Although business ethics is not my area of expertise in ethics, it
seems that in recent years, the various problems of this formula for
business responsibility – perhaps especially the potential brake on the
drive for maximising profits that it represents – have led many in the
business community to abandon it, and to retreat to the notion that
business’s only primary responsibility is to its stockholders or owners.
In other words, although it is still widely recognised that at least these
three categories of primary stakeholders are related in a variety of
ways to business ethics, there is something of a consensus, at least in
the United States, that the primary stakeholder – the owners – will
(and should) receive primary attention. This is to say that the notion
of business being about ‘the bottom line’ is not widely questioned, and
it is presumed that attending to the ‘bottom line’ is the way in which
business contributes to customers and to the wider society.^1
In this way the drive for profits remains the major, and practically
the sole, responsibility that businesses recognise as theirs. Everything
else – all moral responsibilities, beyond the very narrow rules of busi-
ness ethics, and also concerns like the quality of the products, the way
the work force is treated, wages, etc. – is sacrificed to this goal. And
of course, top managers are theoretically remunerated accordingly,
although many studies show that at least in the United States currently,
salaries of top management have actually little to do with performance.^2
This unbridled drive for profit clearly leads many businesses into
ways of thinking and acting that are less than morally responsible,
even though they very well may be run by people who are highly
morally responsible in their individual lives. While many in the cor-
porate world focus on the primary responsibility for business, which
as they define it is making profits, there are those in the business
world who continue to insist that business ethics is far more complex
than this, especially in an age where corporations are primary global
actors, where destruction of the environment is accelerating, where
the gap between rich and poor within and between countries is grow-
ing, and so forth.
- The Price of the Environment
In the last several decades, environmentalists and some economists
have carried out empirical and theoretical studies on the many ques-
tions posed by the intersection of big businesses and the natural world.
Together they point at what often seems to be fundamental problems
in the way business is taught to think about the natural world, in rela-
tion to the economics of making a product and running a business.
One primary problem is that economics does not traditionally
include in its calculations of economic behaviour the elements of the
228 Responsible Leadership : Global Perspectives