St James Ethics Centre's Involvement in the Shareholders' Project
St James Ethics Centre has a simple aim: we hope to encourage and assist people in their thinking, feeling and understanding about how things ought to be regarding our lives in society. This often means playing a role in helping to create the conditions in which it is safe to 'discuss the undiscussable' - encompassing issues that people either shy away from as being too ‘hard’ or ignore because the answers seem so obvious to all.
The past decade has seen a renewed focus on questions about the relative obligations of those formally responsible for the conduct of corporations on the one hand and the shareholders that they serve on the other.
For example, some people wrestle with their concern that obligations owed to shareholders may, on occasions, run counter to those owed in the ordinary course of business to employees, suppliers, the wider community and so on. This sense of a principal obligation to shareholders is often linked to a belief that shareholders desire only one unambiguous good: an increase in the monetary value of their shareholding. But are such assumptions warranted? And if they are, then are they (and can they be) ethically justified? The answer is, perhaps, no longer obvious.
The advent of the Shareholders' Project provides an opportunity to consider questions such as these.
Given the breadth of public share ownership in Australia and the scale and impact of activities done in the name of shareholders, St James Ethics Centre is pleased to be a partner in the process of national discussion that will be stimulated by the Shareholders' Project.