Chapter 18: Environmental Ethics and Business: Toward a Habermasian Perspective

How should we live, work, and manage organizations in an age where decades of wealth accumulation have resulted in environmental risks and disasters (Beck, 1992)? It has long been widely accepted that “the crisis of environmental sustainability is no longer a matter of speculation” (Purser, 1994, p. 4) and that organizations are a key factor in the creation of environmental risks and disasters (Gephart, 1984). Thus it is imperative for managers and citizens to develop a normative framework for business management that addresses environmental issues and that limits the impacts that organizations have on the environment.

In this chapter, we have two broad purposes. First, we introduce the reader to theoretical debates within the field of environmental ethics and explore how these debates have influenced scholars of business management. Second, we explore the relationship between Habermasian critical theory and environmental ethics, and consider whether Habermas’s critical theory (in particular, his theory of communicative action) could provide a viable normative approach for thinking about and advocating environmental concerns. Our overall goal in this chapter, then, is to make manifest the enormous complexity of the issues surrounding debates over environmental policy and explore how Habermas may be useful for articulating and defending environmental values. But while we find Habermas’s critical theory attractive in many respects, we cannot hope to provide in this space a sufficient defense of it. Rather, in opening up the issues involved, we hope to inspire further thinking on these matters with the aim of working toward their future clarification.