From how organisations relate to other people to the search for a shared corporate purpose, philosophy helps organisations tell simple change apart from genuine progress. We discuss this with Prof. Roberto Mordacci, Vice-Rector for Human and Social Sciences, Full Professor of Moral Philosophy and Director of the Philosophy & Business Unit at UniSR.
Inside organisations, responsibility is often pictured as a vertical line. Decisions belong to leadership; intermediate and operational levels simply carry them out. That picture captures only part of the reality. Every procedure, even one set from the top, takes shape through the people who interpret it, communicate it, and translate it into a concrete relationship. “At a practical level, responsibility is a style of behaviour,” Mordacci says: it means taking ownership of the effects one's actions have on customers, colleagues and collaborators, not merely being on the hook for a result.
Artificial intelligence is making this dimension even more visible inside organisations. The more interactions become automated, the more clearly the specific value of human intervention emerges at the moments when a standard procedure isn't enough. Banking apps, chatbots and automated responders can make routine operations more efficient. But when a serious problem arises, “we want to deal with a person.” That is the moment when a company reveals its values and behaviour: in how someone, acting on its behalf, listens to a request and genuinely takes it on, putting the relationship itself at the centre.
Placing the relationship at the centre helps explain what responsibility means philosophically. Legally, the central question is usually one of accountability: who carried out a given action, breached a rule, or caused harm? Philosophical reflection widens that horizon, while keeping the legal question in view. Being responsible also means being able to respond to someone - to a question, a need, the presence of another person. In the twentieth century, in Totality and Infinity, Emmanuel Levinas described the face of the other as what calls the subject to account before any calculation or contract. Here, “face” doesn't simply mean physical appearance: it stands for the irreducible, vulnerable presence of another person, in front of whom one cannot remain morally neutral. In The Imperative of Responsibility, Hans Jonas extended this idea across time, asking that we weigh the consequences of technological power on future generations and on the continuity of life itself.
Applied to organisations, this view shows that responsibility isn't a moral correction bolted onto economic activity after the decisions are made. It is a criterion built into how a company acts: it concerns the way an organisation builds its relationships and answers for the effects it produces. Profit, too, takes on a broader meaning this way. It sits inside a network of trust that reputation, customer loyalty and organisational longevity all depend on, without being dismissed outright.
If a company has to answer for its results and for the relationships it builds, asking what goal drives its activity becomes unavoidable. This is the ground on which management language introduced the term corporate purpose - roughly, a company's reason for being. Over the years, businesses have talked about values, vision and mission. Different formulas, sometimes at risk of becoming buzzwords, but all pointing to the same need: to keep a company from being reduced to its quarterly results. Purpose pushes that question further: why does this organisation exist, and what value does it generate simply by existing?
By analogy, the question echoes Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason - the need to understand why something is one way rather than another. “This isn't about transplanting Leibniz into management textbooks,” Mordacci notes, “but about recognising the philosophical structure behind the question.” As he puts it, “philosophers need to get their hands dirty - not be afraid to talk about management, economics, capitalism and profit.” A credible purpose can connect an organisation's goals with the search for meaning of the people who work there, so that work is never experienced purely as time taken away from life.
A company's purpose has to be verified in day-to-day processes, not judged by the statements used to present it. This is where critical thinking comes in. According to the Purpose in Action Observatory at Politecnico di Milano's School of Management, 68% of Italian mid-level managers can now articulate their company's purpose, but only 13% have seen significant structural change follow from it (2025 data, based on a sample of 836 managers). Thinking critically inside an organisation doesn't mean adopting a reflexively negative stance. It means recognising the gap between intentions and outcomes, between stated values and actual behaviour. “Contradictions often arise from procedures that pile up over time and end up working against each other,” Mordacci says. Just as management positions require the ability to see the whole picture, operational roles hold a close-up knowledge of the process - one that needs to be shared and used to flag what isn't working. In that sense, it becomes a form of organisational self-awareness.
Criticism, though, would stay incomplete if it stopped at simply pointing out problems. Identifying a contradiction also carries the responsibility of imagining how to move past it: “utopian thinking is an unavoidable part of critical thinking,” Mordacci argues. Utopia here isn't an escape from reality - it's the exercise of building an alternative in thought, anticipating its effects, and testing whether it could correct the situation at hand. It is precisely in this move from contradiction to possibility that critical thinking turns creative and lays the groundwork for innovation.
Innovation, then, is the practical outcome of a path that starts with taking on responsibility, moves through defining a corporate purpose, and puts that purpose to the test of criticism. But not every new thing amounts to an improvement. A process that's faster or cheaper can be economically advantageous while, at the same time, worsening working conditions, cutting rights, or lowering the quality of a service.
The decisive line, then, isn't between old and new - it's between regressive innovation and real progress. “There's no innovation without justice,” Mordacci says. Innovation can be called progressive when its benefits don't stay concentrated but reach the largest possible number of people; when it makes a good or a service more accessible without sacrificing the dignity of work or the human dimension of relationships.
A company can talk about listening, inclusion and wellbeing purely for image reasons. But those statements create expectations - and when everyday experience contradicts them, the facade becomes a visible contradiction. Even an initially opportunistic promise, though, can open up space for change, because it shows people that a different way of working is possible and puts them in a position to demand it.
Ultimately, the question isn't choosing between ethics and profit, as if the two were necessarily incompatible. It's understanding what kind of wealth a company creates, for whom, and what relationships it makes possible. Only then does responsibility stop being a reputational formula and become the principle that holds an organisation's identity, decisions and future together.