corporate responsibility and the environment

Corporate Responsibility andthe Environment

TIMOTHY S. YODER

In the movie A Civil Action, John Travolta portrays an attorneynamed Jan Schlichtmann who files suit against corporategiants W. R. Grace (a chemical company) and Beatrice Foods (a

food conglomerate which owned the local J. J. Riley tannery) forallegedly dumping and illegally disposing of harmful chemicals,particularly the carcinogen trichloroethylene (known as TCE), inthe grounds surrounding the town of Woburn, Massachusetts.1 Thesuit contends that the chemicals made their way into two of thetown’s wells (Wells G and H), thus contaminating the water. Resi-dents complained that the water smelled bad, had a rust color, cor-roded their pipes, and, ultimately and tragically, caused some eightcases of leukemia in the children of Woburn. W. R. Grace andBeatrice denied these charges and vigorously defended themselves.

One of the leukemia victims was a boy by the name of JimmyAnderson, who contracted leukemia in January 1972 and finallysuccumbed nine years later. During the years of Jimmy’s continualhospital visits and medical procedures and the cycles of remissionand return, his mother, Anne, met seven other Woburn familieswho each had a child stricken with leukemia. Convinced by thenumber of cases and by the clustering of them in an area of thetown that received its water from Wells G and H that the bad- smell-ing water was to blame, she made contact with Schlichtmann andorganized a meeting in the winter of 1982 for him and these familiesfor the purpose of bringing a civil suit against the two corporations.

© 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.

Business and Society Review 106:3 255–272

Timothy S. Yoder is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Marguette University inMuskego, Wisconsin.

I would like to thank Kevin Gibson and Pat Werhane for their assistance and encouragement withthis project.

keithbustos

Text Box

2001

A particularly poignant moment in the movie occurs during thismeeting, when Mrs. Anderson asserts: “We don’t want any money.Money is not the issue. I want someone to come to my house, knockon the door and say, ‘We’re responsible. We did this. We didn’tmean it, but we did it, and we’re sorry.’”

Mrs. Anderson’s agonized words raise the issue to be addressedin this essay, namely, the problem of corporate responsibility withspecial regard to environmental abuses and concerns. What seemsintuitively clear—that if the corporation polluted or damaged theenvironment and if those who depend on the environment areinjured, then the corporations are responsible and culpable—is,however, upon closer reflection, rather thorny. Who is it that shouldturn up at Mrs. Anderson’s door? Is it the board of directors who areat fault, or the stockholders of the corporations whose desire forprofit drives the illegal actions, or the men who dumped the chemi-cals, or the supervisors who told them to do so? Or is it the govern-ment for not passing strict enough laws or enforcing the ones thatexist? What about the manufacturers of the barrels that leakedor the town officials who kept the wells open despite repeatedcomplaints? The list is virtually endless, and each one of thesestakeholders potentially bears some kind of culpability for the envi-ronmental abuse and the resulting diseases. This article is anattempt to provide some light on the topic of corporate and collectiveresponsibility and the culpability that results from the neglectof those responsibilities. Before those ethical concerns can beaddressed, however, it is necessary to lay a foundation for environ-mental ethics. Therefore, I will proceed in the following way. The firstsection will be a brief defense of the inclusion of environmental con-cerns in ethical debates. The second section will explore the notionsof responsibility and culpability, and the third section will deal withtheir corporate application. Finally, I will conclude with some com-ments 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 ethicsscarcely seen as yet, but which will eventually break through

256 BUSINESS AND SOCIETY REVIEW

into the light and be the corollary and the complement tohuman ethics. . . . Doubtless it was first necessary to civilizeman in relation to his fellow man. . . . That task is alreadymuch advanced and makes progress daily. But it is also neces-sary to civilize humans in relation to nature. There, everythingneeds to be done.2

A stumbling block to Hugo’s vision, however, is whether or not flow-ers and animals and, indeed, nature in general, can be includedin ethical discourse.3 Traditionally understood, the main ethicaltheories are considerations of social ethics, that is, the relationsbetween people. Nature, prima facie, is not a person. It has no feel-ings 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 otherwords, if it has no responsibilities to act morally as an entity assuch, then why should it receive moral consideration as an end andnot simply as a means (something to be used instrumentally in ourethical actions toward other actors).

Among the recent attempts to overcome this difficulty, twoanswers have been presented. One is supplied by ChristopherStone, who argues that natural objects, like trees, have rights andthat the proper authorities ought to ensure that these rights areprotected.4 He reasons that the last several generations have seen abroadening 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. Thenatural progression, Stone argues, is to include trees and the otherobjects of the nonhuman environment as bearers of rights. A flaw inStone’s solution, however, is that he has not shown that naturalobjects have intentionality or cognition or any of the elementsof personhood that all other beings who have rights possess andthat are the premises upon which the possession of rights is dem-onstrated. It is, therefore, not clear why trees, which have nointentionality or cognition, should have rights.

A more satisfactory explanation is provided by Holmes Rolston,who dismisses the notion that nonhumans can have rights.5 Hisapproach is to highlight the values that are inherent in nature, bothin terms of their instrumentality and as ends to themselves. Thepreservation of these values is a duty that mankind assumes, thusmaking the environment as such the receptor of moral interaction.

TIMOTHY S. YODER 257

Since his thoughts on this topic defy summarization in a section asbrief as this one, I will simply reiterate a few of his points, whichwill, however, provide us enough of a basis from which to proceedas announced.

An important element in Rolston’s thought is that the environ-ment 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 andspecifically integrated that it produced projects: stars and comets,lakes and rivers, bacteria and living beings. Life in general, andhumanity in particular, are projects that are spun out of the envi-ronment. He asks:

What is an appropriate attitude toward such a projective sys-tem? Has it any value? any claim on human behavior? Ethicsbegins in interactions between persons, and at this scopenature is a resource. At first, it seems right to say that ourduties are to persons, and that dirt, water, air, minerals, rivers,landscapes are instrumental in such duty. But there comes apoint in environmental ethics when we ask about our sources,not just our resources. The natural environment is discoveredto be the womb in which we are generated.6

Rolston’s point is that while the environment is certainly a neces-sary condition for our life, its value is not exhausted as an instru-ment 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 fullyresponsible behavior is to seek an appreciative relationship to theparental environment, which is projecting all this display of value.”7

Two basic duties can be derived from the inherent worth of the envi-ronment: do not destroy or damage what is of intrinsic value,whether human art or natural, and do maintain the stability, integ-rity, and beauty of the ecosystem. Honoring these two duties wouldentail displaying respect for the environment as an end to itself.

Additional justification for the innate value of the environmentcan be provided from a theological point of view. King David of Israelmade the following claims about nature:

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim thework of his hands.Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they dis-play knowledge.There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard.


Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends ofthe world.8

The psalmist’s claim is that the voice of nature and the voice of Godare one. If one grants this identity, then the environment is deserv-ing of reflection and meditation (a topic not to be pursued in thisessay). A weaker implication, but one more relevant to the matterat hand, is that the environment is of incalculable worth anddemands preservation and protection.

A third argument for the innate value of nature can be made interms of aesthetics. Perhaps this point can be best served with oneof Rolston’s examples. In Mammoth Cave National Park in Ken-tucky, there are sections of the caves where rare formations of gyp-sum crystals called “angel hair” have been produced. Angel hair iscrystal strands so fine that the air movement produced by humanspassing by destroys them. Out of respect for this fragile beauty, thecaves with angel hair are closed, even if that means that the beautyis not observed or studied. Their aesthetic value does not exist inbeing seen by humans, but it exists in virtue of itself.9

It is, then, on this Rolstonian basis that I intend to develop mythoughts on corporate responsibility toward the environment. How-ever, it is necessary to proceed in stages, so before corporateresponsibility and the environment can be addressed, it is neces-sary to investigate corporate responsibility. And before the investi-gation of corporate responsibility can be commenced, it isimperative to inquire into the general notions of responsibility andculpability.

II. RESPONSIBILITY AND CULPABILITY

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


intentionality distinct from the intentionalities of the people associ-ated with the corporation.11 French’s position is challenged byManuel Velasquez, who argues that any actions that can be attrib-uted to a corporation must originate in the minds of individualsassociated with that corporation. Thus, to speak of a corporationdoing or saying is (for instance) to employ potentially misleadingshorthand for the responsible human agents.12 It seems to me, how-ever, that, important as this discussion is, it tends to obscure someother crucial aspects of responsibility. Specifically, it tends to col-lapse responsibility solely into causal responsibility to the neglectof moral responsibility. That is, finding responsibility becomes adescriptive exercise, instead of a prescriptive one. In order to correctthis error, it is necessary to carefully distinguish the various types ofresponsibility.

Velasquez begins this project, recognizing that responsible hasthree meanings: the character of a person, which is adjectival innature (a responsible individual), an obligation or duty, which isfuture-looking (a citizen is responsible to vote), or the consequencesthat are attributable to a person, which is past-oriented (to beresponsible to pay for an accident).13 Velasquez concentrates on thethird meaning, which he divides into three subgroups. First, there iscausal, which attributes an action and its consequences to a naturalagent (a storm caused damage). Second, there is liability, which sug-gests responsibility even if there is no direct causal relation, as inparents being responsible to pay for the damage caused by theirteenager. Lastly, there is responsibility that is intended, but notdirectly caused. Velasquez suggests the example of Hitler’s respon-sibility for the deaths of millions of Jews, because of his intentionalpolicies and beliefs, despite the fact that he personally did not killthem. Velasquez calls this last type moral responsibility.14

This analysis, it seems to me, is in error, and contributes to theconfusion of certain aspects of responsibility and the neglect of oth-ers. First, there is a neglect of concept of culpability, which, in fact,issues forth from responsibility, and so is distinct from it. If respon-sibility has to do with duties or obligations, then culpability is theblame-worthiness that results from the neglect of or failure to fulfillthose obligations. It is on the basis of culpability that punishment isenacted. What Velasquez calls “liability” is actually the culpabilitythat the parent bears for the activity of the minor child, despite thecommon practice of calling it responsibility. Culpability refers to the


negative consequences that follow from actions, particularly thoseactions that are a neglect of responsibility, which itself correspondsto the commission of an action, usually in regard to some duty orobligation. Some distinctions concerning responsibility will bedrawn in due course. One significant difference between culpabilityand responsibility is that culpability is transferable, while responsi-bility is not. In this example, the eight-year-old is responsible forbreaking the neighbor’s window, but is unable to pay for therepairs. Thus, the culpability (which carries with it the punish-ment, namely, the bill for repairs) passes to the parents, despite thefact that they did not break the window. They may have been negli-gent in their responsibility to supervise the child, but that is adifferent responsibility. Since the child could not properly bear thepunishment that resulted from the culpability, that is, to pay for thenew window, the culpability (and the resultant punishment) passesto the parents. Of course, this kind of scenario is played out in thebusiness world, when the corporation with deeper pockets than itsemployees or agents pays damages incurred by the culpability ofthose individuals. In the Woburn case, W. R. Grace ultimately paid$8 million to settle the case, which implies that the culpabilityof those individuals who allowed the chemicals into the groundpassed on to the corporation as a whole, which assumes that culpa-bility by paying the damages.

A second error occurs when Velasquez fails to completely andaccurately catalogue the various discernible types of responsibility,which, because of their occasional coincidence, demand carefulattention 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 anindividual intended an action and directly or indirectly brought itabout, or an action that she did not intend, but directly caused tooccur. Thus, causal responsibility covers two kinds of scenarios.One exists when a supervisor decides to have chemicals stored inbarrels and either places them there himself or orders a worker todo so.16 The second scenario occurs when the worker accidentallytips over the barrel, thus spilling the chemicals onto the ground.The intent to spill the chemicals was not there, but the state ofaffairs (chemicals on the ground) is directly caused by the worker.The culpability for the latter would presumably be less than if the


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 withregard to the law. It is future-oriented with regard to things that Imust do (pay my income taxes) or must not do (drive while intoxi-cated). When it is backward-looking, it is descriptive of activitiesthat I did or did not do and whether or not I may be found culpableunder the law for these activities and thus forced to make restitu-tion. Causal responsibility must be established if I am to be heldlegally responsible and culpable for something I did, like drunkdriving. Causal responsibility is not relevant for neglect of legalresponsibilities, 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 moralduties include things that ought to be done (honoring contracts orsaying “thank you” for birthday presents from grandma) and thingsthat ought not to be done (lying or littering). Since it is presented asan obligation, generally a moral responsibility is formulated as animperative with regard to the future (you ought to go to church),although an action for which one is causally responsible (spilling abarrel of chemicals) or legally responsible (drunk driving) can besaid to be a neglect of a moral responsibility (failure to be careful orto avoid drunkenness). Therefore, it is generally true that moralresponsibilities include causal and legal responsibilities.18 Moralresponsibility is more onerous than direct causal responsibility andlegal responsibility to determine, since it requires that there be anobligation or duty to be honored, which is a notoriously difficultthing to show.19 There cannot be moral responsibility unless it isclearly shown that there is in fact a duty or obligation, and then fur-ther, what it means to fulfill that duty. For instance, it seems a rea-sonable duty for a Christian to go to church, but what of an atheistor a Jew? Is the obligation of a handicapped Christian met bywatching a church service on TV or must she actually be in achurch? It is thus an important aspect of moral responsibility bothto clearly specify and defend the duty and then to clarify what mustor must not be done to honor that duty.

Role Responsibility is a species of moral responsibility, whichderives from a specific role that one plays in society. For instance, aparent bears special responsibilities to his or her children that theparent does not bear to any other members of society and that no


one else bears toward the children. Similarly, specific duties maybe attached to certain professional individuals. A doctor may befound culpable for not assisting an injured person, even if he is noton duty. A politician is not permitted to accept gifts which an ordi-nary citizen may accept, since the gift may influence a legislativedecision.20

A significant, but often overlooked aspect of moral and roleresponsibility is that it is not a finite quantity, but instead ratherelastic in nature. For instance, consider the parental responsibili-ties of a husband and wife. If the husband dies, the wife has soleresponsibility, but that does not imply that she has twice theresponsibility for the children that she had before. Rather, it meansonly that she exercises the responsibility alone. The responsibilitythat her husband had is not transferred, but ceases to exist. On theother hand, consider a couple that divorces, and then the husbandremarries. Now there are three potential guardians for the children,all of whom would exercise responsibilities. Thus, the number ofpeople who have parental kinds of duties toward the children isincreased. The point here is not to delve into the complicated legalissues in child custody, but simply to show that moral and roleresponsibility has a certain elasticity.

Thus far, it has been shown that responsibility comes in severalforms, which are not necessarily exclusive of each other, and thatresponsibility has an elastic quality to it. A final observation aboutthe nature of responsibility is that it is not absolute in terms ofdegree. In other words, two people that bear responsibility for thesame act may not be responsible and culpable to the same degree.The supervisor who orders two workers to dump toxic chemicals intothe sewer and the two workers—one who does it, thinking that he issimply obeying orders, and the other who does not help because hethinks it is wrong, but raises no verbal objection to the dumping—are all present during the dumping and arguably responsible for thesame act. This assertion follows analogously from the legal principlethat an accomplice is also responsible for the crimes of the principalcriminal. The supervisor bears indirect causal responsibility andculpability for misuse of his supervisor’s role (ordering another toillegally pollute the water). The workers are negligent in not contest-ing the illegal order, and the one who dumped the chemicals isdirectly responsible for the pollution, while the other is indirectlyresponsible. However, despite the shared responsibility for a single


state of affairs, it seems clear that each man bears different levels ofresponsibility and culpability for that state of affairs. The conten-tious process of exhaustively parsing out the various levels of rela-tive responsibility and culpability is a task that is best left for anotherproject. The relevant point here, however, is that the same state ofaffairs can involve different levels and types of responsibility and cul-pability. These reflections on the nature of responsibility and culpa-bility give us some tools for answering the questions raised at thebeginning of this article regarding the specific problem in Woburnand the general issue of corporate responsibility and culpability.

III. CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY AND CULPABILITY

My thesis is that corporate responsibility means that all the stake-holders bear some level of responsibility for the actions that areassociated with the corporation. In other words, the “corporate” incorporate responsibility refers to the “collective” or “universal”sense of the word and not necessarily to corporations as such, thusentailing far more than simply the employees of the corporation. Itincludes all the stakeholders, a term that is far more inclusive thanexclusive.21 The Woburn case illustrates this principle. The workersand site supervisors bear some level of causal responsibility, as hasalready been shown. The board of directors carry moral responsibil-ity and possibly indirect causal responsibility for fostering an atmo-sphere that allows or encourages this kind of criminal activity. Thestockholders, although one further step removed, are similarlyresponsible. It is important to note here that the moral responsibil-ity (and the resultant culpability) the directors and the stockholdersbear in this situation is most likely because of the neglect of theobligation to oversee or provide for overseers which will preventsuch criminal activities. The analogy here is to the parent who paidfor the broken window. Their responsibility is not for the brokenwindow as such, but for allowing the state of affairs (an unsuper-vised child) in which the window was broken. The directors and thestockholders are responsible and culpable for allowing a state ofaffairs to exist in which the making of profits or the expedience oftasks at hand is implicitly or explicitly deemed more important thanobeying chemical disposal laws or moral imperatives concerningpollution.


By extension, consumers of the goods produced by the corpora-tion are also indicted, possibly by their ignorance of the corpora-tion’s transgressions or their apathy to them. In some cases, theconsumer is responsible for demanding a product that greatlyincreases the potential for environmental abuse by the manufac-turers. If the J. J. Riley tannery produces water-resistant leatherjackets, because the consuming public demands it, and if the pro-duction of such jackets necessitates the use of TCE, then the con-suming public cannot simply point the finger at the corporation forspilling TCE in the ground. After all, it has to be disposed of in someway, and it is not clear how there can be any “proper” disposal of anenvironmentally damaging substance.

The responsibility that the consumers bear in this situation isderived from their role in society as the stakeholders that ultimatelywield the most power in affecting change in business practice, andalso from their moral responsibility to honor their duties to theenvironment with their purchases and with the corporations thatthey patronize. The reason for focusing attention on the individualstakeholders, and the consumers in particular, is that the corpora-tion is, from the point of view of the environmental ethics, only aninstrument. In this case, Velasquez, in opposing French, is right. Itis the individual stakeholders who make up or influence the corpo-ration who have the power to wield the corporation in such a waythat the innate value of the environment is respected. The corpora-tion does not act or change its actions unless the impetus is sup-plied by an individual or individuals. Consumers are especiallyimportant in this dynamic, since corporate employees are liable toexperience a conflict of interests: the profitability of the corporationversus the good of the environment. In these cases, it is necessarilythe consumer or the government that speaks up for the environ-ment. The corporation as such will not affect change in the name ofthe environment unless individual stakeholders acknowledge andhonor their responsibilities to the environment.

Consider the tragic oil spill in Alaskan water by the Exxon Valdezas an illustration of the indispensable role of the individual stake-holder and/or consumer. Following the Woburn model, it would notbe difficult to identify the various kinds of responsibilities neglectedand culpabilities incurred by the stakeholders, from Captain Hazel-wood to the individual sailors, and from the corporate leaders atExxon to those charged with the clean-up and many others. What is


often neglected is the quickness with which this catastrophe fadedfrom the national consciousness and the relatively short period oftime it took for Exxon’s stock to rebound to pre-spill levels, both ofwhich indicate that consumers and other individual stakeholdersdid not sufficiently uphold their responsibilities in light of the oilspill, 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 responsi-ble for the Valdez spill? My answer is twofold. First, I want to stressthat I am suggesting that all stakeholders bear different kindsand disparate levels of responsibility and culpability. Since respon-sibility is an elastic notion, the inclusion of many responsibility-bearers does not mitigate the responsibility of the most egregiousresponsibility-neglectors. Therefore, by saying that Exxon’s cus-tomers bear some level of role responsibility for the Valdez spilldoes not excuse Captain Hazelwood’s irresponsibility nor that ofthe Exxon officials who were slow to initiate the clean-up andreluctant to pay their fines. Nor am I claiming that the level ofresponsibility is the same. Although the development of a mecha-nism for ascertaining the levels of responsibility and culpability isnot a project for this article, it would seem clear that the amountof responsibility borne by the Exxon customers, along with theconsequent culpability, would be much less than that of CaptainHazelwood and the aforementioned Exxon officials. The second(and main) point, however, is that it is not permissible to respondto ecological disasters like Woburn and Valdez by castigating W. R.Grace and Exxon without inquiring what contribution did I maketo the situation, and what responsibility do I have to foster activitythat will better honor the value innate in nature. The corporationis, after all, only an instrument to be utilized by the stakeholders.

Relevant to the argument that consumers have role responsibil-ity within the arena of the corporations’ obligations to the environ-ment is an article entitled “What If Everyone Did That?” by ColinStrang.22 Strang imagines a conversation between a defaulter and amoralist over the former’s insistence that he can default on hisobligation to military service or to paying federal taxes on thegrounds that his contribution will not really be missed, since it is atrivial amount when compared to the whole. Setting aside issues ofthreshold levels, I will focus on the two principles that the moralistdevelops to reveal the error of the defaulter’s position.


The first truism is what the moralist calls the UniversalizationPrinciple, 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 society-wide obligations should be shared equally by all members of society,again taking into consideration any mitigating circumstances. WhileI am not prepared to accept these principles as is, I do think thatthey suggest two truths that are relevant to this project. First, thereare universal obligations to the environment, which is a contention Imade in the first section and will return to in the last. The secondpoint, which is more relevant to the immediate discussion, is thatthose obligations are to be shared among the members of society. Ithink that Strang is overly optimistic that obligations can be sharedequally. Perhaps all able-bodied citizens can serve an allotted timein the military, but no one would suggest that everyone should (orcould) pay the same amount of taxes. Even paying the same per-centage of taxes is not necessarily a desirable system of taxation. SoI dispute the notion that it is important to strive for a universalequating of all obligations. However, I do think that it is possible, byresorting to notions of moral responsibility and role responsibility,to develop the notion that all members of society have a sharedresponsibility for honoring the value innate in nature.

Shared responsibility means that all the stakeholders mustacknowledge and honor their individual and various responsibili-ties. Specifically, consumers, stockholders, and corporate employ-ees must see the corporation as a tool to be employed to fulfill theirindividual stakeholder responsibilities, especially toward theenvironment.

IV. CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITYAND THE ENVIRONMENT

At one point in the movie A Civil Action, as attorney Schlichtmannwas taking depositions from the local Grace employees in Woburn,he met Al Love, a Grace worker who had used TCE on the job andobserved improper disposal of the chemical. Love was also a neigh-bor of Anne Anderson. While they were not personally acquainted,he did know of her son’s leukemia and the allegations that shemade about the cause of the disease. Although resentful of the


allegations at first, the more Love thought about things, the morehe became convinced that not only was Grace responsible for inap-propriate actions with regard to the local environment and the peo-ple dependent on it, he felt a personal responsibility as a Graceemployee, even though he did not do any of the actual dumping.After several sleepless nights, Love decided one evening to visitAnne Anderson. He walked over, knocked on her door, and told herhow bad he felt about her son and how angry he had become at theway W. R. Grace was responding to the situation. They talked fortwo hours. Love was the only person from Grace or Beatrice thatcame to Anderson’s door and acknowledged any wrongdoing on thepart of the corporation and its employees.23

Needless to say, however, apologies, while important for humanrelations, do nothing for the environment. What is needed is adher-ence to the specific duties and obligations that will honor the innatevalue of nature and also protect its necessary instrumentality inhuman existence. Earlier I mentioned two basic duties growing outof Rolston’s environmental ethic which codify the sentiments of theprevious sentence: (1) Do not destroy or damage what is of intrinsicvalue, which, Rolston argues, includes nature; and (2) Do maintainthe stability, integrity, and beauty of the ecosystem.

An adequate investigation into the corporate implications ofthese basic duties would require a much larger project than thisarticle, and also the expertise of individuals from other disciplines.However, it is possible, from a philosophical and ethical perspec-tive, to propose a few issues that demand some attention, alongwith a few suggestions for practical application. This discussion willserve as both the conclusion of this article and an agenda for mov-ing the general project of corporate responsibility and the environ-ment further along.

When the nonhuman (that is, non-responsibility-bearing) en-vironment is considered, it is clear that it is made up of fourcomponents. There are (1) sentient animals, (2) sentient plants,(3) nonsentient minerals, and (4) the atmosphere. It is also evidentthat these components can be characterized as renewable andnonrenewable. Sentient animals and plants are of such a designthat they reproduce themselves, thus they are innately renewable.On the other hand, minerals and the atmosphere do not reproducethemselves. This is not to say that they are nonproducible, onlythat they do not reproduce themselves. Coal is producible, but not


from other coal in an analogous way to the manner in which newotters are produced from existing otters. If the nonhuman environ-ment can be characterized thus as renewable or nonrenewable,then it is possible to make some further application of the duties tonot 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 nolonger suited for the original purpose, as, for instance, the exhaustthat results from burning gasoline in an engine. While some kindsof waste are naturally reabsorbed back into the environment (applecores, ash from a fire), many kinds of waste are not: nuclear waste,chemicals, many plastics, and so on. The existence of this kind ofwaste is a failure to honor the two basic duties to the environment,and it falls to corporations that produce this waste and to the con-sumers that purchase their products to change our practices toeliminate the production of this kind of waste.

The following are some suggestions for practical principles whichindividuals and corporations may adopt that will respect and pro-tect the environment.

Renewables. It is impermissible to do that which would inhibit orlead to the extinction of sentient animals or plants. The innate abil-ity of the species to reproduce themselves and thus to continue toexist ought to be honored.

Nonrenewables. It is impermissible to use nonrenewables insuch a way that will lead to the exhaustion of this resource. To failto do so would be to disrespect the systemic integrity of the environ-ment and also to place undue dependence on finite resources.

It is also impermissible to recombine resources in such a waythat the waste that is produced is of such a quality that its formula-tion presents a danger to the environment and living entities,instead of continuing as a part of a systemic whole or a resource forfurther use and recombination.

These suggestions concerning renewable and nonrenewable re-sources and the production of waste are only the beginnings of anapplied ethic and public policy that would result from a consider-ation of the corporate responsibilities we all bear toward the envi-ronment. They are by no means exhaustive, but they do illustratethe kinds of principles that corporations need to follow in order tohonor their responsibilities toward the environment. Nevertheless,it is incumbent on all of us in our societal role as humans living in


the environment to honor the innate value of that environment.Although the role of corporations is not an insignificant one in mat-ters environmental, it is imperative that each individual acknowl-edge and act on the responsibilities that he or she has as well. Infact, the corporations cannot be held to any environmental respon-sibilities until the individual stakeholders uphold theirs. Neglect ofthese duties would be among the most serious ethical errors thatone 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 againstwhich human life is set and which is necessary for the existence of life. Ulti-mately, nature encompasses the entirety of the physical universe, includingall sentient beings, but this article takes the former definition as its primaryreferent for nature and the environment.

4. Christopher Stone, Should Trees Have Standing? Towards Legal

Rights for Natural Objects (Los Altos, CA: William Kaufmann, 1974). Ex-cerpted in People, Penguins and Plastic Trees, ed. Donald VanDeVeer andChristine 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 complemen-tary approach (though not identical) to the problem of environmental ethicsis “Zuckerman’s Dilemma: A Plea for Environmental Ethics” by Mark Sagoffin Hastings Center Report 21/5 (October 1991), 32–40. Cf. “Rights andResponsibilities 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.


10. French’s position is defended in “The Corporation as a Moral Per-

son,” 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 con-

tention, 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 re-

sponsibility, 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 mor-

ally 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 (caus-

ally) responsible, but there has been no transgression of a moral responsi-

bility. 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


keep the law. Is there something innately immoral about jaywalking if nocars are in sight? The issue is not clear-cut, but I will admit the possibilitythat this example is one of legal, but not moral, responsibility.

19. I am referring to the is-ought problem, which cannot be addressed inany 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 re-sponsibility or another, that is, that the duties and obligations for which weare responsible to honor arise from whatever roles we take on: parent,teacher, consumer, etc. I am inclined to think that this notion is true, al-though it is not necessary for the integrity of the article to assert it. Rather, itis simply necessary that there are both moral and role responsibilities.

21. This concern about the responsibility of all stakeholders recalls thedistinction that Mark Sagoff employs regarding our roles as consumers andcitizens in his “At the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima, or Why Political Ques-tions Are Not All Economic,” Arizona Law Review 23 (1981), 1283–98. Re-printed in VanDeVeer and Pierce, People, Penguins and Plastic Trees,227–37, esp. 228–30. Sagoff’s predominant concern in this and other writ-ings is that environmental policy be not decided on the basis of cost-benefitanalysis or willingness to pay, but rather on the basis of aesthetic, moral, orother inherent values in the environment. In order for this kind of policy tobe followed, it is necessary that stakeholders do not allow their consumerattitudes to overwhelm other civic responsibilities and duties. See alsoSagoff’s “Economic Theory and Environmental Law,” Michigan Law Review

(1981). Reprinted in Desjardins and McCall, Contemporary Issues in Busi-

ness Ethics, and The Economy of the Earth: Philosophy, Law and the Envi-

ronment (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.


corporate responsibility and the environment

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