ENVIROMENTAL ETHICS

Enviromental Ethics

Enviromental Ethics

Introduction

In our technological age business is one of the greatest destroyers of the natural environment. At present, we do not have any appropriate theory of business that would be consistent with ecology, that is, contains a well-articulated ecological point of view. This article is an attempt to meet this need. Conventional theories of business hold that business is to serve the interests of the owners. As Milton Friedman has so suggestively stated: the only social responsibility of business is to increase its profit within the actually existing framework of law. This view can hardly be reconciled with the demands of ecology. The emerging stakeholder theory of business seems to offer a much more adequate approach in an age of rapidly deteriorating natural environment. The stakeholder theory states that business is to serve the interests of all the parties that are affected by its functioning (Fox 1990).

The Natural Environment as a Stakeholder of Business

The standard definition of the "stakeholder" concept excludes the natural environment among the stakeholders of business. According to Edward R. Freeman "a stakeholder in an organisation is (by definition) any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the organisation's objectives". (Freeman 1994) Freeman lists environmentalist groups, but not the natural environment itself, among the stakeholders of a business firm. This is a rather paradoxical position, since it implies that managers should consider the environmental impacts of their decisions, if and only if they violate the actual standards of law or there are environmentalist groups to advocate for and voice the "interest" of the natural environment.

In modern societies neither legal regulation nor environmentalist groups can provide satisfactory defence for nature from business activities. Environmental law, even in the most advanced countries, is fragmented, issue-centred and mostly expresses solely the interests of people living in a particular environment. Until now environmental legislation has proved to be rather ineffective from the point of view of nature because it does not follow the logic and organisation of nature. In most cases actual standards of law cannot avoid the free riding practice of business concerning the natural environment. (Hoffman 1991)

It is known from the sociological literature that the environmental awareness of people is highly correlated with the level of social welfare. The higher the welfare of people, the higher the environmental awareness that can be expected from people. In modern societies strong environmental preferences only appear once a certain level of material welfare has been reached. (Cotgrove 1982) The present state of the green movement in Eastern Europe provides a clear illustration of this point.

East European environmentalist groups received much stronger social support during the former Communist regimes than they can get now. With the considerable decrease in their standard of living Eastern European people are displaying a more limited interest in environmental problems. The logic of collective action analysed by Marcur Olson and others presents another obstacle for environmental activism. People, even with high level environmental awareness, tend to ...