Moral Corporation Development - Essay Example

? Topic: A number of scholars have published articles on the possibility of developing a moral corporation. For example, Christopher D. Stone’s, “The Culture of the Corporation” suggests that developing a moral corporation requires changing attitudes and looking closely at values. Develop a position for the development of a moral corporate culture and map out a specific plan for achieving a moral corporation. Moral Corporation is developed via corporate responsibility and the environment. Corporate responsibility entails two issues: doing the positive good to the community, and doing no harm or whatsoever to the community. This means that the corporations pay back to the community through participating in community beautification efforts and events, volunteering expertise, donating money to the worthy causes and being a responsible employer. On the other hand, doing no harm entails efforts of the business towards the environment in its production activities, transportation and disposal. Therefore, in order to best examine moral corporations and corporate responsibility for the environment let us start by considering issues of the environment we face (McLachlan, 2008). There is a wide possibility of developing a moral corporation; this requires looking closely at values and changing attitudes. This paper seeks to form a position for the development of a moral corporate culture and map out a specific plan for obtaining a moral corporation. Moral responsibility is the state of deserving moral praise, reward, blame, or punishment for an omission or act, with respect to moral obligations. Making decisions on whether or not something is obligatory morally is a concern of principles of ethics. Corporations with moral responsibility for actions are referred to as moral agents. Such corporations are able to reflect on their circumstances, make intentions concerning how they act, and finally do such actions. Developing a moral corporation is a free will issue whether or not corporations will be morally responsible for the actions they get involved in. The scholars’ debate over the attributes of moral responsibility in corporations has been going on for decades. The conformational approach to this argument is to determine the necessary conditions for moral corporations and plan for the development of moral corporations, and whether such conditions can be satisfied by corporations (McLachlan, 2008). The development of moral corporations needs to ensure that the environment is duly protected. Environmental ethics iscomplicated in practice because of the numerous distinct perspectives that are involved. The development of moral corporations needs to encompass this ethics. In some situations it may be difficult for corporations to understand the environmentalists’ arguments on environmental ethics. Disagreements, hence, rise on plans for developing a moral corporation. It is obvious that corporations possess different viewpoints on ethics of the environment. It is, however, possible for corporations put their different options aside for the good of the environment and agree simply that some actions about the environment need to be done in order to make corporations morally upright. In order to develop a moral corporation, such corporations need to admit that protection of the environment is important, whether they are acting out of a sense of responsibility or out of a sense of self-preservation for the future generation, for to the Earth itself or to all the forms of life. Corporations need to adopt an environmental pragmatism. This ensures that moral corporations are developed and maintained; that the corporations can achieve a consensus on the values of the environment that identify and determine the policies of the environment that all other corporations can agree on (McLachlan, 2008). When thinking of moral corporations, a plethora of questions rise: if the consumerism was predated by an ethical community, then how did consumerism supersede the morals of business practitioners? How does it come that the economic crisis spread out? What are the mechanisms of eliminating system lapses in principles and ethics judgments? These questions have lingered in the minds of environmentalists for some time now and are necessary and valid for the required debates on the development of a moral corporation. Development of such a corporation requires many efforts and attempts both by the government and the corporations themselves. For example, the cynical corporate wrong actions resulted into the regulations such as the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and the New York Stock Exchange governance (Sun, 2010). The rules were meant to influence the corporate leadershippositively. In order to develop moral corporations, the plan will need to involve such legislations in order to effectively encourage moral sustainability and measure corporate morality in organizations. Some environmental ethicists have argued that bureaucratic structures are not particularly humanand are not able to reason. It is very important in the plan for developing a moral corporation to acknowledge that human beings are practically agents for unethical behaviors and corporate morality. Nevertheless, corporations are penalized and glorified in the same way as human beings for environmental actions. In order to develop a moral corporation, it is pivotal to consider a moral actor view of a corporation(McLachlan, 2008). The moral actor view of the corporation is the view that as long as the corporations actintentionally, it is possible to hold them morallyresponsible for all the kinds of their actions. They are practically moral actors. However, because such corporations are not ends in themselves, they are not considered moral persons. Therefore, the ends for which such corporations are developed can be evaluated morally. This, however, has a limitation in the nature of using immoral or moral actions. That is to say not all the immoral or moral actions are equalin the same way. There are, hence, particular degrees of immorality or morality, and that such degrees vary significantly among various stakeholders. For example, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act established an oversight board for accounting acts to mandate corporations in order to develop ethics codes of financial reporting and establish a greater transparency in financial reports to all the interested parties (Connell, McMinn & Bell, 2012). The components that are involved in the protection of the environment need to be considered when developing a moral corporation. As mentioned earlier, it is important to adopt a pragmatic perspective in doing this, the environmental protection entails conservation of the natural resources such as fossil fuels, prevention of soil erosion and contamination, protection of the endangered species and wilderness, cleaning up or prevention of water and air pollution, a careful use of chemical fertilizers and an agricultural use of pesticides, halting depletion of ozone layer and global warming, limiting urban sprawl and human overpopulation, and dealing with nuclear wastes. This list may sound overwhelming, but for sure, it must be implemented whenever we need to develop a moral corporation. In order to make this easier for corporations, the mentioned environmental issues are divided into categories for the ease of implementation: the use of natural resources, pollution, and land health (McLachlan, 2008). The categories are, however, not enough to come up with a moral corporation, community members have a role to play in the successful development of moral corporationstoo. Members of the community are environmentally conscious and have vested their interests in the world. Such consciousness has presented business leaders with numerous moral constraints and challenges beyond their financial reporting, competitive remuneration and safety of employees. Because of this, many corporations are striving to go green through adopting electronic methods of business transactions and encouraging recycling. This has also called for the environmental stewardship deemed to fit a moral conduct of corporations or a corporate ethical behavior. It is important to note that any organization that delays in showing much interest in the wellbeing of the community is at risk of damaging its reputation and longevity (McLachlan, 2008). The notion of moral responsibility in corporations has significantly expanded in the past decades. Corporate moral responsibility may be viewed in terms of duty and obligation or in terms of responsibility. According to studies, a corporation is morally responsible for an environmental impact if such corporations caused the impact, could have prevented the impact, and knew what they were doing. This results into two questions that need to be answered when developing a moral corporation: how can a corporation minimize its moral responsibility? And to what degree and extent is a corporation morally responsible for the mechanisms of its products or serviceusage? The corporations may as well adopt a collective responsibility in order to deal with the environmental ethics (McLachlan, 2008). Collective responsibility is an appropriate arrangement for handling a widespread wrongdoing and harm that are associated with group actions. The major components of the corporation moral responsibility are rooted in every society fabrics and constitute social life. It is also vital to note that with no particular commencement of moral responsibility, there is no amount of imaginative imminent that can give any society recognition as a human society. This collective responsibility, however, brings disagreement between conceptions that can be used for maintaining suchgroups as corporations. As a group a corporationcan be morally responsible independently of the existing members, but conceptions of collective responsibility maintainthat only particular human agents can be morally responsible. These positions particularly make it difficult to develop a moral corporation, since there is a challenging position on who to be held morally responsible for a given action (Northcott, 2012). As I mentioned earlier, corporations need to deal with environmental components in order to be considered morally responsible. Developing a moral corporation requires effective management of pollution which includes managing of emissions, bi-products, energy and farming facilities, and wastes from productions. This is because such materials pose harm to people when released into the air, soil and water. Therefore, corporations will need to check on their disposal mechanisms. The solution is to strike a balance between benefits and harm in the usage of the materials such as pesticides and chemical fertilizers. The use of natural resources should also be sustainable in moral corporations. Sustainability in this case means that activities of the corporations can continue indefinitely with little or no depletion of the resources utilized in the process of carrying out such activities. Current policies of energy may not be sustainable, since they mainly rely on non-renewable resources, and the farming methods are not sustainable as well, as they erode soil and deplete land at a faster rate than it is replenished. In order to develop a moral corporation, the corporations will need to seek alternative sources of energy and use renewable sources such as solar and wind power, and farming methods that are less intensive and minimally erode soil, such as crop rotation (McLachlan, 2008). The natural resources could as well be used efficiently, and sustainable methods are developed within the corporations in order to achieve the ends. Individuals should also consume less energy at home and seek alternative modes of transport. In addition to this, corporations also need to practice land health which includes protection and preserving biological and ecological diversity as well as wild areas. Ecological diversity means the corporation maintains a condition in an ecosystem where the function and structure are not impaired by stresses caused by human beings. This implies that the corporation will have to limit the use of land through foregoing mining opportunities and limiting human development. In a nut shell, corporations need to look into the responsibility they have to protect the environment in order to become morally responsible, that is a moral corporation (McLachlan, 2008). In summary, a moral corporation is developed through a corporate responsibility and the environmental ethics. As mentioned earlier, developing a moral corporation is a free will issue on whether or not corporations are morally responsible for the actions they get involved in. Various scholars have had rage debates over the attributes of moral responsibility of corporationsfor decades. It is necessary to considerprinciples of corporate social responsibility in detail, when developing a moral corporation. These principles mainly involve legal aspects of a corporation, its economic, discretionary, and ethical aspects. Corporations look forward to make profits even as they observe the laws of the state. In addition, corporations should stay ethical and have the right to remain discrete with the respect to their environmental decisions. Corporations also involve various terms in their attempts to remain ethical such as reactive, responsive, defensive, and interactive with the environment. These terms are all useful in developing a moral corporation.Therefore, in order to develop a moral corporation, the management of such corporations needs to consider ethical consumerism, globalization and market forces, social education and awareness, training staff on environmental ethics, and making their stakeholders their priorities (Sun, 2010). In addition, the corporations need to manage effectively pollution, use of natural resources and land health. References Connell, J. A., McMinn, Nathan E., & Bell, N. (2012). How will the next generation change the business world? A report on a survey.Insights to a Changing World Journal, 2012 (4),100-113. McLachlan, J. A. (2008). The right choice making ethical decisions on the job. New York: Prentice Hall. Northcott, M. S. (2012). Artificial persons against nature: Environmental governmentality, economic corporations and ecological ethics.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1249 (1), 104-117. Sun, W. (2010).How to govern corporations so they serve the public good: A theory of corporategovernance emergence, New York: Edwin Mellen. Read More