Business Ethics

As we discussed above it is common parlance amongst businesses to talk about Corporate Social Responsibility; in other words, a business works with the goal not just of profit but to be in step with the issues of society as a whole. Typically, though not exhaustively, this amounts to the business being ethically responsible towards the environment; this might include things such as not testing its cosmetics on animals or reducing the amount of non-recyclable plastic bags that the company uses.

But why should a business have any obligation to the environment? If a business is working within the law but using, say, environmentally unfriendly cement in the construction of its factories, why does this matter? Why should a business use a potentially more expensive product, thus reducing its profits, simply because it is more environmentally friendly?

It is true that the environment is one of the biggest concerns for businesses and is often an area where they are heavily criticized. This, like many of the other ethical issues, is only a relatively new phenomenon. In the past, in the name of profit, businesses could do what they wanted regarding the environment. There was a view that the world is such a massive place that a business polluting a pond, or mining on a green space did not really, in the grand scheme of things, matter. But the increase in globalization, the advancement of science, and the fact we live in connected communities has made people realize that businesses can, and do, affect the environment; climate change and the hole in the ozone layer are prime examples of this slow realization.

We can bring some of the issues into focus through an example:

Did the company do something morally wrong? It might have done something illegal; perhaps it omitted to perform the appropriate load tests, or perhaps it forged safety documentation. But even if it did nothing illegal, did it do something morally wrong?

I suspect in the twenty-first century our answer will be "obviously yes!" But can we give any substance to this thought? What really is wrong? After all, we intentionally kill billions of fish and aquatic life for food every year.

What would we say if we are utilitarians? Well we cannot talk about environmental rights, for there are no rights and again we might find it hard to show why this was morally wrong if we are utilitarians. We might think that the gold produced might cause a lot of happiness, not least because it is used in jewellery, computers, electronics, dentistry, medicine, etc. The fish, plants, and other aquatic life do not have a comparably high level of pleasure or happiness compared to humans so all things being equal it might not be morally wrong. Of course, as with the other cases this will depend on how we spell out the details of the case but Utilitarianism does not appear to be as clear-cut as we perhaps might have hoped.

For the Kantian, we only have moral obligations towards rational agents and thus there is no such thing as a business's moral obligation towards the environment, as the environment is not a rational agent. Now this does not mean that Kant believes a business can do whatever it wants towards the environment.

If a business treats the environment as a means to an end (profit) then they are modelling a certain type of behaviour and this behaviour could then lead to businesses treating humans as a means to an end, which is wrong. So although the exploitation of the environment is not morally wrong for the Kantian, it legitimises and hence increases the possibility of exploitation of people, which is.