Being good, it seems, is never good enough. Companies like Starbucks are renowned for doing well by their employees and for trading fairly with coffee farmers around the world. So why is the coffee chain hitting a bitter note with the anti-poverty and human rights group Oxfam International?  According to Oxfam, Starbucks (nasdaq: SBUX - news - people ) had a hand in the Ethiopian government's recently failed attempt to trademark two of the nation's coffee bean names, Harar and Sidamo. The government believes that trademarking those names could help the country's coffee industry take home an extra $88 million a year. Oxfam International, on behalf of the Ethiopian government, has accused Starbucks of blocking Addis Abbaba's trademark applications with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.  That doesn't quite square with the image Starbucks has worked hard to earn. The company has developed its own set of socially responsible coffee-buying guidelines, for example, called CAFE (Coffee and Farmer Equity) Practices. It has also partnered with environmental organizations along its coffee supply chain to minimize Starbucks' environmental impact. The company is also known for how it treats its employees: Health benefits are available to anyone who works 20 hours a week or more and has been with the company for at least 90 days.  But sometimes, doing good is like painting a target on your back. Because Starbucks is one of the biggest names in coffee, "activists hold us to an even higher standard," says company spokeswoman Audrey Lincoff.  That's true for a lot of companies that develop socially responsible brands, says Herman B. "Dutch" Leonard, who teaches business administration and public-sector management at the Harvard Business School. "If Starbucks says, 'We're bringing you environmentally conscious coffee grown by happy farmers, and you can feel good about this when you drink our coffee,' they can be sure folks like Oxfam are going to be taking a look at what they're doing."  Seth Petchers, the coffee lead for Oxfam's Make Trade Fair campaign, admits Starbucks has made some progress in its supply-chain practices, but it should do more to help its suppliers who come from the poorest of poor countries. "This [trademarking plan] isn't about Ethiopia trying to strengthen its grip on these coffees and impose pricing requirements," he says. "It is about looking to control and protect the way these brands are built up in the market and make sure what Ethiopians get reflects [the country's] true value in the marketplace."  Oxfam's campaign has been a real headache for Starbucks, whose corporate social responsibility (CSR) program is a major part of its brand. Starbucks isn't keen on Ethiopia's trademarking plan, but it denies interfering with Ethiopia's patent applications. The coffee company has shot back with its own battery of press releases and a full-page ad in The New York Times on Nov. 5 that highlighted Starbucks' CAFE Practices, which include paying above-market prices for its coffee.  So when your social responsibility agenda makes your company a target, is continuing your CSR program worth the headache?  Yes. "I don't know a company that can afford not to," says Bradley Googins, director of the Center for Corporate Citizenship at Boston College. Since the 1970s, when corporate social responsibility was the battle cry of a select few-- The Body Shop and Ben & Jerry's, for example--CSR has gone mainstream. Corporate misdeeds (as in the case of Enron) have dragged social responsibility into the spotlight, while concerns about resource constraints and the availability of information over the Internet have brought the concept of corporate social responsibility home. Companies are taking note: Nine hundred companies have signed onto the United Nations' Global Compact, which promotes ten universal principles on responsible corporate citizenship, since it was founded in 2000.  Pressuring companies to be more socially responsible has done some real good. Just look at Nike (nyse: NKE - news - people ) and Gap (nyse: GPS - news - people ). Both came under serious attack for their labor practices and have, over the last four or five years, implemented anti-sweatshop social responsibility programs. Nike has even implemented a code of conduct that advocates industry-wide best-practices standards. Royal Dutch Shell (nyse: RDS - news - people ) has also done well by doing good: By the end of 2005, it had invested more than $1 billion in renewable energy and voluntarily lowered its greenhouse-gas emissions from operations by 15% compared with emissions levels in 1990. Another big CSR spender is General Electric (nyse: GE - news - people ), which has pledged to spend $1.5 billion on cleaner technologies by 2010 as part of its GE Ecoimagination initiative.  But not everyone thinks going above and beyond is such a good idea, and it's difficult to come up with a way to quantify the payoff for investing in CSR programs.  Russell Roberts, an economist at George Mason University, goes as far as to say it is "immoral" for companies to use shareholders' money to pay for corporate social responsibility programs. He, like most critics of CSR, takes his cue from a 1970 article published by the late economist Milton Friedman in the New York Times. Its title says it all: "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits."  First off, the term "socially responsible," Friedman says, is indefinable; it means different things to different people. More important, though, is that an executive's sole purpose in a public company should be to serve his or her employers--the shareholders. Anything that detracts from delivering dividends is wrong.  But Roberts concedes that everyone in today's post-Enron world feels pressured to appear socially responsible. It should be enough that Starbucks has created unprecedented demand for Ethiopian coffee through its coffee business, he says, and corporations should be able to leave it to organizations like Oxfam and governments to figure out how to lift the world's poorest people out of poverty.  The reality, though, is that if a company backs away from CSR, it risks doing itself even more harm than the criticism it was trying to avoid.  BP (nyse: BP - news - people ), for example, can't back off its promise to be "Beyond Petroleum," even despite the public lashings it received after shutting down its oilfields in Prudhoe Bay and after last year's explosion at its Texas City refinery. Reneging on its brand promise to be more environmentally conscious--a campaign the company's executives initiated in 2000--could do more harm than good. In fact, the company is taking an even "more intense approach" now, says BP spokesman Roddy Kennedy from London. "Our view is you should always--if you are a decent company--learn from your mistakes."  BP's mistakes at its Texas City facility claimed the lives of 15 workers, while a corroded transit pipeline led to the spillage of 200,000 gallons of crude oil in Prudhoe Bay last August, which helped push the price of crude oil to a record $78 per barrel. After that, says Harvard's Leonard, "BP doesn't see it as an option to give up" on its CSR program. But to avoid falling on its own CSR sword, companies like BP and Starbucks have to be able to live up to their promises, he says. "You either have to make sure that you are going to be better than the average company, or you should keep a low profile."
Despite their relatively progressive practices, Starbucks and other socially minded firms can't seem to help being slammed by activists.