Abstract
In the contemporary flurry of hostile corporate takeover activity, the ethics of the practice of greenmail have been called into question. The authors provide an account of greenmail in parallel with Daniel Ellsberg’s conception of blackmail, as consisting of two conditions: a threat condition and a compliance condition.
The analysis then proceeds to consider two questions: Is all greenmail morally wrong? Are all hostile takeovers morally wrong? The authors conclude that there is no basis for answering either question in the affirmative. While there is no cause for moral concern per se, the practices of both greenmail and hostile takeovers yield deeper and more interesting questions for the theory of corporate governance.
Originally published in: J Bus Ethics, 6, 165–178 © Springer, 1987
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Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge support from the McKnight Foundation, and the Strategic Management Research Center and the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota.
Portions of this paper were presented at the Eastern Academy of Management Annual Meeting, May 1985, Albany, New York. We are grateful to many participants for helpful criticisms.
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Freeman, R.E., Gilbert, D.R., Jacobson, C. (2023). The Ethics of Greenmail. In: Dmytriyev, S.D., Freeman, R.E. (eds) R. Edward Freeman’s Selected Works on Stakeholder Theory and Business Ethics. Issues in Business Ethics(), vol 53. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04564-6_19
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