A company’s values and norms can
resonate to some extent with their societal counterparts by the company providing
goods and services of value to customers resulting in a reduction of their
suffering or increase in their happiness. Providing a net-value (the value to
the customer less the price) to people can resonate with societal values and norms
that esteem happiness and frown on suffering from want. Indeed, a utilitarian
ethic can apply to the provision of as much value as possible in the form of
goods and services that reduce the suffering or increase the happiness of as
many people as possible. Legitimate wealth can “result from having provided a
significant amount of value to a significant number of people.”[1]
Even fortunes, according to this ethic, are justified by the provision of “a
very unusual form of value to a very unusual number of people.”[2]
Utilitarianism is popularly known from the expression, the greatest good to the
greatest number (i.e., of people). Of course, an ethic justifies what should be, whereas the extent to which a
company’s values and norms approach those of society is a descriptive matter. Describing the degree of fit is not to say that
a company’s values and norms should (i.e.,
normatively) have that degree of fit, or even more. Ethical reasoning would be
needed to supply the normative contention; such reasoning involves
argumentation that the extant societal values and norms should be held generally speaking and specifically by companies.
The fact that the values and norms of many German companies in the NAZI era
resonated with societal values and norms is not to say that the managements should have sought to fit organizational
values and norms with NAZI values and norms. The field of business & society,
which is oriented to the degree of fit that exists descriptively between a
company (or the business sector) and a society (or internationally-held values
and norms), is thus distinct from business ethics, which is oriented to
providing ethical justification for what managers and companies should do. With regard to the former
field, companies can orient themselves even closer to societal values and norms
than by providing value to customers and even taking other stakeholder
interests into account by being primarily oriented to taking on a serious
societal or global problem. In terms of business ethics, such an orientation
can be said to be one that a company should have because an unusual number of
people (even beyond customers and other stakeholders) could receive an unusual
amount of value. Climate-change is such a problem, and Heliogen’s breakthrough
exemplifies such an extraordinary mission.
The full essay is at "Externalities Management and Climate Change."
1. Rod Burylo, The Wealthy Buddhist:
Buddhist Ethics, Right Livelihood, and the Value of Money (Nepean, Canada:
The Sumeru Press, 2018).
2. Ibid.
