The increasing demands placed on private welfare services and calls for business to fulfil its social responsibilities have heightened interest in corporate charitable donations in the United Kingdom. Adjustments to the corporation tax system have been made to encourage companies to give more. The article outlines the legal and fiscal background to company giving, examines its magnitude and reports on a survey of company practice.

This paper undertakes an inquiry into the relationship between the disciplinary training of business ethicists, their institutional affiliations, those whose work they cite, those with whom they collaborate, and — to some degree — the kind of work they do. It is intended as a response to both the historic injunction that we examine ourselves and to what is seen as the considerable disarray of the field.

The book takes knowledge and understanding developed within uni-societal studies of business and society and extends the frame of reference to the international arena.

Psychologists have long assumed that the motivation for all intentional action, including all action intended to benefit others, is egoistic. People benefit others because, ultimately, to do so benefits themselves. The empathy-altruism hypothesis challenges this assumption. It claims that empathic emotion evokes truly altruistic motivation, motivation with an ultimate goal ofbenefiting not the self but the person for whom empathy is felt. Logical and psychological distinctions between egoism and altruism are reviewed, providing a conceptualframeworkfor empirical tests for the existence of (...) altruism. Results of empirical tests to date are summarized; these results provide impressive support for the empathy-altruism hypothesis. We conclude that the popular and parsimonious explanation ofprosocial motivation in terms ofuniversal egoism must give way to a pluralistic explanation that includes altruism as well as egoism. Implications of such a pluralism are briefly noted, not only for our understanding ofprosocial motivation but also for our understanding of human nature and of the emotion-motivation link. (shrink)