Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
6-26-2015
Publication Title
Handbook on Ethics in Marketing
Abstract
Many marketers recognize they have obligations toward the non-human world, obligations that are not fully understood. This chapter sheds light on how such marketers can justify their own feelings and persuade others. The chapter begins with the historical rise of environmental consciousness before discussing the two most influential of the Western ethical theories: Kantianism and utilitarianism. It then discusses their shortcomings before moving on to the sentimentalist approach to ethics that comes down to us from David Hume and Adam Smith. A direct line from the sentimentalist approach is drawn to the environmental/ecological ethics of Aldo Leopold. Much is left out of this chapter: virtue ethics, social contract theory or any of the strictly environmental philosophies that have emerged (deep ecology, ecofeminism, social ecology, bioregionalism). Neither are any of the spiritual or religious approaches to environmental ethics discussed. If you’re not depressed, I often joke to my students, it’s only because you haven’t been reading the newspaper. And indeed we do live in a frightening time, marked by fundamentalist violence, aggressive wars, ethnic conflict, starvation amid plenty, and the subject of this book: enormously pervasive environmental problems. (Gottleib 2006, p. vii) For the most part we have cared little about our impact on the environment. The past century and especially the past 50 years has witnessed an increasing awareness that we can and are causing significant harm to the rest of nature.
Identifier
9781781003428
Recommended Citation
Benton, R. (2015). "Environmental ethics: theory and implications for marketing". In Handbook on Ethics in Marketing. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Copyright Statement
© Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015.
Comments
Author Posting. © Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Edward Elgar Publishing for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Handbook on Ethics in Marketing, edited by Alexander Nill. Cheltamham, U.K.: Edward Elgar Publishing, Summer 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781781003435.00019.