<p>With scholars heralding free and open discourses between corporations and their stakeholders as a governance panacea, deliberative democracy has come to the forefront of business ethics research. Critics, however, have called into question whether corporations are, at all, viable entities to engage in such deliberative discourses due to their embeddedness in competition and their subsequent reliance on self-interest. In this paper, I argue that this objection is not only based on a questionable interpretation of the works of Jürgen Habermas that underpin deliberative democracy, particularly an overestimation of the demand for benevolence in his theory; it also overlooks the important similarities between corporate actors and their counterparts in politics and civil society. Building on this idea, I develop more nuanced criteria for assessing the discourse viability of corporations and other governance actors: first, the criterion of whether acting responsibly gives the organization an advantage in its respective competition; and second, the criterion of whether there are credible signs of a benevolent orientation in the organization. Ultimately, the paper contends that the categorical dismissal of corporations from deliberative discourses is not only unjustified on a theoretical level; weakening their role could also lead to their diminished participation in multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs), possibly even to their exclusion, creating far-reaching consequences for the numerous initiatives worldwide that are supported or even established by corporations.</p>