Corporate Sincerity: Accommodation, Reputation Washing, and Moral Credit

Journal of Business Ethics https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-025-06000-1 ORIGINAL PAPER Corporate Sincerity: Accommodation, Reputation Washing, and Moral Credit Grant J. Rozeboom1 Received: 28 February 2024 / Accepted: 2 April 2025 © The Author(s) 2025 Abstract A distinctive question about corporate sincerity arises in two kinds of contexts. In accommodation contexts, a corporate agent expresses the sort of reasonable, conscience-constituting normative commitments that generate a claim to be exempt from a general obligation that applies to it. For this claim to be justified, it must be sincere in expressing these commitments. In moral credit contexts, a corporate agent expressly acts in a morally right (or justified) manner, but there is reason to leave open the question of whether it deserves moral credit for this. Such a question is raised when, e.g., companies are accused of reputation washing. Deserving moral credit requires companies to have been sincere in their rightful expressive actions. I argue that there is a single substrate of corporate sincerity in both contexts: A corporate agent is sincere when (i) it says or does something that is meant to be understood as expressing certain valuing attitudes and (ii) its statement or action is guided by the practical functioning of those valuing attitudes. In addition to helping us evaluate corporate agents in accommodation or moral credit contexts, this account promises to shed light on the broader relational import of corporate sincerity appraisals. Keywords Corporate sincerity · Reputation washing · Corporate moral agency · Corporate moral credit Introduction Whenever we ask whether a corporate agent, such as a firm, church, or university, has moral agency in its own right, we should always clarify: with respect to what moral evaluation?1 There is no unitary thing, “moral agency,” that might be instantiated by corporate agents, but rather a variety of overlapping capacities that come into focus with different moral appraisals. Did they act rightly? Are they blameworthy or creditworthy for what they did? Do they have certain rights or deserve certain protections? Here, I am interested in the specific forms of corporate moral agency involved with the form of sincerity that features in (at least) two important kinds of moral appraisal: considering whether a corporate agent deserves accommodation on account of its avowed (or expressed) normative commitments, and considering whether a corporate agent deserves moral credit for its morally right (or justified) public, expressive actions. * Grant J. Rozeboom 1 Saint Mary’s College of California, Moraga, USA It is important to develop an account of this form of corporate sincerity, which does not yet exist in the scholarly literature, because it is not always easy to determine whether corporate agents are sincere in the manner required for them to deserve accommodations or moral credit. Without an account, we are left only with our intuitions and a generic understanding of corporate honesty to apply to corporate expressive and communicative actions. This may point us in the right direction but will leave us unable to evaluate hard cases and, more importantly, with little insight into the distinctive relational import of the relevant form of corporate sincerity. To illustrate, consider the US company Hobby Lobby. When it petitioned to be exempt from the US Affordable Care Act’s mandate to subsidize IUDs and Plan B for its female employees on account of its religious commitments, critics and supporters both took up the question of Hobby 1 By “corporate agent,” I designate any group agent organized according to Hartian secondary rules – see Hart (2012, pp. 94ff). Secondary rules are rules that formalize, and create procedures and/ or offices for revising and enforcing, the primary rules of a group. Groups bound only by primary rules, which simply dictate the “dos” and “don’ts” of individual behavior and thought, could not manifest the tightly organized forms of culture, deliberation, and decisionmaking needed for corporate agency in the relevant sense. Vol.:(0123456789) G. J. Rozeboom Lobby’s sincerity. Did Hobby Lobby “really mean it” in espousing the religious commitments—what it calls “Biblical principles” (Hobby Lobby, “Our Story”)—that putatively prohibited use of IUDs and Plan B? Evidence marshaled against Hobby Lobby’s sincerity included its nearly decade-long practice of smuggling historical artifacts from Iraq, which clearly violated the Biblical principle barring theft (Feuer, 2017). Evidence for Hobby Lobby’s sincerity included its wide-ranging donations to religious non-profits and their longstanding practice of closing all stores on Sundays. Here, we see that corporate sincerity is taken to be a central consideration for whether corporate agents deserve accommodation, i.e., to be exempt from the moral obligations that generally apply to agents of their type. (Note that I am raising this issue in the moral, not legal, register.2) This is the form of corporate sincerity at stake in the context of accommodation appraisals. Consider now an example of how corporate sincerity comes into view when appraising a corporate agent’s moral creditworthiness. Every June, like many companies, Starbucks issues public messages and publicly supports a variety of endeavors for Pride Month, promoting the rights of LGBTQ persons. Some seem admirable, such as lobbying the U.S. Senate to pass the Respect for Marriage Act and maintaining its 100% score on the Corporate Equality Index of the Human Rights Campaign. Others less so, such as proffering a wide range of expensive, dye-infused Pride Month drinks. As was true for Hobby Lobby, critics and supporters of Starbucks engage in a debate about the company’s sincerity (Shepherd et al., 2021), sometimes under the heading of whether the company is engaged in reputation washing, in this case, “rainbow washing.” These worries are made pressing by the fact that Starbucks has been accused of neglecting the distinctive needs of part-time LGBTQ employees, a segment of the LGBTQ community that is particularly vulnerable to Starbucks’ policies. Does Starbucks “really mean it” in expressing support for the LGBTQ community, or is it mostly interested in currying customer favor (Higgins, 2022)? Here, the moral appraisal at hand is about moral credit rather than accommodation (Rozeboom, 2023). Does Starbucks deserve moral credit, understood in terms of positive reactive attitudes of gratitude and appreciation? 2 Note also that, especially if one approaches this case from the legal perspective, it may be tempting to think that the accommodation is ultimately for and about the individual owners, and not really (or only derivatively) for and about Hobby Lobby as a corporate agent. I discuss this issue below, in Sect. “Sincerity in Accommodation Contexts”. Scholars have tended to examine these sincerity issues separately.3 4 I think it is fruitf (...truncated)