Ethics Taxonomy Dimension 5: Environment

Abstract

Just as a corporation is part of the economy but must also engage its surrounding society, so too is it required to deal with ecology. This means that corporations should not only examine the interaction with their social environment but with their natural one as well. For all corporations depend on nature, either directly as a factor of production (e.g., petroleum for ExxonMobil, water for Danone Group’s Evian, leather for LVMH’s Louis Vuitton manufactories and grapes for its Moët & Chandon wineries), or indirectly to support operations (e.g., energy for Google’s servers, food for Nike’s cafeteria, and paper for Deutsche Bank’s customer service). This corporate dependency on natural resources, which contributes to their scarcity, leads to our first issue of ecological management ethics: environmental resource efficiency. While this issue asks what and how much a corporation may take from nature, our second issue asks how much pollution a corporation may give to it. As Malte Faber and Thomas Petersen note, the mechanism of joint production implies that producing intended goods can also lead to the production of bads.