemented by companies. As for the ethically acceptable ‘ceiling’ of executive compensation, its identification and justification are more complicated. However, strong economic and ethical arguments can be made in favor of a drastic reduction of executive pay. Corporate responsibility for less income inequality in society means, first, to ‘walk the talk’ and set an example and, second, to be ‘a good corporate citizen’ by supporting legislation for a living wage and an ethically acceptable ceiling of executive pay.

Creativity and innovation have been vital in the history of humankind in all spheres of life and pose unprecedented challenges today. It is therefore appropriate to clarify these terms and emphasize their importance for the creation of wealth, drawing on relevant literature of economic history and innovation. Creating is more than possessing and acquiring wealth; it means making – not only imagining – something new and better. While innovation goes beyond invention by rendering new ideas feasible in economic and financial terms, it needs to be qualified in ethical terms as well because innovation can be highly unethical, like, for instance, human cloning. The chapter refers to multiple aspects of ethical innovation for wealth creation, based on the book Ethical Innovation in Business and the Economy by G. Enderle and P.E. Murphy (2015).

The concept of sustainability explained in Chapter 2 is further developed in terms of human capabilities proposed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. Human capabilities are defined as “real freedoms that people have reasons to value.” Some of these capabilities may be quite elementary, such as being adequately nourished and escaping premature mortality, while others are more complex, such as having the literacy required to participate actively in political life. In contrast to utility-based and resource-based approaches (that is, utilitarianism and Rawls’s theory of justice, respectively), human capabilities provide a robust informational basis for interpersonal comparisons that is necessary to reduce injustices and advance good societies. They are relevant for all types of capital (natural, economic, human and social) as well as for private and public goods and wealth.

Universities are not only institutions of higher education; they also constitute powerful economic actors not the least as buyers of products and services for their own use and for sale to their customers. A special category of products is the clothes, sportswear, memorabilia and many other goods which carry – often conspicuously – the logo of the university. The chapter narrates the 20-plus year history of the search by the University of Notre Dame for its policy to promote corporate responsibility in the supply chains of Notre Dame trademark-licensed products. With the help of two organizations specializing in supply chain assessment, Notre Dame developed a new policy, which is appropriate – with a high level of confidence – to respect human rights in factories located in countries with and without national legislation of freedom of association and collective bargaining. The chapter concludes with policy suggestions for other universities and outlines several research opportunities for investigating corporate responsibility in supply chains.

Because motivations constitute an essential part of economics, understood in the ethics-related sense, of economic systems and of religious and non-religious worldviews, they are also essential for the conception of wealth creation. The wide range of motivations discussed in the economic, sociological and psychological literatures can be divided into two large groups of self-regarding and other-regarding motivations. Self-regarding motivation in the form of self-interest is prevailing in economics and other social sciences, commonly attributed to the “economic man” as self-interest maximizer. While self-interest is acknowledged as a powerful motivation for creating private wealth in the market place, it is critically examined in its often exclusive claim of rationality and is utterly insufficient for creating public wealth from the local to the global level. Other-regarding motivations such as a sense for the common good, solidarity and justice are needed for the creation of public wealth.

First, the spiritual aspects of wealth creation are illustrated with the examples of the Grameen Bank (at the micro-level), the Matsushita philosophy (at the meso-level) and the values incorporated in the EU Treaties of Maastrich and Lisbon (at the macro-level). Then two extreme positions – the materialistic and the spiritualistic – are refuted, based on the “bodiliness” of the human person or the inseparable unity of body and mind. Subsequently, several notions of spirituality are discussed before adopting Judy Neal’s definition of expressing “the experience of a transformative connection” and commenting on the spiritual awakening among business practitioners and scholars in the last 30 years. Often, but not necessarily, spirituality in the workplace is related to religion. Finally, the Manifesto for a Global Economic Ethic and the Interfaith Declaration of International Business Ethics demonstrate what world religions can contribute to a common ethical ground for business in the global and pluralistic context.

In contrast to a widespread view that wealth creation is only a productive process followed by the distribution of wealth, the chapter emphasizes that the generation of wealth includes a distributive dimension, which permeates all of its stages from the preconditions to the generation process, the outcome and the use for and allocation within consumption and investment. The productive and the distributive dimension are inseparably connected. The chapter highlights the importance of the distributive dimension by briefly reviewing three important books on inequality: Piketty (2014), Stiglitz (2012) and Wilkinson & Pickett (2009). The eight High-Performing Asian Economies (Japan, Hong Kong, Republic of Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand) created “The East Asian Miracle” from 1960 to 1990 and can illustrate how the productive and distributive dimensions of economic growth are closely interconnected.