Corporate ethical futures: responsibility for the shadow on the future of today's ethical corporations

Humankind needs protection from the actions of corporations, which have an effect in time and space beyond the boundaries that they attend to in their day-to-day business decisions or their regulatory duties. A combination of an ethical orientation with a futures orientation gives rise to ethical futures, which produces a more developed and robust moral code for corporate organisations. In a pilot study of the current corporate social responsibility reports of five corporate organisations, a tentative qualitative relationship was found between the futures orientation of these corporations and their (BITC) corporate social responsibility index rating. Enforcing corporate ethical futures should become an imperative for stakeholders.