Business, Ethics, and the Environment

For courses in Business Ethics, Business and Society, Applied Ethics, and Environmental Ethics. This is the first text to bring the sustainability paradigm to the forefront of management and business ethics. The concept of sustainability and sustainable development has taken hold throughout the world as a new guiding principle of economic development. Sustainability involves meeting the real needs of the present without so harming the biosphere that future generations will be unable to meet their own needs. As used by such institutions as the United Nations and the World Bank, sustainable development usually applies to entire economies and societies, and less so to industries and individual businesses. Yet already some corporations, especially in Europe, have adopted sustainable business practices. The future is clear: given present global environmental, population, and poverty trends, economic institutions will be judged by how well they meet environmental and ethical, as well as economic, goals. Joseph R. Desjardins wrote this book to make the case for this claim.