Business Ethics

Handout

Lecture No, 31
Because of these problems, some contend that utilitarianism cannot lead our
pollution control policy. Perhaps absolute bans on pollution are more adequate.
Some writers even suggest that when risk cannot be reliably estimated, it is best
to steer clear of such projects. Others maintain that we should identify those who
will bear the risks and take steps to protect them.

It holds that until those patterns of hierarchy and domination are changed, we will
be unable to deal with environmental crises. In a system of hierarchy, one group
holds power over another and members of the superior group are able to
dominate those of the inferior group and get them to serve their Many thinkers
have argued that the environmental crises we face are rooted in the social
systems of hierarchy and domination that characterize our society. This view,
now referred to as social ecology, ends. What literally defines social ecology as
"social" is its recognition of the often overlooked fact that nearly all our present
ecological problems arise from deep-seated social problems. Conversely,
present ecological problems cannot be clearly understood, much less resolved,
without resolutely dealing with problems within society. To make this point more
concrete: economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender conflicts, among many others,
lie at the core of the most serious ecological dislocations we face today--apart, to
be sure, from those that are produced by natural catastrophes.

If this approach seems a bit too "sociological" for those environmentalists who
identify ecological problems with the preservation of wildlife, wilderness, or more
broadly, with "Gaia" and planetary "Oneness," it might be sobering to consider
certain recent facts. The massive oil spill by an Exxon tanker at Prince William
Sound, the extensive deforestation of redwood trees by the Maxxam Corporation,
and the proposed James Bay hydroelectric project that would flood vast areas of
northern Quebec's forests, to cite only a few problems, should remind us that the
real battleground on which the ecological future of the planet will be decided is
clearly a social one.

Indeed, to separate ecological problems from social problems--or even to play

down or give token recognition to this crucial relationship-- would be to grossly
misconstrue the sources of the growing environmental crisis. The way human
beings deal with each other as social beings is crucial to addressing the
ecological crisis. Unless we clearly recognize this, we will surely fail to see that
the hierarchical mentality and class relationships that so thoroughly permeate
society give rise to the very idea of dominating the natural world.
Unless we realize that the present market society, structured around the brutally
competitive imperative of "grow or die," is a thoroughly impersonal, self-operating
mechanism, we will falsely tend to blame technology as such or population
growth as such for environmental problems. We will ignore their root causes,
such as trade for profit, industrial expansion, and the identification of "progress"
with corporate self-interest. In short, we will tend to focus on the symptoms of a
grim social pathology rather than on the pathology itself, and our efforts will be
directed toward limited goals whose attainment is more cosmetic than curative.

While some have questioned whether social ecology has dealt adequately with
issues of spirituality, it was, in fact, among the earliest of contemporary ecologies
to call for a sweeping change in existing spiritual values. Such a change would
mean a far-reaching transformation of our prevailing mentality of domination into
one of complementarity, in which we would see our role in the natural world as
creative, supportive, and deeply appreciative of the needs of nonhuman life. In
social ecology, a truly natural spirituality centers on the ability of an awakened
humanity to function as moral agents in diminishing needless suffering, engaging
in ecological restoration, and fostering an aesthetic appreciation of natural
evolution in all its fecundity and diversity.

Thus social ecology has never eschewed the need for a radically new spirituality
or mentality in its call for a collective effort to change society. Indeed, as early as
1965, the first public statement to advance the ideas of social ecology concluded
with the injunction: "The cast of mind that today organizes differences among
human and other life-forms along hierarchical lines of 'supremacy' or 'inferiority'
will give way to an outlook that deals with diversity in an ecological manner--that
is, according to an ethics of complementarity."1 In such an ethics, human beings
would complement nonhuman beings with their own capacities to produce a
richer, creative, and developmental whole-not as a "dominant" species but as a
supportive one. Although this idea, expressed at times as an appeal for the
"respiritization of the natural world," recurs throughout the literature of social
ecology, it should not be mistaken for a theology that raises a deity above the
natural world or that seeks to discover one within it. The spirituality advanced by
social ecology is definitively naturalistic (as one would expect, given its relation to
ecology itself, which stems from the biological sciences), rather than
supernaturalistic or pantheistic.

To prioritize any form of spirituality over the social factors that actually erode all
forms of spirituality, raises serious questions about one's ability to come to grips
with reality. At a time when a blind social mechanism, the market, is turning soil
into sand, covering fertile land with concrete, poisoning air and water, and
producing sweeping climatic and atmospheric changes, we cannot ignore the
impact that a hierarchical and class society has on the natural world. We must
earnestly deal with the fact that economic growth, gender oppressions, and
ethnic domination-not to speak of corporate, state, and bureaucratic interests-are
much more capable of shaping the future of the natural world than are privatistic
forms of spiritual self-regeneration. These forms of domination must be
confronted by collective action and major social movements that challenge the
social sources of the ecological crisis, not simply by personalistic forms of
consumption and investment that often go under the rubric of "green capitalism."
We live in a highly cooperative society that is only too eager to find new areas of
commercial aggrandizement and to add ecological verbiage to its advertising and
customer relations.

Until these systems (such as racism, sexism, and social classes) are changed,
we will be unable to deal adequately with the environment. Eco-feminists, a
related group of thinkers, sees the key form of hierarchy connected to the
destruction of the environment as the domination of women by men. They
believe that there are important connections between the domination of women
and the domination of nature–patterns of thinking, which justify and perpetuate
the subordination. This logic of domination sets up dualisms (artificial and
natural, male and female) where one of the pair is seen as stronger and more
important. To solve our ecological problems, we must first change these
destructive modes of thinking.

According to the ethics of caring, the destruction of nature that has accompanied
male domination must be replaced with caring for and nurturing our relationships
with nature and other living things. Nature must be seen as an "other" that must
be cared for, not tamed or dominated. Thought-provoking as these approaches
are, they are still too new and undeveloped to give us specific direction.

The Ethics of Conserving Depletable Resources

Conservation refers to the saving or rationing of natural resources for later use.
In fact, even pollution control can be seen as a form of conservation, since
pollution consumes air and water. However, generally, conservation refers to the
saving of finite, depletable resources. The only source of such resources is what
has been left over from previous generations.

As we deplete the world's resources, there is unavoidably a smaller amount of

them left for future generations. If future generations have an equal right to the
world's resources, then by depleting them we are stealing what is actually theirs.

A number of writers have claimed that it is a mistake to think that future

generations have rights. They advance three main reasons to show this:

First, future generations cannot intelligently be said to have rights because they
do not now exist and may never exist. I may be able to think about future people,
but I cannot hit them, punish them, injure them, or treat them wrongly. Future
people exist only in the imagination, and imaginary entities cannot be acted on in
any way whatsoever except in the imagination. Similarly, we cannot say that
future people possess things now when they do not yet exist to possess or have
them. Because there is a possibility that future generations may never exist, they
cannot "possess" rights.

Second, if future generations did have rights, we might be led to the absurd
conclusion that we must sacrifice our entire civilization for their sake. Suppose
that each of the infinite number of future generations had an equal right to the
world's supply of oil. Then we would have to divide the oil equally among them
all, and our share would be a few quarts at the most. We would then be put in the
absurd position of having to shut down our entire Western civilization so that
each future person might be able to possess a few quarts of oil.

Third, we can say that someone has a certain right only if we know that he or she
has a certain interest that that right protects. The purpose of a right, after all, is to
protect the interests of the right holder, but we are virtually ignorant of what
interests future generations will have. What wants will they have?

John Rawls, on the other hand, argues that though it is unjust to impose heavy
burdens on present generations for the sake of the future, it is also unjust for
present generations to leave nothing for the future. We should ask ourselves
what we can reasonably expect they might want and, putting ourselves in their
place, leave what we would like them to have left for us. Justice, in short,
requires that we hand over to our children a world in no worse condition than the
one we received ourselves.