_Business Ethics and the Natural Environment_ examines the present status of relations between corporate enterprise and the natural environment in the world today. •Discusses such questions as: What obligations does a corporation have toward the environment? To respect entities unprotected by law? To care about future generations? •Argues that environmentally-friendly business practices yield dividends exceeding expectations, and that the competitive firm of the 21st century will follow “green” standards •Provides a background in ethics, a survey of business ethics, an account (...) of environmental philosophy, an overview of environmental legal issues, and an account of the problems associated with globalization. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:This article reviews four key orientations in environmental ethics that range from an instrumental understanding of sustainability to one that acknowledges the intrinsic value of sustainable behavior. It then shows that the current scholarly discourse around corporate sustainability management—as reflected in environment management, corporate social responsibility, and corporate political activity —mostly favors an instrumental perspective on sustainability. Sustainable business practices are viewed as anthropocentric and are conceptualized as a means to achieve competitive advantage. Based on these observations, we speculate about (...) what corporate sustainability management might look like if it applied ethical orientations that emphasize the intrinsic value of nature. This discussion also includes an introduction to two articles in this special section focused on the role of the environmental manager and sustainability standards, both of which offer paths for incorporating intrinsic valuation of the environment into sustainability management. (shrink)

_Business Ethics and the Natural Environment_ examines the present status of relations between corporate enterprise and the natural environment in the world today. •Discusses such questions as: What obligations does a corporation have toward the environment? To respect entities unprotected by law? To care about future generations? •Argues that environmentally-friendly business practices yield dividends exceeding expectations, and that the competitive firm of the 21st century will follow “green” standards •Provides a background in ethics, a survey of business ethics, an account (...) of environmental philosophy, an overview of environmental legal issues, and an account of the problems associated with globalization. (shrink)

Late in 1990, the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at Illinois Institute of Technology (lIT) received a grant of more than $200,000 from the National Science Foundation to try a campus-wide approach to integrating professional ethics into its technical curriculum.! Enough has now been accomplished to draw some tentative conclusions. I am the grant's principal investigator. In this paper, I shall describe what we at lIT did, what we learned, and what others, especially philosophers, can learn (...) from us. We set out to develop an approach that others could profitably adopt. I believe that we succeeded. (shrink)

Robert Solomon has usefully set forth the outlines of an ontology of ethics for the employee. I seize upon three of the insights in his paper-specifically, relating to employee role, social nature, and virtue-and develop them along Aristotelean lines, showing along the way how classic "dilemmas" of the business ethics literature can be recast as problems of employee character and virtue.

When there are disasters in our society, whether on an individual, organizational or systemic level, individuals or groups of individuals are often singled out for blame, and commonly it is assumed that the alleged culprits engaged in deliberate misdeeds. But sometimes, at least, these disasters occur not because of deliberate malfeasance, but rather because of complex organizational and systemic circumstances that result in these negative outcomes. Using the Boeing Corporation and its 737 MAX aircraft crashes as an example, this ethical (...) analysis will examine some of the organizational problems that led to changes in management in Boeing and ultimately resulted in the fatal accidents. We will examine ethical blind spots within the company that led to the deadly accidents, and we will study the kinds of circumstances that are particularly acute in organizations such as Boeing, and which contributed to the malfunctions in the 737 MAX and the two resulting crashes. The Boeing 737 MAX example is not a singular case, but rather shares similarities with other engineering disasters such as the Challenger and Columbia explosions, and the ignition switch failures at General Motors each of which seem to have been at least partly the result of organizational shortcomings involving a compromise in commitment to safety. These parallels lead us to conclude that organizational malfeasance poses a serious ethical challenge for engineers and their organizations. We will conclude with some tentative suggestions for avoiding such tragic incidents in the future. (shrink)

The eight pieces constituting this Meeting Report are summaries of presentations made during a panel session at the 2011 Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE) annual meeting held between March 3rd and 6th in Cincinnati. Lisa Newton organized the session and served as chair. The panel of eight consisted both of pioneers in the field and more recent arrivals. It covered a range of topics from how the field has developed to where it should be going, from identification of (...) issues needing further study to problems of training the next generation of engineers and engineering-ethics scholars. (shrink)

Except for a small clutch of academic shark-defenders, everyone seems to know that hostile takeovers are wrong, destructive of people and industries, and damaging to the long-term competitiveness of corporate America. But analysis of the takeover process, absent insider trading, fails to identify any injury that is not replicated elsewhere in the business system. Current suggestions for remedying the situation seem inadequate, ill-fitted to the problem, or hostile to the entire capitalist system. Could it be that it is that system (...) as a whole, or the assumptions underlying it, that is at fault? (shrink)

Is good morality the natural outcome of profitable business practices? The thesis explored here is one version of the recent literature on corporate culture, typified by the bestselling In Search of Excellence — that the corporation that creates a strong culture, one that best serves the customer, the product, and the employee, must also be profitable. The thesis turns out to have an historical parallel in Plato's Republic (subtitled, I suppose, In Search of Justice). Parallel virtues can be worked out (...) for state and corporation. In the end, profitability turns out not to be a necessary consequence of excellence, just as Plato's Ideal state turned out to be mortal. (shrink)

A casebook in environmental ethics that presents the classic cases with adequate detail so the students experience real situations in order to learn how serious and complex the issues are. The authors present a balanced, impartial account of these events that will interest and challenge students.

Accountability is viewed as a civilizing element in society, with professional accountability formalized in most cases as duties dating to the Greeks and Socrates; journalists must find their own way, without formal professional or government regulation or licensing. Three scholars look at the process in a line from the formal professional discipline to suggesting problems the journalism fraternity faces without regulation to suggesting serious internal ethics conferences as 1 solution to the problem.

In all the criticisms that have shadowed the financial industry in recent years, the burden seems to be, that the reckless (as opposed to malicious) bankers too often took money of which they were the appointed stewards, and used it for speculation, especially in junk bonds. AsShaheen Borna and James Lowry argue in their "Gambling and Speculation" (the only article on gambling that I was able to raise on my computer) business speculation is probably wrong, since it is very like (...) gambling, which everyone knows is wrong. But why is gambling wrong? Ifwe, as the ethicists of business, are to adopt an uncharacteristically judgmental posture toward the most venerable American institutions, occupying the tallest and closest of American buildings, by calling their residents "gambIers," then surely we ought to be able to provide an account of the blameworthiness of gambling itself. That, at any rate, is the challenge I set myself for this paper. (shrink)

In all the criticisms that have shadowed the financial industry in recent years, the burden seems to be, that the reckless (as opposed to malicious) bankers too often took money of which they were the appointed stewards, and used it for speculation, especially in junk bonds. AsShaheen Borna and James Lowry argue in their "Gambling and Speculation" (the only article on gambling that I was able to raise on my computer) business speculation is probably wrong, since it is very like (...) gambling, which everyone knows is wrong. But why is gambling wrong? Ifwe, as the ethicists of business, are to adopt an uncharacteristically judgmental posture toward the most venerable American institutions, occupying the tallest and closest of American buildings, by calling their residents "gambIers," then surely we ought to be able to provide an account of the blameworthiness of gambling itself. That, at any rate, is the challenge I set myself for this paper. (shrink)

In a hyper-consuming society, what questions should we ask ourselves as we survey the increasingly crowded planet on which we find ourselves? What are the moral effects of living amid unprecedented material plenty? With David Crocker, Lisa Newton, and Judith Lichtenberg.

Since the traumas of the last quarter of the 20th century forced all professions into the light of public scrutiny, we have seen the destruction of the parochial boundaries of the ethical understandings of the past, and the development of a cosmopolitan professional ethics. It is now understood that we have to have an ethics that travels well, whose principles operate with equal force and plausibility in all disciplines. Without good passports, principles become locked into their own disciplines, Ethics as (...) a subject loses its integrity, and every profession has an excellent reason to insist that “their” ethics have nothing to do with the rest of the world. Consideration of professional ethics as a whole shows that the general principles that we use travel very well indeed, and rapidly smokes out those that do not. “The Doctrine of Double Effect” is one of the non-travelers; from that fact we explore the possibility that the Doctrine is radically misconceived even in its home discipline of­medicine. (shrink)

Can business be a moral enterprise? -- Employee rights and responsibilities : the internal constituencies of business -- Customers, community, and world : the external constituencies of business.

This volume tracks the development in the United States of the field of Bioethics, Ethics applied to the disciplines of medicine, nursing, and health care in general, including medical research and the complex economic and political problems surrounding the provision of medical and nursing care. It explains how the United States developed, case by case, the central rules and principles of ER ethics in the Health Care System. The discussion includes the controversies centering on birth, death, clinical research, experimental procedures (...) (cloning, reproductive technology, organ transplants), and ends with a substantial suggestion on the provision of health care for all. (shrink)

We argue that the goal of natural excellence, discoverable by scientific observation of the species, is appropriately called good, and the proper object of human development and education. That affirmation stands, but we are forced to acknowledge several conceptual difficulties (in the deliberate creation of “natural” excellences, for example, and in cases of plurality of excellences) and a final inability to reconcile human freedom—surely part of the natural excellence of human life—with the need to prevent humans from using that freedom (...) to sacrifice it (through, for instance, drugs, self-indulgence, and emotional enthusiasms). (shrink)

In a hyper-consuming society, what questions should we ask ourselves as we survey the increasingly crowded planet on which we find ourselves? What are the moral effects of living amid unprecedented material plenty? With David Crocker, Lisa Newton, and Judith Lichtenberg.

This article responds to the preceding papers by Fletcher and Pasternack. Accepting Fletcher’s virtue-based approach as a useful starting point, it suggests the need for more careful philosophical work on the morality of gambling.

Does “business ethics,” as we have developed it in the United States, apply without change when business goes abroad? We argue that we cannot assume, in foreign nations (especially in the developing world), that the assumptions of U.S. business practice and business ethics hold without modification. An attempt to find a universally applicable ethic for global business results in the tentative formulation of “ten commandments” to guide the practice of business in the nations of the world.

Everyone knows that somehow we must protect the natural environment as part of the ethical imperatives of doing business, especially in the era of globalization of business. But where, actually, do we find the structure of ethical imperatives that will support that “must”? The drawbacks of several candidates, some of them discussed in papers elsewhere in this volume, are considered, then supplemented with the Japanese concept of kyosei as supplying a missing link between ethics and the land. In the end, (...) some questions are raised about the possibility of success of the entire environmental enterprise in face of the provisions of global trade agreements. (shrink)