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When standards for pollution, discrimination, and salary schedules are lower in an offshore host country than they are in the home country, should multinational corporations insist on home country standards? Or does using home standards imply a failure to respect cultural diversity and national integrity? What obligations, if any, do multinationals have to the people they affect indirectly? In this study, business ethicist Thomas Donaldson offers three concepts for interpreting international business ethics: a social contract between productive organizations and society, the notion of a fundamental international right, promulgated by ten specific international rights, and a moral "algorithm" to help multinational managers make tradeoffs between conflicting norms in home and host countries. He then employs these concepts in the analysis of specific problems such as the distribution of hazardous technology and South African divestment.

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Donaldson has dual involvements in philosophy and management, but philosophic inquiry dominates this, the first monograph-length work on its subject. The author's technique is to begin with rationales for ignoring international obligations (cultural relativism and Hobbesianism) and then to proceed to the character of the multinational enterprise (MNE) and the possibility of applying to it a "social contract" that sets minimal and maximal duties. He then carefully works out a list of ten "fundamental international rights" and employs them in producing an "ethical algorithm" capable of guiding MNE managers in policy alternatives when conflicts arise between the MNE's home and host countries. Finally, Donaldson thoroughly analyzes two prominent issues highly publicized during the 1980s: Bhopal--the poison-gas tragedy and issues of international risk distribution, and South Africa--policies toward nonwhites and issues of divestment. A concluding summary, an appendix on neo-Hobbesianism, and extensive notes all strengthen the presentation. The work is highly rewarding, but requires the reader to follow fascinating twists and turns of a philosopher's rigorous search with role reversals, devil's-advocate arguments, and other relentless probing for the moral principle with real-world applicability. Recommended for upper-division and graduate collections. -J. C. Thompson, University of Connecticut