Natural Business Ethics

Natural business ethics is the use of theories, concepts, and research from the natural sciences that provide insights into the ethical dilemmas, problems, and issues that occur in business organizations. The natural sciences most frequently involved are ecology, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and genetics, with thermodynamics, paleontology, primatology, and related anthropological sciences sometimes being used. In this approach, human behavior is understood to be the outcome of natural evolutionary forces that have produced behavioral traits, cognitive modules, and genetic systems that are positively and adaptively responsive to environmental challenges and opportunities of the earth's ecosystems. Business behavior, including that found in the large-scale business corporation, is a variant of naturally evolved human behavior and subject to the same natural forces, constraints, and opportunities. Going beyond simple descriptive accounts of nature-based business behavior, natural business ethicists draw normative inferences about the moral issues that occur in the corporate workplace, such as fair pricing, discriminatory treatment of employees, stakeholder claims, organizational justice, breach of social contracts, environmental pollution, and so forth.

A broad base of Darwinian evolutionary theory and confirming empirical research constitutes the conceptual foundation of natural business ethics. It includes the following features:

• Organic life evolves within its host environment, with adaptive success dependent on the organism's physical traits and behavioral routines.
• Organic traits and behavioral patterns are the outcome of an organism's genome, that is, its total set of genes, interacting with the host environment.
• Natural selection describes the organism–environment linkage wherein those traits and routines that enable the organism to survive and adapt are favored and conserved, while nonadaptive features are discarded or become adaptively nonfunctional.
• Life-supporting ecosystems consist of a great diversity of cellular forms, plants, animals, and humans, and are affected by meteorological, astronomical, chemical/physical, geological, and oceanic forces. Symbiotic, mutually supportive linkages between diverse organisms occur throughout ecosystems, enhancing the adaptive prospects of ecosystem inhabitants.
• Modern human beings (Homo sapiens) and their hominid predecessors (several Homo variants) have evolved subject to the organic, genetic, natural selection, and ecosystem processes that have shaped and conditioned all organic life on earth.
• Cognitive neuroscience, paleoanthropology, and comparative primatology describe the evolution of a distinctive human brain capable of forming, using, transmitting, and self-correcting cognitive symbols as adaptive tools for interacting successfully with environmental forces.
• Human cognitive symbols are the basic building blocks of human culture, capable of assuming diverse forms and patterns within geophysical environments of great variety. These sociocultural symbols, also known as memes, are transmitted through learning by being copied from brain to brain over generational time, thus establishing cultural traditions and customs.
• A reciprocal relationship exists between sociocultural symbols and the natural evolutionary processes that gave rise to them, with each dependent on the other. Hence, the nature-nurture, culture-gene interface blends and harmonizes human learning and inherited biological traits, rather than separating and opposing them to one another.

Building on this Darwinian theoretical base, natural business ethicists have proposed that moral issues in business are a mixture of biological and cultural traits, best understood and dealt with by recognizing the natural components involved. Four examples give a flavor of this approach. William Frederick has argued that two nature-based value systems—economic production and a quest for power—drive the behavior of corporate managers toward goals that defeat and contradict [Page 1480]the moral needs of employees and their communities by disrupting ecological systems and diminishing social justice. Paul Lawrence posits the presence of four biological drives—to acquire, to bond, to learn, and to defend—underlying all human behavior, which taken together constitute an innate moral system. The resultant moral sense can be used as a template to evaluate the ethical and unethical actions of companies like Enron. Timothy Fort draws on cognitive neuroscience research that shows an upper limit on the number of meaningful relationships that people can have with others, arguing that a person's moral identity therefore depends on working within relatively small-size groups. Large-scale, hierarchical organization that is typical of business corporations can, and often does, diminish the ability of business practitioners to distinguish right from wrong. Evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides' and John Tooby's research reveals the presence of ancestral neural modules that favor the formation and enforcement of social contracts; David Wasieleski and William Frederick subsequently developed a model of evolutionary social contracts that demonstrates the moral responsibility of business firms when they contract with employees and host communities.

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