EME 504
Foundations in Sustainability Systems

9.2 Who The Stakeholders are and What is at Stake

Evaluating the ethical relationships among various interested parties in the outcomes of a given decision and set of conditions depends on whom the stakeholders are and what is at stake.

Do we have an obligation to ensure that other people, besides the immediate/primary stakeholders, are not harmed by our actions? While this seems like one question, there are a few ways we can break it down into considerations about justice. (Assuming here that a just outcome is an ethical outcome.)

First, we ought to consider issues of distributive justice, which would require us to consider how the harms and benefits of a given project or action are distributed across populations. Are there some populations being disproportionately harmed, even though they may have gained little to none of the benefits? Questions about equity are particularly important when it comes to discussing the distribution of a finite resource. The global atmosphere and oceans are places to store excess CO2, i.e., the atmosphere/ocean as carbon sink, presents precisely the kind of limited resource that is used based on who releases the most CO2 first.

Second, we need to consider our singular and collective obligations to future generations, or, intergenerational justice. In other words, we need to think about the kind of global, local, and personal conditions we are leaving to future generations, such as our children, grandchildren, and so on. (The most distantly related humans are only about 50 generations apart.) A simple way to think about this is in considering how a certain decision or action may affect future conditions for your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, etc. This becomes a very living and important consideration when we think about the problems and debts that previous generations left us with. (Living and remembering the good times is not contingent upon forgetting the bad times. In fact, an ethical view of the world requires us to acknowledge both and rectify between the two, which is captured in the following section on retributive justice.

Third, a past, current, or future situation or harm may require a consideration of retributions for harms done, or retributive justice. We see this in legal processes all the time, such as in a medical malpractice case, where the medical service provider is required to pay the patient for harms done in an improper implementation of standard procedure. We also see this in criminal cases, where someone is punished with jail time for crimes. However, if we take intergenerational justice into account, but ask it about past environmental harms that have helped us to arise at present conditions, then issues and obligations become difficult to parse. Most individual crimes have a statute of limitations within which one person can be convicted of committing that crime, even if that person benefited from committing that crime.

What happens, though, when we begin to talk about harms committed in the past that have put current populations in a much better position than others due to various historical advantages? What happens when we consider the over-consumption of finite resources in the past compared to current and future consumption patterns? For example, the currently developed Western countries in Europe and North America used a significant amount of fossil fuels, as well as other finite natural resources, from the 18th to the 21st Century to develop the level of lifestyle we/they are currently living. Should the less-well-off nations be allowed to pollute enough to give them an equal quality of life, just as the Western countries did for a very long time? Think of it this way, the Western countries have filled the global environmental garbage can to about 2/3 full by the beginning of the 21st Century. Who is allowed to fill the rest of the garbage can considering the non-Western countries, constituting the other 3/4 of the world's population, have yet to really add to the collective garbage pile? These questions reflect varying positions and resulting opinions occurring in climate change and emissions debate, where the atmosphere as global carbon sink is a finite resource that needs to be equitably divided, where the threshold of emissions reflects some limit (in ppm CO2) we would not want to surpass due to environmental-ecological thresholds, i.e. where the overconsumption of a finite resource would prove life-threatening challenges to all stakeholders. Simply speaking, who in the world is allowed to fill the last 1/3 of the garbage can? How is the process determined? And further, are those who had added the most trash to the can in the past, even though they were innovators, unaware of the long-term implications of their inventions?

A majority of the world's population would argue that there is an obligation to allow higher emissions from the countries with the least developed, and therefore higher polluting, technologies and infrastructure. After all, how do you upgrade to better and more efficient technology (therefore, less polluting) without more money via boosting the GDP? These questions reflect the questions nations like China, India, and Brazil ask of the industrially developed nations. The lesser-industrially developed African countries are only beginning to consider these types of questions. These kinds of ethical questions, however, are very difficult to resolve on a truly level political playing field.

The terms of procedural justice require arriving at an outcome that is satisfactory to all relevant stakeholders. Doing so requires implementing a multi-representational process-based means for evaluating and agreeing on collective resolutions and targeted outcomes. Procedural ethics typically requires that these situations employ a just and representative (pluralistic) procedure for arriving at decisions. (Many would consider the outcome of a trial to be fair and just if they consider the trial processes to be fair and just.)

Ethical relationships with ecologies, environments, and silent stakeholders are often not taken into account as seriously or directly as primary and secondary stakeholders. Sustainability ethics requires the consideration of silent stakeholders, such as certain species, that have no embodied representation in collective decision-making processes. In other words, polar bears cannot make their own arguments on the floor of the U.S. Congress, yet their interests require some consideration in the decision-making processes. You may remember this quote: “I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.” ― Dr. Seuss, The Lorax. While a children's' story, the Lorax metaphorically embodies the imperatives for the representation of other living creatures in our immediate and long-term decision-making processes. (Pretty deep stuff for a kids' book...) This is the concept of inter-species justice. Currently, we see this kind of representation done by NGOs, such as the World Wildlife Fund (now, the World Wide Fund for Nature), or even local organizations such as PennEnvironment.