11.6 Toward an Environmentally Conscious Future

We'll conclude this chapter by considering what a more environmentally conscious future might look like.

Many businesses are already moving toward greener production, testing, and maintenance methods. “Green” business practices are environmentally aware and aim to be sustainable; at the very least, they’re an improvement over what certain companies or industries have done previously. Stronger regulatory standards have made compliance mandatory and have improved the environmental outlook in certain limited respects.

But as we noted before, whether these changes will achieve enough is still an open question. We don’t yet know whether the environmental damage that human and business activities have caused is reversible, or otherwise fixable; we don’t know if the effects of human actions have already snowballed in a way that makes them uncontrollable. The best we can do is make a serious, long-term effort to prioritize the environment in business operations.

The trouble, of course, is that in order to prioritize the environment in business operations, we must actually prioritize the environment in business operations. That is, environmental considerations must sometimes take precedence over other concerns, including profit, so that we can make a meaningful difference. The philosophical question of whether corporations have responsibilities beyond those to their shareholders seems a quaint concern if we end up facing a future in which corporate actions have rendered the environment unlivable.

Large-scale government efforts are already underway to combat environmental changes. The Paris Agreement, a 2015 treaty about climate change adopted by 196 nations and groups, began to be enforced in late 2016. Unlike prior climate accords, the Paris Agreement is legally binding on the parties who signed it. It calls for “economic and social transformation, based on the best available science,” and each successive national contribution “is meant to reflect an increasingly higher degree of ambition compared to the previous version.”1

The US has gone back and forth in its participation in this Agreement. While it originally agreed to abide by it, President Donald Trump caused the US to abandon it in 2017, but President Joe Biden rejoined the Agreement in 2021. We can’t know for some time whether the US will now continue to participate, and if so, in what capacity, following the reelection of President Trump in 2024.

In any case, while legally binding agreements on countries are an ethical response to the dangers of environmental damage, the fact is that business leaders in many sectors will be crucial to future responses. In the end, each person is part of the environment, a node in a worldwide network of living organisms that inhabit a living planet. As such, it is the decisions of individual people that will determine the issue in the long run.

As we discussed in the case study on the Washington Duke Golf Club, however, the acceptance of individual responsibility for the environment should not cloud the issue: it is still the case that businesses and the ways they regulate or are regulated have the greatest impact on the environment. They therefore bear an ethical responsibility not only to their customers but to others as well to behave responsibly. Responsible behavior in some domains of business might not mean much, but in others it means a lot, and might require sweeping change.

Many authors have already written about how these sweeping changes are possible in profitable businesses. One classic source is the book Natural Capitalism, whose goal is to reform our thinking about how capitalism works in order to make room for environmental efforts. Another is Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make ThingsCradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, which offers a sustainable model for product design, mimicking natural processes and the way materials are re-used by nature. These ideas and many others are tools for conceiving business operations in new ways that better respect the environment—which is exactly what business ethics is supposed to get us to do.

For if we can’t make that practical application of our business ethical knowledge, then business ethics theory has no purpose. Ultimately the decision belongs to us, and to our organizations—to act or not to act.