Beyond the Business Case for Responsible Artificial Intelligence: Strategic CSR in Light of Digital Washing and the Moral Human Argument

This paper, normative in nature and scope, addresses the perks and limits of the strategic CSR approach when confronted with current debates on the ethics of artificial intelligence, responsible artificial intelligence, and sustainable technology in business organizations. The paper summarizes the classic arguments underpinning the “business case” for the social responsibility of businesses and the main moral arguments for responsible and sustainable behavior in light of recent technological ethical challenges. Both streams are confronted with organizational ethical dilemmas arising in designing and deploying artificial intelligence, yielding tensions between social and economic goals. While recognizing the effectiveness of the business argument for responsible behavior in artificial intelligence, the paper addresses some of its main limits, particularly in light of the “digital washing” phenomenon. Exemplary cases of digital washing and corporate inconsistencies here discussed are taken from the literature on the topic and re-assessed in light of the proposed normative approach. Hence, the paper proposes to overcome some limits of the business case for CSR applied to AI, which mainly focuses on compliance and reputational risks and seeks returns in digital washing, by highlighting the normative arguments supporting a moral case for strategic CSR in AI. This work contributes to the literature on business ethics and strategic CSR at its intertwining with the ethics of AI by proposing a normative point of view on how to deploy the moral case in organizations when dealing with AI-related ethical dilemmas. It does so by critically reviewing the state-of-the-art studies on the debate, which, so far, contain different streams of research, and adding to such a body of literature what is here identified and labeled as the “human argument”.