Business and human rights (BHR) is, at its core, a normative project. It rests on the claim that economic activity must be regulated with a view to respecting human dignity. Yet as the field has developed, that moral commitment has become less visible (in operational BHR practice), translated into principles, frameworks, and procedures that increasingly emphasize how human rights are implemented rather than why they matter. This post argues that this shift changes what human rights are doing in BHR.

That matters because instruments such as human rights due diligence (HRDD) make rights legible within corporate practice through risk assessment, monitoring, and compliance, and they have enabled a degree of standardization and accountability that would otherwise be difficult to achieve. But they also risk displacing the justificatory basis away from rights, such that compliance begins to substitute for moral justification.

The Hidden Logic — Optimization and Trade-offs

If procedures start to substitute for the values they were meant to serve, the question is then what kind of reasoning fills the space that moral justification leaves behind. The answer, in BHR practice, is a managerial proceduralism that draws on an underlying economic logic of trade-off and efficiency. Monciardini, Bernaz and Andhov have demonstrated this dynamic empirically in the context of UK Modern Slavery Act compliance, showing how compliance professionals translate ambiguous legal duties into auditable procedures that absorb their substantive content. We extend that diagnosis by asking what kind of normative reasoning is displaced when this happens, and what it would take to recover it.

HRDD translates ethical commitments into a language of identifying, assessing, and managing risks. Harms are mapped, assessed, and addressed based on factors such as severity, likelihood, and impact. This is not inherently problematic as it makes human rights more operational and allows for coordination across global supply chains. It does, however, make them easier to weigh and trade off. Some risks are reduced, others tolerated, and others externalized. Decisions are justified not by whether a harm is acceptable in principle, but by whether it has been assessed and addressed within the system. In effect, procedural frameworks introduce implicit thresholds of acceptable harm that guide implementation.

Within BHR, firms are expected to treat human rights not merely as strategic considerations, but as normative constraints that shape and limit conduct. Yet businesses remain embedded in institutional environments structured around survival, competitiveness, efficiency, and performance. Human rights, by contrast, are framed as standards that ought to be upheld even where they conflict with economic advantage. Organizational decision-making within market systems frequently operates through forms of instrumental and optimization-oriented reasoning that permit trade-offs between harms and competing objectives. By contrast, human rights frameworks are intended to function as moral constraints on what firms ought to do, including in situations where respecting rights conflicts with organizational or economic interests.

In practice, however, this distinction is difficult to sustain. Rights are formally affirmed as constraints, particularly where they reflect duties not to inflict harm, yet they are operationalized through processes that rank, prioritize, and balance impacts. Dignity is acknowledged but increasingly mediated through procedural frameworks that permit trade-offs within organizational constraints. The concern is therefore not that BHR incorporates economic reasoning, but that that the constraint character of rights risks being absorbed into the logic of optimization.

Exposing the Limits of Frameworks — Conflict-Affected Areas

This dynamic is particularly visible in contexts where violence is embedded within the environment and cannot be fully avoided. Two related problems emerge. First, when rule-based systems weaken and constraints on actors erode, which often is the case in war and violent environments, behavior shifts toward necessity, survival, and power. The issue is not only rule violation, but the fragility of the underlying values that they are based on. When these constraints on power disappear, dignity is difficult to protect. Second, even when HRDD and compliance are applied rigorously, they may not suffice in conflict contexts. Where harm cannot be avoided—e.g., operating under coercion by armed actors—procedural compliance may not resolve whether continued operations are justified, especially where complicity to harm is indirect and difficult to trace. For instance, firms may comply formally while relying on local suppliers subject to extortion, displacing harm into the supply chain and rendering it less visible. It is in these contexts where harm is largely unavoidable and business activity risks becoming directly or indirectly linked to violations of human rights.

Reflection and judgment become decisive in these contexts, and actors must return to the moral core of the rule-based framework. War and violence have long been part of human history and will likely persist, but they do not determine how individuals and institutions respond to them. Hannah Arendt, a political theorist after the second World War, famously argued that evil often arises not from deeply rooted malevolence but from thoughtlessness and unreflective conformity within modern institutions. Her concept of the banality of evil captures how ordinary individuals may participate in harmful systems when critical reflection and public engagement erode. Viewed through Arendt’s lens, the issue is less one of deliberate wrongdoing than of thoughtlessness within organized systems. Thus, violating human rights may not necessarily arise from malicious intent, but from the ability to continue acting without fully confronting the consequences of those actions. In that sense, actors must continuously ask whether their actions can be morally justified in light of human dignity, rather than whether risks have been adequately assessed or managed.

Reclaiming Justification — Dignity as Constraint

If the difficulty lies in the displacement of justification by procedure, the task for BHR is not to abandon existing frameworks, but to reorient them. Due diligence and related mechanisms should not function as ends in themselves. They should operate as sites of justification.

A useful starting point is the idea of a “culture of justification,” most closely associated with Etienne Mureinik. On this view, the exercise of power must be justified through reasons that can be publicly articulated and critically assessed. Legitimacy does not follow from procedural compliance alone, but from the quality of the reasons offered.

Applied to BHR, this shifts the focus. The question is no longer simply whether risks have been identified and managed, but whether decisions affecting rights can be justified in light of the values those rights express. Due diligence, in this sense, becomes a mechanism for structuring and exposing justification, not substituting for it.

To take a concrete example: under the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), a company assessing a high-severity risk of forced labor in its supply chain is required to identify, prevent, and where necessary terminate the relationship. A risk-based reading treats this as a graduated calculation in which severity, likelihood, leverage, and remediation costs are weighed, and continued engagement may be justified by the prospect of incremental improvement. A justificatory reading reverses the order of inquiry. The first question is whether continued sourcing can be defended in terms that the affected workers, treated as ends, could be expected to accept. Mitigation plans, supplier improvement programmes, and severance from the relationship are then evaluated as candidate answers to that question, not as inputs into a balancing exercise that has already absorbed it. That inquiry does not point in a single direction. Termination may be the only defensible answer where suppliers are unwilling or unable to change. But it can also be the wrong answer: severing a relationship can deprive the affected workers of livelihood, leaving them more exposed than continued engagement coupled with active remediation would. The justificatory question is therefore not resolved once. It must be posed continuously, against the actual conditions of those whose rights are at stake. The procedural steps are not changed. The change is in what those steps are taken to be doing.

Reclaiming justification, therefore, is not a move away from practice but a reorientation of it. Procedural frameworks remain necessary, but they must remain anchored in forms of reasoning that do not permit the erosion of their underlying values. Without such constraint, the language of human rights risks becoming compatible with outcomes it was meant to prohibit.

The Future — Justification in Business and Human Rights

The difficulties identified above reflect a deeper conflict in how BHR is understood. Legal and ethical reasoning each offer ways of thinking about corporate responsibility, but both are increasingly subordinated to the managerial-economic logic that drives compliance practice. Values are invoked without being fully operationalized and procedures are refined without being fully justified. Contexts of war and violence demonstrate this tension even more. Where harm is pervasive and often unavoidable, and where legal and institutional constrains weaken, procedural compliance and risk-based reasoning reach their limits. In such contexts, the question cannot be resolved through optimization or mitigation alone but whether certain forms of involvement can be justified at all. These contexts therefore do not represent exceptional cases, but rather reveal the underlying structure of reasoning that BHR relies on more generally.

The task, then, is not simply to coordinate these perspectives, but to re-establish a common structure of reasoning. A justificatory approach offers one way forward. It does not displace legal or ethical reasoning but requires that decisions be defended in light of the constraints imposed by rights. Legal and ethical reasoning must remain answerable to each other, against the pressure of optimization. To insist on justification is to preserve the field’s core insight: that some harms cannot be defended by reference to efficiency or aggregate benefit. The task for BHR is therefore not to refine its procedures but to recover what those procedures are for. Without that recovery, due diligence will continue to produce the appearance of accountability while leaving the harms it was built to prevent intact.