Abstract
Despite the increased attention that has been paid in recent years to the significance of animal interests within moral and political philosophy, there has been virtually no discussion of the significance of animal interests within business ethics. This is rather troubling, since a great deal of the treatment of animals that will seem especially problematic to many people occurs in the context of business, broadly construed. In this chapter, I aim to extend the growing concern that our normative theories should be animal-friendly to business ethics. I consider whether several popular theoretical approaches in business ethics are consistent with taking animal interests to bear on the decisions that business managers are obligated to make. I do not argue for the claim that we should reject any theory in business ethics that cannot count animal interests as providing reasons that are relevant to the moral status of managerial conduct (though I think that this is true). Instead, I proceed on the assumption that many will find this claim plausible, and argue that those who do have reason to doubt that many of the prominent theoretical approaches defended in the business ethics literature are acceptable. My main aim, then, is to show that those who believe that the correct theory in business ethics must be animal-friendly, at least in the limited sense of counting animal interests as relevant to the moral status of managerial conduct in a plausible way, will need to look beyond the main competing theories that occupy present discussions.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
I take this explanation to be consistent with both broadly consequentialist and broadly deontological accounts of the grounds of our obligations to non-human animals.
- 3.
It is at least somewhat more difficult to accommodate the conviction that the interests of animals bear on how we ought to act on some theoretical approaches in ethics, as compared with others. For example, while it is generally thought that consequentialist views have no difficulty accommodating it, proponents of Kantian and contractualist views have recognized the need to argue at some length that their approaches can as well (Korsgaard 2004; Scanlon 1998, pp. 177–87).
- 4.
- 5.
All theories of justice take state institutions to be bound by the principles of justice. It is a matter of debate whether, and if so, in what ways and to what extent, other agents such as individuals and corporations are bound by those principles. John Rawls famously held that the principles of justice apply to the institutions of the “basic structure of society,” but not directly to the conduct of individuals (1999, pp. 6–9, 47). This view has been most notably critiqued by G.A. Cohen (2008), who holds that the principles of justice apply to individual conduct, in addition to institutional policy. I discuss this issue in Berkey (2015, 2016, 2017, 2018).
- 6.
Friedman describes managers as both “employees” and “agents” of shareholders (1970). For criticism of the view that shareholders own the companies in which they hold shares in a sense that requires, either legally or morally, that managers employ company resources only in ways that conform to their wishes, see Strudler (2017).
- 7.
Similarly, John Hasnas, in his broadly sympathetic discussion of Shareholder Theory, says that it “holds that managers are obligated to follow the (legal) directions of the stockholders, whatever these may be” (1998, p. 22).
- 8.
Since, for Friedman, both the law and the prohibition on deception and fraud are independent constraints on permissible profit-seeking in business, shareholders’ preference that a manager violates the law or engages in deception or fraud in pursuit of profits would not, on his view, generate a fiduciary duty to act as shareholders prefer.
- 9.
It is true that companies that operate factory farms often go to great lengths to conceal from the public the conditions in which animals are kept. This, it might be argued, amounts to conducting business in a deceptive manner, especially since it appears that the reason that the companies go to the lengths that they do to prevent the public from having access to information about the conditions in which animals are kept is that they are concerned that if this information were widely known, sales of their products would be negatively affected. While it is plausible that the business practices of many companies that operate factory farms are deceptive in a way that Shareholder Theorists like Friedman might object to, and that accepting that this is the case would allow proponents of Shareholder Theory to claim that the managers of at least some such companies are violating ethical obligations, it does not allow them to claim that the treatment of the animals is itself unethical, or that animal interests are, in themselves, relevant to the moral status of managerial conduct. This is because what is objectionable, according to the line of argument suggested here, is not the treatment of the animals itself, but rather the fact that accurate information about how the animals are treated is concealed from consumers. If companies that operate factory farms were simply transparent about how animals are treated in their operations, then the objection would cease to apply, despite the fact that the treatment of the animals would be unchanged.
- 10.
This is true not only on the more restrictive interpretation of Friedman’s view according to which ethical custom constitutes an independent constraint on the permissible pursuit of profit, but also on versions of Shareholder Theory, like that defended by Oliver Hart and Luigi Zingales (2017), according to which managers are obligated to take into account shareholders’ prosocial preferences rather than simply assuming, as Friedman suggests they can in typical cases, that shareholders prefer that company resources be employed in whatever way will maximize profits.
- 11.
For the purposes of this chapter, I allow that accepting a narrow definition of stakeholders is consistent with counting at least some animals as stakeholders of some companies. Even this, however, is questionable. There are reasons to think that if stakeholder theory is to be the kind of theory that many of its proponents intend it to be, only humans will be able to count as stakeholders. Robert Phillips and Joel Reichart, for example, argue that Stakeholder Theorists must accept a narrow definition of stakeholders, and that the best understanding of the view holds that stakeholders are those who are owed duties of fairness (2000; see also Phillips 1997). They go on to claim that the relevant duties of fairness can be owed only to human beings (Phillips and Reichart 2000, p. 191). Similarly, Eric Orts and Alan Strudler (who do not themselves endorse Stakeholder Theory) argue that Stakeholder Theorists should accept a narrow definition of stakeholders that includes only “the participants in a business enterprise who have significant property rights in the firm or who have significant contractual relations with the firm” (2002, p. 219). Since animals can have neither property rights in nor contractual relations with firms, this view clearly rules out counting animals as stakeholders.
- 12.
This way of understanding the requirement that managers are subject to does not, by itself, offer much in the way of guidance, since it leaves entirely open what an equitable balancing of the relevant interests might look like. This reflects a more general difficulty for Stakeholder Theory, namely that many of its formulations do not adjudicate between competing principles that might be appealed to regarding how trade-offs between competing interests should be made.
- 13.
The fact that a theory in business ethics implies that managers might sometimes be obligated to act in a way that will predictably lead to their company going out of business is not a reason to reject the theory. In fact, any plausible theory will have this implication in at least some cases.
- 14.
Donaldson cites the historical tradition in social contract theory, including Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, in his initial articulation of a social contract approach to business ethics (1982, pp. 39–41). His own view, however, seems to me more in the spirit of the social contract approach of John Rawls (1999). In addition, Donaldson’s later work with Dunfee has affinities with Rawls’s “political turn” in his own later work (1993).
- 15.
Donaldson says explicitly that those to whom corporations owe obligations under the social contract can be understood as falling into two main categories, namely consumers and employees (1982, pp. 45). Since animals are neither consumers nor employees, his view clearly rules them out as among those to whom duties under the contract are owed.
- 16.
Some might think, for example, that animals can be counted as parties to a social contract of the kind initially defended by Donaldson via a “trustee” model. I am skeptical that this approach can succeed, though for reasons of space I cannot discuss it here. Note that in more recent work, Donaldson and James Walsh claim that they are inclined to think that managers are obligated to take the interest of animals into account in their decision-making, but acknowledge the difficulty of justifying this view both within the theoretical approach that they develop and more generally (2015, p. 198).
- 17.
As he puts it, one of the distinctive features of the Market Failures Approach is “the specific account of how…constraints [on permissible profit-seeking strategies] should be derived. Rather than trying to derive them from general morality…the market failures approach takes its guidance from the policy objectives that underlie the regulatory environment in which firms compete, and more generally, from the conditions that must be satisfied in order for the market economy as a whole to achieve efficiency in the production and allocation of goods and services” (Heath 2006, p. 551). As I have suggested, I do not think that this is an especially distinctive feature of the Market Failures Approach in comparison with other prominent theoretical approaches in business ethics, though I do think that Heath is correct to view it as a more theoretically grounded version of an approach that seeks principles specifically applicable in business contexts than either Shareholder Theory or Stakeholder Theory.
- 18.
References
Berkey, Brian. 2015. Double Counting Moral Rigorism and Cohen’s Critique of Rawls: A Response to Alan Thomas. Mind 124 (495): 849–874. https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzv024
Berkey, Brian. 2016. Against Rawlsian Institutionalism about Justice. Social Theory and Practice 42 (4): 706–732. https://doi.org/10.5840/soctheorpract201642424
Berkey, Brian. 2017. Prospects for an Inclusive Theory of Justice: The Case of Non-Human Animals. Journal of Applied Philosophy 34 (5): 679–695. https://doi.org/10.1111/japp.12163
Berkey, Brian. 2018. Obligations of productive justice: individual or institutional?. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 21 (6): 726–753. https://doi.org/10.1080/13698230.2016.1262315
Cohen, G.A. 2008. Rescuing Justice and Equality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Donaldson, Sue and Will Kymlicka. 2011. Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Donaldson, Thomas. 1982. Corporations and Morality. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.
Donaldon, Thomas and Thomas W. Dunfee. 1994. Toward a Unified Conception of Business Ethics: Integrative Social Contracts Theory. Academy of Management Review 19: 252–284.
Donaldon, Thomas and Thomas W. Dunfee. 1995. Integrative Social Contracts Theory: A Communitarian Conception of Economic Ethics. Economics and Philosophy 11: 85–112.
Donaldson, Thomas and James P. Walsh. 2015. Toward a Theory of Business. Research in Organizational Behavior 35: 181–207.
Freeman, R. Edward. 2001. A Stakeholder Theory of the Modern Corporation. In Ethical Theory and Business, Sixth Edition. Eds. Tom Beauchamp and Norman Bowie. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall.
Friedman, Milton. 1970. The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits. New York Times Magazine.
Garner, Robert. 2013. A Theory of Justice for Animals: Animal Rights in a Nonideal World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hart, Oliver and Luigi Zingales. 2017. Companies Should Maximize Shareholder Welfare Not Market Value. Journal of Law, Finance, and Accounting 2: 247–274.
Hasnas, John. 1998. The Normative Theories of Business Ethics: A Guide for the Perplexed. Business Ethics Quarterly 8: 19–52.
Heath, Joseph. 2004. A Market Failures Approach to Business Ethics. In The Invisible Hand and the Common Good. Ed. Bernard Hodgson. Berlin: Springer.
Heath, Joseph. 2006. Business Ethics Without Stakeholders. Business Ethics Quarterly 16: 533–557.
Heath, Joseph, Jeffrey Moriarty, and Wayne Norman. 2010. Business Ethics and (or as) Political Philosophy. Business Ethics Quarterly 20: 427–452.
Kant, Immanuel. 1997. Lectures on Ethics. Eds. Peter Heath and J.B. Schneewind. Trans. Peter Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Korsgaard, Christine. 2004. Fellow Creatures: Kantian Ethics and Our Duties to Animals. Tanner Lectures on Human Values 24: 77–110.
Moriarty, Jeffrey. 2005. On the Relevance of Political Philosophy to Business Ethics. Business Ethics Quarterly 15: 455–473.
Nussbaum, Martha C. 2006. Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Orts, Eric W. and Alan Strudler. 2002. The Ethical and Environmental Limits of Stakeholder Theory. Business Ethics Quarterly 12: 215–233.
Phillips, Robert A. 1997. Stakeholder Theory and a Principle of Fairness. Business Ethics Quarterly 7: 51–66.
Phillips, Robert A. and Joel Reichart. 2000. The Environment as a Stakeholder? A Fairness-Based Approach. Journal of Business Ethics 23: 185–197.
Rawls, John. 1993. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.
Rawls, John. 1999. A Theory of Justice, Revised Edition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Regan, Tom. 1983. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Scanlon, T.M. 1998. What We Owe to Each Other. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Singer, Peter. 1975. Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. Avon Books.
Starik, Mark. 1995. Should Trees Have Managerial Standing? Toward Stakeholder Status for Non-Human Nature. Journal of Business Ethics 14: 207–217.
Strudler, Alan. 2017. What to Do with Corporate Wealth. Journal of Political Philosophy 25: 108–126.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to audiences at 2018 Pre-Conference Animal Ethics Workshop at the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress, the Department of Management at Loyola University Chicago, and the 2019 Vermont Food Ethics Workshop. Trevor Hedberg provided very helpful comments at the Animal Ethics Workshop. Mark Budolfson, Rob Hughes, Govind Persad, and Amy Sepinwall also provided valuable written comments. I have also benefitted from discussions with Cheryl Abbate, Cedric Dawkins, David DeGrazia, Tyler Doggett, Bob Fischer, Elizabeth Foreman, Al Gini, Sofia Huerter, Adam Lerner, Kate Nolfi, Jeff Sebo, and Abe Singer.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Berkey, B. (2022). Prospects for an Animal-Friendly Business Ethics. In: Thomas, N. (eds) Animals and Business Ethics. The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97142-7_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97142-7_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-97141-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-97142-7
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)