Morality 7: Sustainability and the Natural Environment

Abstract

At stage 7, the ethical rights of stage 6 are extended to issues that appear to be totally useless to HRM because they are located beyond humanity.⁶⁷⁷ Human rights are applied to a wider holistic context rather than being restricted to humans alone. Ethical awareness embraces forms of life such as animals and ecological systems regardless of their social and corporate utility.⁶⁷⁸ Animal ethics, for example, sets forth principles for the ethical treatment of animals. The application of these principles contradict HRM rather indirectly as they are seen as an HR support function of the corporate need to turn animals into values by exploiting, misusing, abusing, and eventually killing them. HRM manages those who commit these inhumane acts against animals in Tayloristic and Fordist factory farming and industrial laboratories by applying performance management and KPIs.⁶⁷⁹ In the deceptiveness of Managerialism’s language this is called ‘utilising nature’.⁶⁸⁰