Business Ethics and the Environment: Manifestations of Virtuous Duty in Business and Economics

Our environmental organizations manifest duties of virtue in pursuit of environmental restoration and preservation. As such, they provide the key political-economic institutions that interact with our government agencies to lead and provide the visions that our environmental movement pursues. Understanding these organizations of collective duty are therefore the key to investigating the economics and politics of our environmental movement. This text examines their role, motivations, and accomplishments thereby elucidating various phases of our environmental movement such as

• the positive link between environmental restoration and economic development,
• the movement for environmental justice,
• the refinement of the aims and methods of environmental regulation,
• the political difficulties posed by the tragedy of the global commons.

Using the conceptions of collective duties of virtue, this text effectively explains the functioning of our environmental advocacy organizations in ways and extents not accomplished elsewhere. Featuring suggested reading lists, review questions, and class discussion/essay questions in each chapter, this book is useful for students and professors in environmental business ethics and sustainability.

Richard M. Robinson is Professor of Business in the Department of Business Administration at the State University of New York at Fredonia (SUNY Fredonia, USA) where he instructs courses in business ethics and economics. He is author of several books including the textbook, Business Ethics: Kant, Virtue, and the Nexus of Duty (Springer, 2022, 2024), Environmental Advocacy and Local Restorations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), and Restoring America’s Rivers (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). He is a former editor of the Journal of Economics and Finance (Springer) and has authored numerous articles in scholarly academic journals.