Raising the stakes in the stkeholder theory: should animals be considered stakeholders by business that affect them?

Within business ethics literature, a spectrum of definitions for the term ‘stakeholder’ has been put forward to serve different theories of corporate social responsibility. Stakeholder theories often come with the normative idea that a business has, at least, a fiduciary duty, and at most, a moral duty, to protect the interests of its stakeholders. Therefore, how a stakeholder is defined usually shapes a stakeholder theory. In this paper, I show that there has been a clear move from acceptance of stakeholdership under the minimum criterion of ‘actively participating in and benefiting from the system’ towards ‘being affected by the system’. I will argue why the reasoning behind this move should not necessarily stay human-centred. What elevates the minimum criterion for humans can be applied to animals used in businesses such as ones in biomedical research and the food industry. This will of course pose challenges as to the limitations on defining what constitutes having a stake in a corporate system in non-human stakeholders. I will respond to these challenges by showing that the above-mentioned move on minimum criterion has only become possible by taking into account what I will call ‘outside attributes’. Outside attributes are those attributes that manifest themselves outside the primary function of a business. For example, private life interests of an employee count as an outside attribute with respect her workplace. My hypothesis is that looking at outside attributes of laboratory animal models or animals raised for food can qualify them for a status of stakeholdership. The consequence of this change in our attitude would be that our scope of understanding animal welfare in these areas will have to reach beyond attributes observed within the confines of research and food chain.