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)

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.

_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)

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)

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)

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)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction: How Brent Spar Changed the Rules The Brent Spar was not Alone: Two Sentinel Cases What is Going on? The Power Shift Third Sector, Global Civil Society Dealing with Attacks from CSOs Challenges for the CSOs The Ultimate Hope for the CSOs Case 7: Monsanto and the Genetically Modified Organisms Notes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This chapter contains section titled: Why Study Ethics? Philosophical Ethics: Defending Judgments Case 1: New England Fisheries Appendix: Decision Procedures For Ethics Notes.

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.

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.

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Toeing the line at the millennium Kyosei: Working together for the common good Crisis: danger and opportunity.

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)

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.

Traditional medical ethics, developed to apply to the contingencies of individual fee-for-service medical practice, do not always seem to speak to the problems of the new forms and locations of health care: the medical team, the hospital, the organized health-care profession, and the society as a whole as guarantor of all health care and education. It is the purpose of this issue of The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy to articulate guidelines for describing and attributing responsibility for health care in (...) these collective providers. This introduction attempts to provide the conceptual apparatus for a discussion of collective responsibility in health care, by the elucidation of the multiple meanings of "responsibility" and the articulation of three standard models for collective responsibility. In the light of these models, the question is put: can the health-care professions and their various subunits and institutions accept and exercise moral responsibility for health care? Its importance is stressed, and its answer left to the contributors. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (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)

This volume contains a rich and varied selection of classic writings in philosophy and ethics through the ages.This volume features selections from Eastern religions, Native America, feminist perspectives, existentialism and environmentalism as well writing from Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, John Rawls, Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and others. For anyone interested in learning about the evolution of ethics and ethical thought in America.

This chapter contains section titled: An Introduction and Forewarning Business as Arena of Moral Dilemmas The Factory and the Worker The Uneasy Compromise Case 2: Hooker Chemical & Love Canal.

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction Our Obligations to the Natural Environment Eight Perceptions of the Natural World Environmental Crises: A Short Catalog of Bad News Case 3: Great Apes as Bushmeat Notes.