11.4 Sustainablity

In response to environmental concerns like those we've been discussing, many responses taken by businesses acrossin many industries have come to be summarized under a single term: sustainability. In this section we’ll discuss the ethics of sustainability and the viability of the idea for long-term environmental protection.

To begin, we all have a basic notion of what’s involved in “sustainability.” But can we define the idea more precisely? To sustain something is to maintain it, to preserve it, or to support its ongoing growth and development. All of those ideas are involved in sustainability for the environment from a business perspective—the point is to care for the environment, to maintain and preserve it, so that it remains able to support human and animal life. Many of the environmental issues we’ve been discussing in this chapter have the potential for catastrophic damage to life on scales far beyond even the BP oil spill or the Bhopal chemical disaster. Any legitimate conception of sustainability will involve both taking care of the environment in such a way that we make such events less likely to happen, and making these events less damaging when they do occur.

Another dimension to sustainability is the sustainability of resources. If we use more materials than we are able to produce, then at some point we’re going to run out. Sustainability for resources is a matter of changing production processes to use fewer resources or to produce more efficiently so that they deplete more slowly, or start to gain them back. Other routes to sustainability for resources include longer-lasting products, which reduces future demand; better recycling and reuse of current or obsolete materials; and discovering new materials that can better serve current needs than what we use right now.

A third dimension to sustainability is the sustainability of communities. Here we are not referring to the natural environment; this part of sustainability concerns taking care of human communities in order to preserve and sustain them over time. Businesses have a great impact on this project, both in positive and negative ways: a brand-new business in an area produces jobs, which means that individuals and families will have new ways to support themselves and lead fulfilling lives; on the other hand, cutting jobs, cutting benefits, or causing specific environmental harms to specific places are all actions that make the survival of human communities less likely. Of course, sustainability in this sense can’t mean that it’s unethical to fire employees, or to close a manufacturing facility; we’re always going to have to balance community preservation with the realities of business operations. But businesses can be more mindful of how those operations contribute to communities over time, and take community interests into account, in ways we have seen throughout this book.

Putting these dimensions of sustainability together, we can offer the following definition: sustainability The process of taking into account the needs of the environment, resources, and human communities, in order to act to preserve and enhance them across time. is the process of taking into account the needs of the environment, resources, and human communities, in order to act to preserve and enhance them across time.

Understood in this sense, sustainability has both a business side and an ethical side. The business side consists of the actual operational decisions that go into making a company one that can take sustainable actions or make sustainable decisions; we won’t talk more about this side in this course. We can say more about the ethical side, though.

Do businesses have an ethical responsibility to prioritize sustainability? There are several ways we can argue that they do.

First, there is an argument of general responsibility. This argument posits that businesses are the ones who most interfere with the environment, and that they are therefore responsible in a general sense for managing that interference and for minimizing its overall impact. In the same way that a person has a responsibility to clean up after themselves when using the microwave at the office kitchen, a business also has a responsibility to “clean up after itself,” or to act in such a way as to reduce its environmental impact and minimize that impact if possible.

A second argument in favor of a responsibility for sustainability is an argument from society. This argument is that businesses occupy a certain role in the society where they operate; this role gives them a measure of social responsibility that goes beyond their corporate obligations to shareholders, and this social responsibility exists because the business could not exist without the relationships of that society. It owes an ethical duty back to society that is different from the duties that individual people owe other people, because businesses are different from individual people. Given its impact on the environment, sustainability may be a part of this ethical duty.

A third argument in favor of responsibility for sustainability is an argument from survival. This one is both simpler and more drastic than the first two, and it is that businesses ought to act sustainably because if they don’t, we’re all going to die. Putting the argument this way is probably a bit too blunt, but at some point life and death will be the stakes for more and more people. To keep people from dying, then, businesses have a responsibility to act sustainably.

While we haven’t fleshed out any of these arguments in great detail, they’re a good basis for starting to make a case in favor of sustainability. The key is to make an ethical case for sustainability, and not just a business one. It may turn out, for example, that it makes more economic sense for a business to pursue sustainability; this is good, and would produce good results. The problem with sustainability for economic reasons is that, once it makes better economic sense to do the opposite, that option will seem preferable unless we have strong ethical reasons to think otherwise. These three arguments explore a few ways to ground duties toward sustainability in ethical reasons, and not just in profit.

What other arguments can you come up with? What responsibility do businesses have to take sustainable action? What role should government regulation play in requiring this action?

One way of thinking about ethical duties for sustainability is in terms of what John Elkington, an English management consultant and business author, calls the “triple bottom line.” Normally we think of a business’s “bottom line” as its profit, and we call it the “bottom line” both because the profit is the last line on the spreadsheet after deducting all costs and expenses, and because, in the end, it seems to be all that matters for a business; nothing is more fundamental than profit to sustain a business.

Elkington’s idea of the triple bottom line acknowledges the importance of profit, but suggests that we add two other “bottom lines” to the original one. The two additional bottom lines are a social bottom line, referring to how a business contributes to a society and to its various communities; and an environmental bottom line, referring to how a business contributes to the health of the environment, both locally and globally.

The triple bottom line suggests that the success of a business is to be measured not just in terms of whether it generates profit, but also in terms of whether and how it succeeds with the other two bottom lines. A company that reaps massive profits while wiping out entire species, for example, would be successful with one line but not another. The ideal would be a concerted effort toward success with all three bottom lines, and indeed our concept of sustainability includes elements of all three. We’ve defined sustainability in a way that takes into account the additional bottom lines of society and environment.

Elkington’s idea offers us a framework for thinking about the ethical duties involved in sustainability. And it’s become popular as well; it might even be all that some businesspeople know about sustainability.

That’s good, but for Elkington it isn’t enough. After introducing the idea of the triple bottom line to the business world, he began working with firms to implement new processes that would help with the other two bottom lines. But over time, Elkington noticed that people were not thinking big enough—they saw the three bottom lines as competing with each other, and therefore requiring concessions to be made in one area in order to succeed in another.

This, however, was not the intent of the triple bottom line; as Elkington put it in 2018, “the TBL [triple bottom line] wasn’t designed to be just an accounting tool. It was supposed to provoke deeper thinking about capitalism and its future, but many early adopters understood the concept as a balancing act, adopting a trade-off mentality.”1

Here Elkington is calling attention to the fact that, for the purposes of sustainability, profit-minded tradeoffs are not enough. This attitude is similar to the one we mentioned above, that promotes sustainability for economic reasons. As Elkington realizes, we cannot meet the ethical challenges of sustainability and the environment with an approach based in generating profit; the incentives for doing harm in races to the bottom or collective action problems are simply too great. Rather, we must realize, appreciate, and center the ethical duties behind sustainability. If we can’t, then all we’ve really done is abandoned care of the environment to the vagaries of the invisible hand.

After this discussion, you may wonder whether the triple bottom line is even possible. As Milton Friedman argued in chapter 4, the responsibility that businesses have to make money seems so overarching that it might be difficult to conceive of doing anything different; this mindset accords with what Elkington noticed, as “the TBL concept has been captured and diluted by accountants and reporting consultants. Thousands of TBL reports are now produced annually, though it is far from clear that the resulting data are being aggregated and analyzed in ways that genuinely help decision-takers and policy-makers to track, understand, and manage the systemic effects of human activity.”2

But we need not be bound by this thinking. Whether the triple bottom line is possible is not set in stone by the laws of the universe nor by the declarations of economists or consultants. Its fate is up to us, both as individuals and as the owners and operators of businesses. We can choose to make sustainability a meaningful goal, or we can boil it down to reports that we post on our website and tell the press about in canned marketing releases. The choice is ours, and so will be the consequences.