In his recently published book, Georges Enderle discusses wealth creation, human rights, and corporate responsibility. Enderle presents an original argument, according to which business enterprises, as organizations, must create wealth but also carry moral obligations on human rights. It is an intriguing argument, especially when compared to mainstream perspectives on corporate responsibility, usually centered on profit and shareholder returns or on stakeholder value creation.

The first part of the book presents an innovative conception of wealth creation. In the following section, Enderle develops a normative-ethical perspective centered on human rights. He carefully defines the purpose of business and economy as the creation of wealth and argues that it should be guided by human rights. The last section is dedicated to showing how his perspective can be applied to the ethics of business organizations.

Enderle argues that it is necessary to understand wealth in a comprehensive manner: wealth not only involves economic capital but also encompasses natural, human, and social capital. Enderle argues that the literature dealing with a nation’s wealth that considers only its monetary dimension is limited. When applied to business ethics, this notion of wealth implies, as he seeks to demonstrate throughout the book, a set of corporate ethical obligations.

The author draws a parallel between wealth and public and private goods. Public goods are defined by nonexcludability and nonrivalry. The wealth of a society, according to Enderle, is defined by the same characteristics. Wealth can be seen as a combination, and not a mere aggregation, of private and public wealth because they are mutually dependent. There is no way of creating private wealth without existing public wealth, and public wealth depends on the availability of private wealth.

An implication of a broader understanding of wealth as private and public is the type of motivation behind wealth creation. If it is true that self-interested motivations do not underlie preferences and choices for public goods, the creation of wealth, in Enderle’s terms, would also require other-regarding motivations to be carried out.

Furthermore, the process of wealth generation has not only the productive dimension—traditionally considered by the mainstream literature—but also a distributive one. In the book, Enderle seeks to demonstrate how corporate responsibility should face income inequalities in business organizations and society at large (chapter 19). Enderle argues for a reduction of executive compensation as a means of diminishing income inequality within business firms. The discussion of inequalities and rewards echoes contemporary work in political philosophy on “limitarianism” (Robeyns Reference Robeyns2022), the view that no one should have more than a certain upper limit of wealth and income. Regarding society at large, Enderle suggests that business firms should support legislation for better salaries and for an upper limit to executive earnings.

However, there is a limitation to Enderle’s proposal. I maintain that decisions and policies to reduce wage inequalities, especially within large companies, do not necessarily generate a reduction in economic inequalities from the societal point of view. On the contrary, in contexts of a wide informal labor market—such as the situation found in many countries in the Global South—these policies can worsen the economic situation of those who are economically worse off. Informal workers are outside the social welfare system, unprotected by labor laws, and therefore will not only not be contemplated but their situation might even deteriorate because of those politics and legislations. For example, the adoption of better living salaries in a corporation can increase the gap between the company’s workers and the other residents of the same territory. The well-being and economic power of the worse-off people in the city where this company is located can be negatively affected, worsening their purchasing power, given the increase in prices caused by the new salary policies. The decision not to address such “macro-level” issues generates some limitations to Enderle’s argument, especially on inequality: structural justice, which is considered fundamental by contemporary literature on distributive justice, is not considered in the book.

The book’s second section is dedicated to a normative-ethical perspective centered on human rights. According to Enderle, the set of all thirty human rights described in the International Bill of Human Rights and in the eight core conventions of the International Labor Organization must compose a minimal ethical standard that is respected by business organizations. The author claims that ensuring human rights for everyone requires collective actors and actions.

For Enderle, human rights should guide the process of wealth creation. Human rights should act not only as constraints for wealth creation but also as goals and means to support the wealth creation process. Thus human rights play a central role: they are a fundamental part of the ethical foundation of corporate responsibility, and furthermore, they are the minimal requirements of ethical reasoning. As the author states, “human rights provide a common ethical ground for creating wealth in the global and pluralistic context” (xiv).

But what are the implications of such a theory for business firms? Enderle faces this problem in the final section of his book, showing the impact of his original claims on corporate responsibility and on the moral status of business organizations. His argument is organized into two steps. First, Enderle seeks to conceptualize business organizations as corporate actors endowed with moral agency. Second, Enderle aims to qualify these corporate actors as moral actors. Thus Enderle proposes that “business organizations—to the extent they are corporate actors—are also moral actors in a sense analogous to personal actors” (178). In Enderle’s view, corporate responsibility should be understood as complementary to personal responsibility. This conceptualization creates important consequences for the allocation of responsibility in business. Corporations share responsibility with other actors, such as individuals or macro-level actors, which is important for a correct allocation of responsibility from an intergenerational perspective.

Specifically, Enderle sees corporate responsibility as concept key to ethical thinking and presents a thorough explanation of its meaning in chapter 15. Following Schulz (Reference Schulz1972), Enderle treats responsibility as a concept with a “bipolar” nature (174), with an inner and an outer pole and three components: the subject of responsibility, the content of responsibility, and the authority. When formulating this conception of responsibility, Enderle makes the concept more precise, making it possible to identify the actors that bear responsibility, to determine the content of the responsibility in a comprehensive but precise manner, and to establish the authorities or addressees.

The book presents compelling arguments. However, some questions can be raised regarding Enderle’s position. First, his comprehensive understanding of wealth and wealth creation and the theoretical consequences of this conceptual choice deserve careful analysis. In the book, Enderle formulates thick notions of wealth and wealth creation, that is, concepts that are at the same time evaluative and substantially descriptive. The comprehensive scope and the evaluative dimension of these concepts can be verified, for example, when Enderle defines wealth creation as a creative process, material as well as spiritual, that makes things new and better and that should consider both existing and future generations (chapter 9). The epistemic advantages to adopting such a comprehensive concept of wealth are not clear. All-inclusive concepts can undermine the analytical rigor needed in ethical reasoning. Thus abandoning the understanding of wealth in a narrowly defined way—as a stock of economic resources—can generate theoretical inaccuracies and vagueness that may outweigh the benefits of this conceptual shift. Additionally, Enderle’s conceptual choice impregnates his thesis with a particular—and perhaps overwhelming—conception of the good and the good life with which many reasonable people may disagree.

Another controversial issue is the link between Enderle’s thesis and Amartya Sen’s capability approach.Footnote ¹ According to Enderle, the capability approach is the most suitable framework with which to reflect on his idea of the creation of sustainable wealth because it puts people at the center and provides a solid informational basis for interpersonal comparisons. As the author correctly points out, according to Sen (Reference Sen2009), the definition of which capabilities are included in the capability set must be an outcome of democratic deliberation. Considering that, it is not clear why any increase in wealth necessarily implies an increase in every person’s capability set. Enderle does not consider the conflicts that might arise between wealth creation and capabilities achievements. For example, some trade-offs may have to be addressed: to ensure a basic capability set for all people may require redistributive actions, which, in turn, can reduce the creation of wealth in the medium and long terms. Enderle does not consider these tensions between redistributive policies (from a capability approach point of view) and the increase of wealth. As his concept of wealth creation is so comprehensive, it is unclear whether Enderle would accept the existence of these trade-offs. Thus consideration of the more general distributive consequences of adopting Enderle’s thesis of wealth creation would be welcome.

Enderle’s book, by a renowned business ethicist for business ethicists, is highly recommended reading. The author’s approach is especially fruitful for contemporary debates within and beyond business ethics, wealth, inequalities, and human rights. By elaborating on rigorously constructed arguments, he is successful at intelligently integrating the descriptive-analytical and normative-ethical dimensions of business ethics. The result is an original theory of corporate responsibility as wealth creation that also respects and promotes the fulfillment of human rights.