Today every responsible person in business or elsewhere must be or become something of an ethicist or an environmentalist. Each time people will tend to act morally more readily under certain conditions rather than others, we recognize the importance of the conditions for moral behaviour. When the lights go out in a large city, when dark anonymity surrounds each person, morality may suffer. Modern companies recognize the importance of the moral conditions within which institutions, such as corporations and the state, among other things, the special powers they have, the temptations to which they may be subjected, and the competitive pressures under which politicians and transnational corporations operate.
A prime target of every socially responsible corporation is the idea of “corporate strategy.” Corporate strategy is a central part of modern business talk. Corporate strategy has become the wellspring of guidance about how to run a business through marketing, manufacturing, human resources, and financing activities. Such ethics will not be laden with the values of any single nation, society, or religion. It will, of necessity, be environmental ethics, but the environment embraced will be social as well as physical. Ethics are cultural and temporal; they adhere to the values of a particular culture, articulated and changed over time. This argument suggests the importance of international action to foster common moral conditions for international corporations. Rather than hold that there is little that can be done, the author suggests that each nation-state has its own moral responsibility to act along the lines suggested above to create conditions under which international corporations could be expected to act morally.
In recent years, the Triple Bottom Line approach becomes extremely important for the oil and chemical industries. These companies provide a reasonable starting point to look at individual companies. Both industries produce and sell products that can cause environmental damage, and both employ production processes that can create serious pollution and toxic waste problems. It is interesting to look at what the firms in these two industries say about themselves in their annual reports. Here again, there is contradictory evidence. Of the four major chemical producers surveyed, three highlighted environmental issues and achievements, while the fourth made almost no mention of the subject. Significant policies are beginning to be forged in areas of toxic wastes and the atmosphere’s ozone layer. There is, nevertheless, considerable resistance to ecological business practices in the area of acid rain. In many developing countries, the situation is far more ominous.
The moral problem of the environment is not merely a present problem. In fact, in most discussions, it is the nature of the supposed future catastrophe as well as our obligations to future generations that primarily frames the discourse. This is not to underestimate present problems. Rather it is to draw attention to the fact that moral discourse in this area is to a great extent based on estimates of future probabilities as well as on determining present facts and responsibilities. Empirical uncertainty regarding “what it is we are talking about” necessarily introduces a dynamic element into the moral analysis. Empirical reference points must be continually revised. With this caveat, it is nonetheless possible to compare the broad outlines of moral positions. In doing this, three other determinants come into play. With this retrieval of corporate strategy, critics create an account in which corporate strategists and stakeholders alike acknowledge that each person occupies a unique place in the world. That unique place is defined, in part, by each person’s accomplishments and the unique identity that follows from those accomplishments.
Business ethics is much more than an expression of taste, however strongly felt. Properly understood, business ethics is, in fact, about moral principles; indeed, it is the application of ethics too, or in, specifically, business situations and activities. This may initially seem mere wordplay–the term “ethics” is frequently used to refer to moral codes and the actions enjoined by them as well as to the study of either or both. Indeed, when dealing with received opinions, such common usages will be observed, both with respect to “ethics” and to “business ethics.” When strictly used, however, the term “ethics” refers properly to a subsection of philosophy that seeks to identify and clarify the presuppositions of human conduct having to do with good and evil. In work on business ethics, the grounds of ethical activity, like the existence of business, must be taken as given. Certain implications of the philosophical nature of ethics are, however, crucial to the question of universality. The most important is that as a purely theoretical discipline, ethics has no necessary connection to any existing system of religious belief, or any specific legal framework, or any particular moral code. As a result, the commonly cited variations of actual practice are irrelevant to the question of whether there are universal truths of business ethics–cultural diversity, even cultural relativism, does not and cannot justify ethical relativism.
In sum, companies should follow social responsibility and ethical principles in order to meet the needs of consumers as community members. Social responsibility is simply the application of general moral principles to specific business situations and activities. The function of ethics is to resolve or at least to clarify the moral issues which typically arise in commerce. Starting from an analysis of the nature and presuppositions of business, business ethics apply general moral principles in an attempt to identify what is right. What the universality of business social responsibility depends on is the status of those ethical principles–if they are universal, then so is business ethics. Those principles are necessarily universal–they are so by definition. That which is not universal may be a useful rule of thumb, or a practical guideline, or a summary of common practice, but cannot be a principle.