In this book, which is written to be accessible to a nonspecialist audience, authors Amit Ron and Abraham A. Singer make the case that normative business ethicists have thus far failed to reflect sufficiently on the ways in which democratic values generate distinctive obligations that apply to businesses (and thereby to individuals when and insofar as they are acting as occupants of roles within businesses). Their central claim is that proper respect for legitimate democratic principles and procedures requires that businesses avoid corrupting or unduly influencing the democratic process (e.g., 4, 50). These obligations constrain what it is permissible for businesses and their individual members to do in a range of domains of business practice, including lobbying (chapter 4), marketing (chapter 5), responding to consumer boycotts and employee labor actions (chapter 6), and investment decisions (chapter 8).

Ron and Singer employ the concept of a “social subcontract” to explain the normative grounds of businesses’ democratic obligations (50–51). The idea is that within democratic societies, there are reasons for the democratic public, via its legal apparatus, to create market conditions and empower firms to engage in competition, because this is the best way to ensure that economic resources are deployed efficiently. In effect, firms should