Stage 7: The Management Morality of Environmentalism

At stage 7, the ethical rights of stage 6 are extended to issues that are totally useless to management and located beyond humanity. Human rights are applied to a wider holistic context rather than being restricted to humans alone. Ethical awareness reaches further than humanity and embraces forms of life such as animals and ecological systems regardless of their social utility.433 Animal ethics, for example, sets forth principles for the ethical treatment of animals. The application of these principles would totally annihilate management’s need to turn animals into values by exploiting, misusing, abusing, and eventually killing them. In the deceptive managerial language this is called utilising nature. It starts with the managerial use of plants in mono-culture plantations using pesticides, herbicides, and genetically modified organisms for profits. The elimination of the non-truthful term ‘culture’ in agri-culture leaves it as agri-business. It occurs through the conversion of nature and animals into manageable units.434 The morality of these managerial processes can be highlighted when related to environmental ethics, biocentric ethics, ecological philosophy, deep ecology, new animists, social ecology, land ethics, the ethics of preserving and restoring nature, ecological human rights, rights of nature, ecological intergenerational justice, animal ethics, Kantian environmental ethics, anthropocentrism, the morality of biotic communities, species protection, deep ecology, biospheric egalitarianism, biospherical nets, new animists, bioregionalism, sentient beings, Albert Schweitzer’s Reverence for Life, teleological-centre-of-life moralities, responsive cohesion, ecosystems, the biophysical world, social ecology, mutualistic interrelations, ecological interdependence, life-centred ethics, and the ethical concept of equal consideration.435