Corporate Responsibility and the Environment

Citation preview

Business and Society Review

106:3 255–272

2001

Corporate Responsibility and the Environment TIMOTHY S. YODER

I

n the movie A Civil Action, John Travolta portrays an attorney named Jan Schlichtmann who files suit against corporate giants W. R. Grace (a chemical company) and Beatrice Foods (a food conglomerate which owned the local J. J. Riley tannery) for allegedly dumping and illegally disposing of harmful chemicals, particularly the carcinogen trichloroethylene (known as TCE), in the grounds surrounding the town of Woburn, Massachusetts.1 The suit contends that the chemicals made their way into two of the town’s wells (Wells G and H), thus contaminating the water. Residents complained that the water smelled bad, had a rust color, corroded their pipes, and, ultimately and tragically, caused some eight cases of leukemia in the children of Woburn. W. R. Grace and Beatrice denied these charges and vigorously defended themselves. One of the leukemia victims was a boy by the name of Jimmy Anderson, who contracted leukemia in January 1972 and finally succumbed nine years later. During the years of Jimmy’s continual hospital visits and medical procedures and the cycles of remission and return, his mother, Anne, met seven other Woburn families who each had a child stricken with leukemia. Convinced by the number of cases and by the clustering of them in an area of the town that received its water from Wells G and H that the bad- smelling water was to blame, she made contact with Schlichtmann and organized a meeting in the winter of 1982 for him and these families for the purpose of bringing a civil suit against the two corporations.

Timothy S. Yoder is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Marguette University in Muskego, Wisconsin. I would like to thank Kevin Gibson and Pat Werhane for their assistance and encouragement with this project. © 2001 Center for Business Ethics at Bentley College. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK.

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A particularly poignant moment in the movie occurs during this meeting, when Mrs. Anderson asserts: “We don’t want any money. Money is not the issue. I want someone to come to my house, knock on the door and say, ‘We’re responsible. We did this. We didn’t mean it, but we did it, and we’re sorry.’” Mrs. Anderson’s agonized words raise the issue to be addressed in this essay, namely, the problem of corporate responsibility with special regard to environmental abuses and concerns. What seems intuitively clear—that if the corporation polluted or damaged the environment and if those who depend on the environment are injured, then the corporations are responsible and culpable—is, however, upon closer reflection, rather thorny. Who is it that should turn up at Mrs. Anderson’s door? Is it the board of directors who are at fault, or the stockholders of the corporations whose desire for profit drives the illegal actions, or the men who dumped the chemicals, or the supervisors who told them to do so? Or is it the government for not passing strict enough laws or enforcing the ones that exist? What about the manufacturers of the barrels that leaked or the town officials who kept the wells open despite repeated complaints? The list is virtually endless, and each one of these stakeholders potentially bears some kind of culpability for the environmental abuse and the resulting diseases. This article is an attempt to provide some light on the topic of corporate and collective responsibility and the culpability that results from the neglect of those responsibilities. Before those ethical concerns can be addressed, however, it is necessary to lay a foundation for environmental ethics. Therefore, I will proceed in the following way. The first section will be a brief defense of the inclusion of environmental concerns in ethical debates. The second section will explore the notions of responsibility and culpability, and the third section will deal with their corporate application. Finally, I will conclude with some comments on corporate responsibility and environmental duties.

I. THE ENVIRONMENT AND ETHICS French novelist Victor Hugo has presciently written, In the relations of humans with the animals, with the flowers, with the objects of creation, there is a whole great ethics scarcely seen as yet, but which will eventually break through

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into the light and be the corollary and the complement to human ethics. . . . Doubtless it was first necessary to civilize man in relation to his fellow man. . . . That task is already much advanced and makes progress daily. But it is also necessary to civilize humans in relation to nature. There, everything needs to be done.2 A stumbling block to Hugo’s vision, however, is whether or not flowers and animals and, indeed, nature in general, can be included in ethical discourse.3 Traditionally understood, the main ethical theories are considerations of social ethics, that is, the relations between people. Nature, prima facie, is not a person. It has no feelings or desires, nor does it display intentionality or cognition. Therefore, the logical question is: If nature cannot be a moral actor, then on what grounds may it be said to be a moral object? In other words, if it has no responsibilities to act morally as an entity as such, then why should it receive moral consideration as an end and not simply as a means (something to be used instrumentally in our ethical actions toward other actors). Among the recent attempts to overcome this difficulty, two answers have been presented. One is supplied by Christopher Stone, who argues that natural objects, like trees, have rights and that the proper authorities ought to ensure that these rights are protected.4 He reasons that the last several generations have seen a broadening of those individuals to whom rights are granted, or, better, those individuals whose intrinsic rights are recognized: women, minorities, prisoners, the handicapped, and so forth. The natural progression, Stone argues, is to include trees and the other objects of the nonhuman environment as bearers of rights. A flaw in Stone’s solution, however, is that he has not shown that natural objects have intentionality or cognition or any of the elements of personhood that all other beings who have rights possess and that are the premises upon which the possession of rights is demonstrated. It is, therefore, not clear why trees, which have no intentionality or cognition, should have rights. A more satisfactory explanation is provided by Holmes Rolston, who dismisses the notion that nonhumans can have rights.5 His approach is to highlight the values that are inherent in nature, both in terms of their instrumentality and as ends to themselves. The preservation of these values is a duty that mankind assumes, thus making the environment as such the receptor of moral interaction.

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Since his thoughts on this topic defy summarization in a section as brief as this one, I will simply reiterate a few of his points, which will, however, provide us enough of a basis from which to proceed as announced. An important element in Rolston’s thought is that the environment is more than simply a collection of dirt, rocks, and trees. It is, in his words, a projective system, that is, a universe so tightly and specifically integrated that it produced projects: stars and comets, lakes and rivers, bacteria and living beings. Life in general, and humanity in particular, are projects that are spun out of the environment. He asks: What is an appropriate attitude toward such a projective system? Has it any value? any claim on human behavior? Ethics begins in interactions between persons, and at this scope nature is a resource. At first, it seems right to say that our duties are to persons, and that dirt, water, air, minerals, rivers, landscapes are instrumental in such duty. But there comes a point in environmental ethics when we ask about our sources, not just our resources. The natural environment is discovered to be the womb in which we are generated.6 Rolston’s point is that while the environment is certainly a necessary condition for our life, its value is not exhausted as an instrument for our existence. It exists as a valuable thing in its own right ( just like each person), in no small part, but not exclusively, because humanity is part of the environment. “The only fully responsible behavior is to seek an appreciative relationship to the parental environment, which is projecting all this display of value.”7 Two basic duties can be derived from the inherent worth of the environment: do not destroy or damage what is of intrinsic value, whether human art or natural, and do maintain the stability, integrity, and beauty of the ecosystem. Honoring these two duties would entail displaying respect for the environment as an end to itself. Additional justification for the innate value of the environment can be provided from a theological point of view. King David of Israel made the following claims about nature: The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard.

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Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.8 The psalmist’s claim is that the voice of nature and the voice of God are one. If one grants this identity, then the environment is deserving of reflection and meditation (a topic not to be pursued in this essay). A weaker implication, but one more relevant to the matter at hand, is that the environment is of incalculable worth and demands preservation and protection. A third argument for the innate value of nature can be made in terms of aesthetics. Perhaps this point can be best served with one of Rolston’s examples. In Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky, there are sections of the caves where rare formations of gypsum crystals called “angel hair” have been produced. Angel hair is crystal strands so fine that the air movement produced by humans passing by destroys them. Out of respect for this fragile beauty, the caves with angel hair are closed, even if that means that the beauty is not observed or studied. Their aesthetic value does not exist in being seen by humans, but it exists in virtue of itself.9 It is, then, on this Rolstonian basis that I intend to develop my thoughts on corporate responsibility toward the environment. However, it is necessary to proceed in stages, so before corporate responsibility and the environment can be addressed, it is necessary to investigate corporate responsibility. And before the investigation of corporate responsibility can be commenced, it is imperative to inquire into the general notions of responsibility and culpability.

II. RESPONSIBILITY AND CULPABILITY One of the most important current debates with regard to corporate responsibility is whether the corporation as such is a moral agent, or whether it is that some certain people within the corporation are the agents that bear responsibility. Peter French has famously defended the notion that corporations are indeed moral actors themselves, and thus can be moral agents which are morally responsible in the same way that people are.10 His argument for corporate personhood is based on the internal decision-making structure (the CID structure) of each corporation, which, since it is not necessarily reducible to a single individual, indicates that the corporation displays an

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intentionality distinct from the intentionalities of the people associated with the corporation.11 French’s position is challenged by Manuel Velasquez, who argues that any actions that can be attributed to a corporation must originate in the minds of individuals associated with that corporation. Thus, to speak of a corporation doing or saying is (for instance) to employ potentially misleading shorthand for the responsible human agents.12 It seems to me, however, that, important as this discussion is, it tends to obscure some other crucial aspects of responsibility. Specifically, it tends to collapse responsibility solely into causal responsibility to the neglect of moral responsibility. That is, finding responsibility becomes a descriptive exercise, instead of a prescriptive one. In order to correct this error, it is necessary to carefully distinguish the various types of responsibility. Velasquez begins this project, recognizing that responsible has three meanings: the character of a person, which is adjectival in nature (a responsible individual), an obligation or duty, which is future-looking (a citizen is responsible to vote), or the consequences that are attributable to a person, which is past-oriented (to be responsible to pay for an accident).13 Velasquez concentrates on the third meaning, which he divides into three subgroups. First, there is causal, which attributes an action and its consequences to a natural agent (a storm caused damage). Second, there is liability, which suggests responsibility even if there is no direct causal relation, as in parents being responsible to pay for the damage caused by their teenager. Lastly, there is responsibility that is intended, but not directly caused. Velasquez suggests the example of Hitler’s responsibility for the deaths of millions of Jews, because of his intentional policies and beliefs, despite the fact that he personally did not kill them. Velasquez calls this last type moral responsibility.14 This analysis, it seems to me, is in error, and contributes to the confusion of certain aspects of responsibility and the neglect of others. First, there is a neglect of concept of culpability, which, in fact, issues forth from responsibility, and so is distinct from it. If responsibility has to do with duties or obligations, then culpability is the blame-worthiness that results from the neglect of or failure to fulfill those obligations. It is on the basis of culpability that punishment is enacted. What Velasquez calls “liability” is actually the culpability that the parent bears for the activity of the minor child, despite the common practice of calling it responsibility. Culpability refers to the

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negative consequences that follow from actions, particularly those actions that are a neglect of responsibility, which itself corresponds to the commission of an action, usually in regard to some duty or obligation. Some distinctions concerning responsibility will be drawn in due course. One significant difference between culpability and responsibility is that culpability is transferable, while responsibility is not. In this example, the eight-year-old is responsible for breaking the neighbor’s window, but is unable to pay for the repairs. Thus, the culpability (which carries with it the punishment, namely, the bill for repairs) passes to the parents, despite the fact that they did not break the window. They may have been negligent in their responsibility to supervise the child, but that is a different responsibility. Since the child could not properly bear the punishment that resulted from the culpability, that is, to pay for the new window, the culpability (and the resultant punishment) passes to the parents. Of course, this kind of scenario is played out in the business world, when the corporation with deeper pockets than its employees or agents pays damages incurred by the culpability of those individuals. In the Woburn case, W. R. Grace ultimately paid $8 million to settle the case, which implies that the culpability of those individuals who allowed the chemicals into the ground passed on to the corporation as a whole, which assumes that culpability by paying the damages. A second error occurs when Velasquez fails to completely and accurately catalogue the various discernible types of responsibility, which, because of their occasional coincidence, demand careful attention to mitigate the slippery nature of the notion. It is crucial, then, to delineate these four types of responsibility: causal, legal, moral, and role.15 Causal Responsibility describes a state of affairs in which an individual intended an action and directly or indirectly brought it about, or an action that she did not intend, but directly caused to occur. Thus, causal responsibility covers two kinds of scenarios. One exists when a supervisor decides to have chemicals stored in barrels and either places them there himself or orders a worker to do so.16 The second scenario occurs when the worker accidentally tips over the barrel, thus spilling the chemicals onto the ground. The intent to spill the chemicals was not there, but the state of affairs (chemicals on the ground) is directly caused by the worker. The culpability for the latter would presumably be less than if the

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spill was intentional. Since this type of responsibility is descriptive, it is backward-looking with regard to time.17 Legal Responsibility refers to one’s duties and obligations with regard to the law. It is future-oriented with regard to things that I must do (pay my income taxes) or must not do (drive while intoxicated). When it is backward-looking, it is descriptive of activities that I did or did not do and whether or not I may be found culpable under the law for these activities and thus forced to make restitution. Causal responsibility must be established if I am to be held legally responsible and culpable for something I did, like drunk driving. Causal responsibility is not relevant for neglect of legal responsibilities, as in the failure to pay income tax. Moral Responsibility refers to a moral duty or obligation one has, including, but not limited to, legal responsibility. These moral duties include things that ought to be done (honoring contracts or saying “thank you” for birthday presents from grandma) and things that ought not to be done (lying or littering). Since it is presented as an obligation, generally a moral responsibility is formulated as an imperative with regard to the future (you ought to go to church), although an action for which one is causally responsible (spilling a barrel of chemicals) or legally responsible (drunk driving) can be said to be a neglect of a moral responsibility (failure to be careful or to avoid drunkenness). Therefore, it is generally true that moral responsibilities include causal and legal responsibilities.18 Moral responsibility is more onerous than direct causal responsibility and legal responsibility to determine, since it requires that there be an obligation or duty to be honored, which is a notoriously difficult thing to show.19 There cannot be moral responsibility unless it is clearly shown that there is in fact a duty or obligation, and then further, what it means to fulfill that duty. For instance, it seems a reasonable duty for a Christian to go to church, but what of an atheist or a Jew? Is the obligation of a handicapped Christian met by watching a church service on TV or must she actually be in a church? It is thus an important aspect of moral responsibility both to clearly specify and defend the duty and then to clarify what must or must not be done to honor that duty. Role Responsibility is a species of moral responsibility, which derives from a specific role that one plays in society. For instance, a parent bears special responsibilities to his or her children that the parent does not bear to any other members of society and that no

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one else bears toward the children. Similarly, specific duties may be attached to certain professional individuals. A doctor may be found culpable for not assisting an injured person, even if he is not on duty. A politician is not permitted to accept gifts which an ordinary citizen may accept, since the gift may influence a legislative decision.20 A significant, but often overlooked aspect of moral and role responsibility is that it is not a finite quantity, but instead rather elastic in nature. For instance, consider the parental responsibilities of a husband and wife. If the husband dies, the wife has sole responsibility, but that does not imply that she has twice the responsibility for the children that she had before. Rather, it means only that she exercises the responsibility alone. The responsibility that her husband had is not transferred, but ceases to exist. On the other hand, consider a couple that divorces, and then the husband remarries. Now there are three potential guardians for the children, all of whom would exercise responsibilities. Thus, the number of people who have parental kinds of duties toward the children is increased. The point here is not to delve into the complicated legal issues in child custody, but simply to show that moral and role responsibility has a certain elasticity. Thus far, it has been shown that responsibility comes in several forms, which are not necessarily exclusive of each other, and that responsibility has an elastic quality to it. A final observation about the nature of responsibility is that it is not absolute in terms of degree. In other words, two people that bear responsibility for the same act may not be responsible and culpable to the same degree. The supervisor who orders two workers to dump toxic chemicals into the sewer and the two workers—one who does it, thinking that he is simply obeying orders, and the other who does not help because he thinks it is wrong, but raises no verbal objection to the dumping— are all present during the dumping and arguably responsible for the same act. This assertion follows analogously from the legal principle that an accomplice is also responsible for the crimes of the principal criminal. The supervisor bears indirect causal responsibility and culpability for misuse of his supervisor’s role (ordering another to illegally pollute the water). The workers are negligent in not contesting the illegal order, and the one who dumped the chemicals is directly responsible for the pollution, while the other is indirectly responsible. However, despite the shared responsibility for a single

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state of affairs, it seems clear that each man bears different levels of responsibility and culpability for that state of affairs. The contentious process of exhaustively parsing out the various levels of relative responsibility and culpability is a task that is best left for another project. The relevant point here, however, is that the same state of affairs can involve different levels and types of responsibility and culpability. These reflections on the nature of responsibility and culpability give us some tools for answering the questions raised at the beginning of this article regarding the specific problem in Woburn and the general issue of corporate responsibility and culpability.

III. CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY AND CULPABILITY My thesis is that corporate responsibility means that all the stakeholders bear some level of responsibility for the actions that are associated with the corporation. In other words, the “corporate” in corporate responsibility refers to the “collective” or “universal” sense of the word and not necessarily to corporations as such, thus entailing far more than simply the employees of the corporation. It includes all the stakeholders, a term that is far more inclusive than exclusive.21 The Woburn case illustrates this principle. The workers and site supervisors bear some level of causal responsibility, as has already been shown. The board of directors carry moral responsibility and possibly indirect causal responsibility for fostering an atmosphere that allows or encourages this kind of criminal activity. The stockholders, although one further step removed, are similarly responsible. It is important to note here that the moral responsibility (and the resultant culpability) the directors and the stockholders bear in this situation is most likely because of the neglect of the obligation to oversee or provide for overseers which will prevent such criminal activities. The analogy here is to the parent who paid for the broken window. Their responsibility is not for the broken window as such, but for allowing the state of affairs (an unsupervised child) in which the window was broken. The directors and the stockholders are responsible and culpable for allowing a state of affairs to exist in which the making of profits or the expedience of tasks at hand is implicitly or explicitly deemed more important than obeying chemical disposal laws or moral imperatives concerning pollution.

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By extension, consumers of the goods produced by the corporation are also indicted, possibly by their ignorance of the corporation’s transgressions or their apathy to them. In some cases, the consumer is responsible for demanding a product that greatly increases the potential for environmental abuse by the manufacturers. If the J. J. Riley tannery produces water-resistant leather jackets, because the consuming public demands it, and if the production of such jackets necessitates the use of TCE, then the consuming public cannot simply point the finger at the corporation for spilling TCE in the ground. After all, it has to be disposed of in some way, and it is not clear how there can be any “proper” disposal of an environmentally damaging substance. The responsibility that the consumers bear in this situation is derived from their role in society as the stakeholders that ultimately wield the most power in affecting change in business practice, and also from their moral responsibility to honor their duties to the environment with their purchases and with the corporations that they patronize. The reason for focusing attention on the individual stakeholders, and the consumers in particular, is that the corporation is, from the point of view of the environmental ethics, only an instrument. In this case, Velasquez, in opposing French, is right. It is the individual stakeholders who make up or influence the corporation who have the power to wield the corporation in such a way that the innate value of the environment is respected. The corporation does not act or change its actions unless the impetus is supplied by an individual or individuals. Consumers are especially important in this dynamic, since corporate employees are liable to experience a conflict of interests: the profitability of the corporation versus the good of the environment. In these cases, it is necessarily the consumer or the government that speaks up for the environment. The corporation as such will not affect change in the name of the environment unless individual stakeholders acknowledge and honor their responsibilities to the environment. Consider the tragic oil spill in Alaskan water by the Exxon Valdez as an illustration of the indispensable role of the individual stakeholder and/or consumer. Following the Woburn model, it would not be difficult to identify the various kinds of responsibilities neglected and culpabilities incurred by the stakeholders, from Captain Hazelwood to the individual sailors, and from the corporate leaders at Exxon to those charged with the clean-up and many others. What is

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often neglected is the quickness with which this catastrophe faded from the national consciousness and the relatively short period of time it took for Exxon’s stock to rebound to pre-spill levels, both of which indicate that consumers and other individual stakeholders did not sufficiently uphold their responsibilities in light of the oil spill, since Exxon as a corporation did not change. Someone may object and say that I am blaming the wrong party. How can all of us who buy gasoline and oil from Exxon be responsible for the Valdez spill? My answer is twofold. First, I want to stress that I am suggesting that all stakeholders bear different kinds and disparate levels of responsibility and culpability. Since responsibility is an elastic notion, the inclusion of many responsibilitybearers does not mitigate the responsibility of the most egregious responsibility-neglectors. Therefore, by saying that Exxon’s customers bear some level of role responsibility for the Valdez spill does not excuse Captain Hazelwood’s irresponsibility nor that of the Exxon officials who were slow to initiate the clean-up and reluctant to pay their fines. Nor am I claiming that the level of responsibility is the same. Although the development of a mechanism for ascertaining the levels of responsibility and culpability is not a project for this article, it would seem clear that the amount of responsibility borne by the Exxon customers, along with the consequent culpability, would be much less than that of Captain Hazelwood and the aforementioned Exxon officials. The second (and main) point, however, is that it is not permissible to respond to ecological disasters like Woburn and Valdez by castigating W. R. Grace and Exxon without inquiring what contribution did I make to the situation, and what responsibility do I have to foster activity that will better honor the value innate in nature. The corporation is, after all, only an instrument to be utilized by the stakeholders. Relevant to the argument that consumers have role responsibility within the arena of the corporations’ obligations to the environment is an article entitled “What If Everyone Did That?” by Colin Strang.22 Strang imagines a conversation between a defaulter and a moralist over the former’s insistence that he can default on his obligation to military service or to paying federal taxes on the grounds that his contribution will not really be missed, since it is a trivial amount when compared to the whole. Setting aside issues of threshold levels, I will focus on the two principles that the moralist develops to reveal the error of the defaulter’s position.

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The first truism is what the moralist calls the Universalization Principle, which states that if a thing is obligatory for one person, then, barring special circumstances, it is obligatory for all people. The second one, called the Fairness Principle, suggests that societywide obligations should be shared equally by all members of society, again taking into consideration any mitigating circumstances. While I am not prepared to accept these principles as is, I do think that they suggest two truths that are relevant to this project. First, there are universal obligations to the environment, which is a contention I made in the first section and will return to in the last. The second point, which is more relevant to the immediate discussion, is that those obligations are to be shared among the members of society. I think that Strang is overly optimistic that obligations can be shared equally. Perhaps all able-bodied citizens can serve an allotted time in the military, but no one would suggest that everyone should (or could) pay the same amount of taxes. Even paying the same percentage of taxes is not necessarily a desirable system of taxation. So I dispute the notion that it is important to strive for a universal equating of all obligations. However, I do think that it is possible, by resorting to notions of moral responsibility and role responsibility, to develop the notion that all members of society have a shared responsibility for honoring the value innate in nature. Shared responsibility means that all the stakeholders must acknowledge and honor their individual and various responsibilities. Specifically, consumers, stockholders, and corporate employees must see the corporation as a tool to be employed to fulfill their individual stakeholder responsibilities, especially toward the environment.

IV. CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY AND THE ENVIRONMENT At one point in the movie A Civil Action, as attorney Schlichtmann was taking depositions from the local Grace employees in Woburn, he met Al Love, a Grace worker who had used TCE on the job and observed improper disposal of the chemical. Love was also a neighbor of Anne Anderson. While they were not personally acquainted, he did know of her son’s leukemia and the allegations that she made about the cause of the disease. Although resentful of the

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allegations at first, the more Love thought about things, the more he became convinced that not only was Grace responsible for inappropriate actions with regard to the local environment and the people dependent on it, he felt a personal responsibility as a Grace employee, even though he did not do any of the actual dumping. After several sleepless nights, Love decided one evening to visit Anne Anderson. He walked over, knocked on her door, and told her how bad he felt about her son and how angry he had become at the way W. R. Grace was responding to the situation. They talked for two hours. Love was the only person from Grace or Beatrice that came to Anderson’s door and acknowledged any wrongdoing on the part of the corporation and its employees.23 Needless to say, however, apologies, while important for human relations, do nothing for the environment. What is needed is adherence to the specific duties and obligations that will honor the innate value of nature and also protect its necessary instrumentality in human existence. Earlier I mentioned two basic duties growing out of Rolston’s environmental ethic which codify the sentiments of the previous sentence: (1) Do not destroy or damage what is of intrinsic value, which, Rolston argues, includes nature; and (2) Do maintain the stability, integrity, and beauty of the ecosystem. An adequate investigation into the corporate implications of these basic duties would require a much larger project than this article, and also the expertise of individuals from other disciplines. However, it is possible, from a philosophical and ethical perspective, to propose a few issues that demand some attention, along with a few suggestions for practical application. This discussion will serve as both the conclusion of this article and an agenda for moving the general project of corporate responsibility and the environment further along. When the nonhuman (that is, non-responsibility-bearing) environment is considered, it is clear that it is made up of four components. There are (1) sentient animals, (2) sentient plants, (3) nonsentient minerals, and (4) the atmosphere. It is also evident that these components can be characterized as renewable and nonrenewable. Sentient animals and plants are of such a design that they reproduce themselves, thus they are innately renewable. On the other hand, minerals and the atmosphere do not reproduce themselves. This is not to say that they are nonproducible, only that they do not reproduce themselves. Coal is producible, but not

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from other coal in an analogous way to the manner in which new otters are produced from existing otters. If the nonhuman environment can be characterized thus as renewable or nonrenewable, then it is possible to make some further application of the duties to not damage or destroy, but rather to maintain, the environment. An additional issue along these lines is the notion of waste, which results from the recombination of materials into things no longer suited for the original purpose, as, for instance, the exhaust that results from burning gasoline in an engine. While some kinds of waste are naturally reabsorbed back into the environment (apple cores, ash from a fire), many kinds of waste are not: nuclear waste, chemicals, many plastics, and so on. The existence of this kind of waste is a failure to honor the two basic duties to the environment, and it falls to corporations that produce this waste and to the consumers that purchase their products to change our practices to eliminate the production of this kind of waste. The following are some suggestions for practical principles which individuals and corporations may adopt that will respect and protect the environment. Renewables. It is impermissible to do that which would inhibit or lead to the extinction of sentient animals or plants. The innate ability of the species to reproduce themselves and thus to continue to exist ought to be honored. Nonrenewables. It is impermissible to use nonrenewables in such a way that will lead to the exhaustion of this resource. To fail to do so would be to disrespect the systemic integrity of the environment and also to place undue dependence on finite resources. It is also impermissible to recombine resources in such a way that the waste that is produced is of such a quality that its formulation presents a danger to the environment and living entities, instead of continuing as a part of a systemic whole or a resource for further use and recombination. These suggestions concerning renewable and nonrenewable resources and the production of waste are only the beginnings of an applied ethic and public policy that would result from a consideration of the corporate responsibilities we all bear toward the environment. They are by no means exhaustive, but they do illustrate the kinds of principles that corporations need to follow in order to honor their responsibilities toward the environment. Nevertheless, it is incumbent on all of us in our societal role as humans living in

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the environment to honor the innate value of that environment. Although the role of corporations is not an insignificant one in matters environmental, it is imperative that each individual acknowledge and act on the responsibilities that he or she has as well. In fact, the corporations cannot be held to any environmental responsibilities until the individual stakeholders uphold theirs. Neglect of these duties would be among the most serious ethical errors that one could make.

NOTES 1. The movie is based on the account of the actual event, also called A Civil Action, written by Jonathan Harr (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). 2. Cited by Holmes Rolston on the face page of Environmental Ethics, the quotation is from En Voyage, Alpes et Pyrénées (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1890), 180–81. 3. By nature or the environment I mean the nonhuman context against which human life is set and which is necessary for the existence of life. Ultimately, nature encompasses the entirety of the physical universe, including all sentient beings, but this article takes the former definition as its primary referent for nature and the environment. 4. Christopher Stone, Should Trees Have Standing? Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects (Los Altos, CA: William Kaufmann, 1974). Excerpted in People, Penguins and Plastic Trees, ed. Donald VanDeVeer and Christine Pierce (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1986), 83–96. 5. Holmes Rolston, Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988). A complementary approach (though not identical) to the problem of environmental ethics is “Zuckerman’s Dilemma: A Plea for Environmental Ethics” by Mark Sagoff in Hastings Center Report 21/5 (October 1991), 32–40. Cf. “Rights and Responsibilities on the Home Planet,” Zygon 28/4 (December 1993), 425– 39, esp. 429–30. 6. Rolston, Environmental Ethics,197–98. 7. Ibid., 198. Rolston develops an interesting and intricate model for the value of the environment based on intrinsic, aesthetic, and systemic values, which far exceeds the needs of this article (see 216 ff.). 8. Psalms 19:1–4. 9. Rolston, Environmental Ethics, 199.

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10. French’s position is defended in “The Corporation as a Moral Person,” American Philosophical Quarterly 16/3 (July 1979), 297–317; also in Corporate Ethics (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace, 1995) (see esp. 10–18). 11. On this CID Structure, cf. French, Corporate Ethics, 20 ff. 12. Manuel Velasquez, “Why Corporations Are Not Morally Responsible for Anything They Do,” Business and Professional Ethics Journal 2/3 (spring 1983). Reprinted in Contemporary Issues in Business Ethics, 2nd ed., ed. Joseph Desjardins and John McCall (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1990), 114–25. On this debate, I favor Velasquez, since every action that can be predicated of a corporation (except incorporation and merging, which is simply incorporation of a higher order) can be predicated of a person (e.g., hiring, firing, selling, going bankrupt, etc.). I can think of no activity that is the exclusive domain of a corporation, except the act of incorporation. 13. Velasquez, in Contemporary Issues in Business Ethics, 114. 14. Ibid., 115. 15. My analysis of these four types of responsibility was aided by Martha Klein’s entry on Responsibility in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ed. Ted Honderich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 771–72. 16. The indirect type of causal responsibility is disputed by some (like Velasquez) who hold that causal responsibility can only be direct. The contention, though real, is, for the most part, a matter of semantics, since this type of responsibility certainly exists, regardless of the name that it is given. 17. Though Velasquez claims to be addressing the issue of moral responsibility, his dispute with French is dominated by notions of causal (or descriptive) responsibility. A similar criticism is made by Kevin Gibson in his article “Fictious Persons and Real Responsibilities,” Journal of Business Ethics 14 (1995), 761–67, where he interprets the Velasquez/French debate as revolving around intent and criminal liability, which is to say, it focuses on descriptive responsibility. Gibson’s suggestion is to employ a tort model, which enables one to introduce neglect of duty, which can never be causal responsibility. 18. There are exceptions to this general statement. Unintentional causal acts do not necessarily imply that one is morally responsible (and thus morally culpable) for the unintentional act. Dropping a pencil does not mean that I have violated a duty with regard to pencils. It simply means that the state of affairs in which the pencil is on the floor is one for which I am (causally) responsible, but there has been no transgression of a moral responsibility. It may also be argued that not all legal responsibilities imply a moral responsibility that is separate from, and in addition to, my obligation to

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keep the law. Is there something innately immoral about jaywalking if no cars are in sight? The issue is not clear-cut, but I will admit the possibility that this example is one of legal, but not moral, responsibility. 19. I am referring to the is-ought problem, which cannot be addressed in any manner here. I am simply assuming that oughts can be derived. 20. It may be argued that all moral responsibility is one kind of role responsibility or another, that is, that the duties and obligations for which we are responsible to honor arise from whatever roles we take on: parent, teacher, consumer, etc. I am inclined to think that this notion is true, although it is not necessary for the integrity of the article to assert it. Rather, it is simply necessary that there are both moral and role responsibilities. 21. This concern about the responsibility of all stakeholders recalls the distinction that Mark Sagoff employs regarding our roles as consumers and citizens in his “At the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima, or Why Political Questions Are Not All Economic,” Arizona Law Review 23 (1981), 1283–98. Reprinted in VanDeVeer and Pierce, People, Penguins and Plastic Trees, 227–37, esp. 228–30. Sagoff’s predominant concern in this and other writings is that environmental policy be not decided on the basis of cost-benefit analysis or willingness to pay, but rather on the basis of aesthetic, moral, or other inherent values in the environment. In order for this kind of policy to be followed, it is necessary that stakeholders do not allow their consumer attitudes to overwhelm other civic responsibilities and duties. See also Sagoff’s “Economic Theory and Environmental Law,” Michigan Law Review (1981). Reprinted in Desjardins and McCall, Contemporary Issues in Business Ethics, and The Economy of the Earth: Philosophy, Law and the Environment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 22. Colin Strang, “What If Everyone Did That?”, The Durham University Journal 53/1 (December 1960), 5–10. 23. Harr, A Civil Action, 160–68.