Over the past decades, the modernization of agriculture in the Western world has contributed not only to a rapid increase in food production but also to environmental and societal concerns over issues such as greenhouse gas emissions, soil quality and biodiversity loss. Many of these concerns, for example those related to animal welfare or labor conditions, are stuck in controversies and apparently deadlocked debates. As a result we observe a paradox in which a wide range of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, originally seeking to reconnect agriculture and society, frequently provoke debate, conflict, and protests. In order to make sense of this pattern, the present paper contends that Western agriculture is marked by moral complexity, i.e., the tendency of multiple legitimate moral standpoints to proliferate without the realistic prospect of a consensus. This contention is buttressed by a conceptual framework that draws inspiration the contemporary business ethics and systems-theoretic scholarship. From the systems-theoretic point of view, the evolution of moral complexity is traced back to the processes of agricultural modernization, specialization, and differentiation, each of which suppresses the responsiveness of the economic and legal institutions to the full range of societal and environmental concerns about agriculture. From the business ethics point of view, moral complexity is shown to prevent the transformation of the ethical responsibilities into the legal and economic responsibilities despite the ongoing institutionalization of CSR. Navigating moral complexity is shown to require moral judgments which are necessarily personal and contestable. These judgments are implicated in those CSR initiatives that require dealing with trade-offs among the different sustainability issues.

中文翻译：

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农业的道德复杂性：对企业社会责任的挑战

在过去的几十年里，西方世界的农业现代化不仅促进了粮食产量的快速增长，而且还引起了环境和社会对温室气体排放、土壤质量和生物多样性丧失等问题的关注。其中许多问题，例如与动物福利或劳动条件有关的问题，都陷入了争议和显然陷入僵局的辩论中。因此，我们观察到一个悖论，其中广泛的企业社会责任 (CSR) 计划最初旨在重新连接农业和社会，但经常引发辩论、冲突和抗议。为了理解这种模式，本文认为西方农业的特点是道德复杂性，即：在没有达成共识的现实前景的情况下，多种合法​​的道德立场趋于扩散。这一论点得到了一个概念框架的支持，该框架从当代商业道德和系统理论学术界汲取灵感。从系统论的角度来看，道德复杂性的演变可以追溯到农业现代化、专业化和分化的过程，每一个过程都抑制了经济和法律制度对全方位社会和环境问题的反应。关于农业。从商业伦理的角度来看，尽管企业社会责任正在进行制度化，但道德的复杂性仍然阻碍了伦理责任向法律和经济责任的转化。驾驭道德复杂性被证明需要道德判断，这些判断必然是个人的和有争议的。这些判断涉及那些需要在不同可持续性问题之间进行权衡的企业社会责任倡议。