Moral Considerations about the Social Responsibility of Organizations: A Revision and Critique of Milton Friedman’s View

The “social responsibility of organizations” figures prominently in many sources of management and organization ethics, and for many, this might solve behavioral and structural problems of organizations, as it might enhance its accountability to people’s complaints and higher supervisions. There is no consensus, however, over the efficiency and advantages of this concept. The most adamant opponent of the notion is Milton Friedman—a highly influential contemporary economist. This paper is devoted to an account and critique of Friedman’s view of the “social responsibility of organizations.” In order to have a more precise understanding of Friedman’s view, I deploy the descriptive method and draw on his interview with New York Times to account for his views, and then I begin my criticism by deploying the exegetical-critical method with a functionalist, rather than a foundationalist, approach. I conclude that, regardless of objections to Friedman’s liberalist foundations and critiques of certain motivations, confusions, and biases, it might be pointed out that his emphasis on elimination of external authoritative supervisions is understandable and acceptable to some extent, but his insistence on total elimination of such supervisions on the expectation of self-supervision or internal super-vision is not realistic.