Chapter Overview

Chapter nine attempts to provide a blueprint for how our thinking on business' responsibility for the environment ought to proceed. It notes, first of all, the wide range of values appealed to in defense of various environmental policy prescriptions, and suggests that these differences yield to an approach that reaches agreement on specific policy recommendations however they may be arrived at. The fact that not every environmental issue fits within the standard model of business ethics, that nonanthropocentic, anthropocentric, and ecocentrist theories raise new questions about, e.g., the moral standing of future generations, nonhuman animals, and ecological wholes is addressed. A salient point is made that ecocentrist theories in particular explain environmental values in nonmoral terms that have symbolic, historic, cultural, and aesthetic meanings.

The chapter next proposes four areas of concern from which environmental policies and, ultimately, goals can be derived and a rational consensus formed: wastes and pollution, use of natural resources, protection of environmentally sensitive areas and preservation of biodiversity. It then discusses business' responsibilities in supporting these goals, challenging, in terms of the market's failure to guarantee that important public goods are preserved and protected, the classical model's approach which proceeds on cost-benefit analysis lines and on the idea of producing overall utilitarian good by satisfying consumer preferences.

Mark Sagoff's case against using economic analysis as the dominant tool of environmental policymaking is analyzed and discussed in great detail. The chapter moves on to challenge the Mark Sagoff-Norman Bowie argument that concedes the ability of citizens to democratically establish environmental goals, but that absent laws or consumer demand, business has no particular environmental responsibility. The weaknesses of the circular flow model of business are exposed and the virtues of a new model expressed as "natural capitalism" that addresses the finite biosphere from which natural resources are derived and returned in the form of waste are touted. Under this model, managers have a responsibility to find ways to integrate former wastes back into the productive system in the form of biologically beneficial elements or, at least, to produce wastes no faster than the biosphere can absorb them. Finally, the chapter argues that the traditional manufacturing model that produces goods must yield to a new model of providing service.

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