An Existence of Greater Meaning
An Existence of Greater Meaning: A Constitutional Approach to Proving the Obligatory Force of Corporate Social Responsibility.
That is the official title of my JD thesis.
While
others are dabbling in purely legal matters such the doctrine of prior
restraint, libel and "Transforming de Lege Ferenda to de Lege Lata:
Concretizing the Nebulous under International Law" (whatever the hell
that means), leave it to me to pick a thesis topic that deals with
bigger pictures and fundamental principles, so much so that it has the
unfortunate (or fortunate, depends on which way you look at it)
tendency to spill over to philosophical and socio-economic schools of
thought.
True enough, my "Fundamentals of Thesis" professor
liked the topic but was concerned over the aforementioned philosophical
undertone - if it wasn’t legal enough, I may have a problem. I do think
though that she really didn’t think it was legal enough to start with,
but the fact that my thesis adviser was the dean of the school and THE
corporation law guru pretty much stopped her from saying what she
really felt about it.
So inasmuch as I’m happy about the topic -
hell, I insisted on something about Corporate Social Responsibility -
it’s going to be an uphill battle to be able to get my topic to its
full potential - meaning, making it a hard-hitting legal treatise
rather than a long-ass militant philosophical rant.
And since
I’m making a thesis that’s very much in line with the point of this
journal, you’ll all be witnesses to the birth and growing pains of
this, my latest brainchild (wow… big whoop). Bearing in mind that
this is merely the intial portion of the introduction, this is what I
have so far…
"There is a general agreement in
philosophical theories as to the basic nature of man that it is by
doing the good that man’s fullness is achieved. What exactly the good
entails is arguable, but we all must concede that it is a fundamental
imperative that the good must be attained, with our best efforts and
our noblest intentions.""In our limited jurisdiction,
the best efforts and the noblest intentions of the Sovereign Filipino
People, has produced the provisions of the Constitution. It is in this,
our organic law, that we have staked our understanding of what good we
are to achieve, and laid down the foundations of how we are to achieve
it. It is in fact in the 1987 Philippine Constitution, more perhaps
than any other in the world, that a fervent hope for progress and
prosperity is most apparent – by the introduction of the social and
economic rights in addition to the long-standing civil and political
rights. Through the 1987 Constitution therefore, no longer were social
justice and human dignity merely philosophical fantasies – they have
been elevated through the social and economic rights into legal
concepts. It is in these unique set of rights that corresponding duties
and obligations were impliedly created – the scope of which has not yet
fully been explored, but the reality of which permeate through each and
every branch of government and sector of society. It is the prevailing
belief, that through the convergence of these new rights and new
obligations, the greatness of our nation – our completeness as a just
and humane society – shall finally be realized.""However,
in this, our very complex world, these elementary tenets of what man
must do have been skewed, wrangled and confused to accommodate
practicality and pragmatism bordering on the selfish. To produce more,
we have isolated values and interpreted principles in the attempt to
justify actions that have, in essence, worked against the very good we
entrusted ourselves to reach. And in no other area has this been more
apparent than in the commercial world. And no other tool is used quite
as often and effectively to perpetuate this fundamental option than the
Corporation.""Through the Corporation, built on the
foundations of the bottom line, we have allowed ourselves to slide down
the slippery slope of the principle of profit maximization. While we
embellish this deterioration with terms like “value” and “utility”, the
fact remains that we have allowed those behind the Corporation to spare
nothing for the sake of the profitable return. In this twisted reality,
the good, if ever it is chosen to be accomplished, is not done for its
sake alone – it is used as a tool to rake in more profits. At best,
therefore, Corporate Social Responsibility is merely voluntary. The
isolation of values is most real in the Corporation, where human
beings, who by themselves must ideally do the good, are justified in
doing nothing else but make money in furtherance with what has grown to
be a self-centered legal mandate.""“The Corporation is
merely for making profits – nothing more”, they say. But the
Constitution, our most sacred of laws, says otherwise – “The use of
property bears a social function, and all economic agents shall
contribute to the common good.” The same Constitution lays down the
various rights pertaining to social justice and human dignity and
boasts of policies and principles directed towards human welfare. But
for every right, there is a corresponding obligation. And it is
submitted that these rights ordain all agents of society to work for
society – one such agent being the Corporation.""Therefore,
it is through the newly recognized social and economic rights enshrined
in our nation’s guide to doing the good that life is breathed into a
social obligation of the Corporation to go beyond maximizing profit, to
go farther than merely giving back value, to dig deeper than the false
foundation of the bottom line, to do good for good’s sake – a duty to
do Corporate Social Responsibility."
O ha. Ayos ba?
