A Primer on Critical Thinking and Business Ethics

Any credible agenda that seeks to eradicate global poverty must seek to correct the structural injustices and inequities that cause and perpetuate endemic poverty. Such an agenda must aim not merely to aid the poor with grants, welfare, and subsidies (that indirectly perpetuate poverty) but seek to enhance self-sufficiency and productive skills of the poor by ensuring them comparable access to opportunities of the market economies to participate, on more equitable terms, in the dynamic process of overall economic growth. In this context, we apply critical thinking to identify and recognize the structured injustices of the market system, which not only cause poverty but also compromise human dignity via social inequalities and inequities arguably caused by the free market and corporate capital systems of the world. Global poverty that affects more than a quarter of the human population is a pernicious self-serving system connected to the injustices of the business and political systems of the world. The persistent nature of poverty is in direct proportion to our inability to eradicate it as a whole in the cosmic system. Eradication of global desperate poverty and its unjust structural causes can be achieved, we submit, by tracing the roots of global poverty to corporate and free enterprise capital systems and their unexamined structures of social injustice and social inequalities.

This chapter deals with global sustainability, in its old and modern concepts, typologies, and theories. Most concepts of sustainability, we contend, are anthropocentric, a self-serving attitude that believes in the utmost superiority of man over the rest of the nonhuman universe, which seemingly privileges humans to use, extract, and exploit planetary resources for industrialization and infrastructure development and presumably lead to human growth and prosperity (the Anthropocene). The cost of this however is terrestrial depletion, deterioration, degradation, and decadence that manifest in the current global phenomena of global warming, global climate change, Arctic meltdowns, ocean acidity, massive deforestation, and global carbon footprints, which have collectively rendered human habitability on this earth drastically reduced and jeopardized. In this context, we review the timeline (1992–2022) of the United Nations' sustainability negotiations and accords, several nonanthropocentric and nonanthropomorphic conceptualizations of global sustainability such as Leopold Aldo's land ethic, deep ecology of Naess and associates, Thomas Berry's ecozoic ecology (updated by Spethmann). Combining the best nonanthropocentric developments, we propose a holistic concept of “natural sustainability,” more consonant with critical thinking, which mandates reduced or disciplined use of planetary resources such that Nature can regenerate and renew herself.

Natural sustainability advocates a more fruitful integrative ecozoic paradigm of “sustainability centrism,” which seeks cosmic sustainability of Mother Nature for herself as an end in herself, and we spell out its implications for organizational science and corporate responsibility as an extended global community.

This chapter runs into three parts. Part I: Major Sustainability Types versus Ecozoic Worldview of Cosmic Sustainability; Part II: Conceptualization of Natural Sustainability and Its Justification based on Environmental Ethics, Ecozoic Sustainability, and Deep Ecology; and Part III: Capturing Nature as Nature and Her Moral Imperatives for Understanding Natural Sustainability. Toward the end of this chapter, we also discuss managerial implications and directions for future research.

This chapter focuses on ecofeminism that primarily refers to feminist theory and activism informed by ecology. Ecofeminism is concerned with real connections between humans and Nature, as also by the domination of Nature by man and, specifically, by women's subservience to men. The foundational ecofeminist assumption is that environmental issues are basically feminist issues, and vice versa. It believes that ecofeminism, best understood and operationalized, can restore Mother Nature (endangered by industrial extraction and exploitation) and reassure rights to animals (deanimalized and threatened by factory farming). Although ecofeminism is a diverse movement, ecofeminist theorists share the presupposition that social transformation is necessary for ecological survival, that intellectual transformation of dominant modes of thought must accompany social transformation, that Nature teaches and reveals nondualistic, nonhierarchical systems of relations that are models for social transformation of values, and that human and cultural diversity are values in social transformation; some of these values and movements even influenced the world via the UN. Accordingly, this chapter highlights major positive contributions of ecofeminism.

This chapter on animal ethics, animal rights, and animal welfare is a logical sequence to and ontological consequence of the arguments in earlier chapters. By respecting Mother Nature in all her ecosystems and biodiversity levels, especially by recognizing animal rights and their uniqueness, autonomy, and intrinsicality, we actively contribute to natural sustainability and animal welfare. Our anthropocentric economic models that are profoundly insensitive to the complex interdependencies between human and nonhuman behavior systems and their irreversible environmental challenges endanger both animal rights and global sustainability. Philosophically, we confront epistemological and anthropocentric structures that uncritically privilege humans disproportionately to nonhumans and unwittingly rationalize, moralize, and commodify meat production and consumption such that animal rights and welfare get seriously compromised. To achieve animal welfare, however, we need to seriously rescale Nature's hierarchies first by dethroning ourselves from self-appointed and self-serving, uncontested and critically unexamined presumed human superiority over the nonhuman world and restoring global equality of being an opportunity for all.

Currently, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and several outer space industry multibillionaire entrepreneurs – e.g., Elon Musk (SpaceX), Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin), and Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic), to name a few – are actively engaged in outer space research that reports innovative advances, such as outer space mining, outer space tourism, outer space medicine labs, outer space terraforming of Mars and moon, and altering celestial bodies and terrestrial humans to enhance extraterrestrial survivability. All these advances induce serious ethical concerns of human identity and dignity and destiny, human rights and privileges over earth and her resources, and cosmic sustainability. Further, the current understanding of sustainability development is highly anthropocentric (i.e., the earth and cosmos are meant solely for man's use) and limited in scope as a terrestrial, temporal, economic, and pro-human project. Critical thinking invites sustainability development to include trans-terrestrial, trans-temporal, trans-economic, and transhuman developments. While outer space research certainly offers great hopes of newer living spaces and resources for mankind already strapped by depleted terrestrial habitable spaces, we believe that this capital-intensive “elitist” unregulated outer space research industry may benefit a chosen few at the expense of polarizing mankind in terms of one's undeserved financial capacities to afford extraterrestrial spaces and privileges while endangering Nature by deploying massive terrestrial energy resources for outer space rocket launches causing trailing cosmic debris and planetary pollution. We frame this complex problem into terrestrial humanist issues versus extraterrestrial transhumanist issues, each domain triggered by pro-planetary versus pro-cosmic breakthrough technologies, thus creating a fourfold framework that enables us to explore a distributed ethical strategic understanding and ethical resolution of outer space ethical concerns.

Thus far, we have treated critical thinking descriptively and analytically in previous chapters. In this, the epilogue, as a closing chapter, we intend to consider critical thinking normatively – what it should be, ideally and holistically. We do this in four stages. First, recapitulating the essential concepts, theories, and paradigms of social welfare, social well-being, and social progress, we suggest that critical thinking should ultimately understand and further social progress and social well-being for all humanity. Second, we submit that the great wealth of corporate and free-market capitalism should – as spiritual capital – benefit all, especially the poor and the marginalized. Third, in order to realize the first two objectives, we posit that critical thinking should be repositioned as the art of aesthetic reasoning and aesthetic rationality such that, fourth, it is best realized within the framework of social mindfulness. We discuss major theories grounding these four parts and reflect on their managerial implications and propose future directions for critical thinking research and development.

All four propositions, assumptions (A), presumptions (P), suppositions (S), and presuppositions (PS), are, in general, part of human language and its usage, usually studied under the domain of linguistics. Critical thinking, as we understand in these volumes, is critical analysis of human language and its linguistics and narratives and arguments, which freely or spontaneously use A, P, S, and PS. These in turn are composed of signs, symbols (e.g., the alphabet) that bear meanings (semantics), messages and information (informatics), and motivation and persuasion via argumentation (pragmatics). We elaborate on these in this appendix.

Our major thesis here is the epistemological quasi necessity of A, P, S, and PS, which we freely and spontaneously use in linguistics, informatics, semantics, semeiotics, and pragmatics in our day-to day discussions, dialog, research, teaching, conversations, and conventional rationalizations. These can be both good from the viewpoint of transparency and honesty, opacity, and human exchange information asymmetry. They are dangerous since such A, P, S, and PS could be based on false dichotomies of man/Nature, male/female, truth/falsehood, objectivity/subjectivity, riches/poverty, equality/inequality, and the like; most of the negative aspects of such dichotomies are being used for self-serving, profit-maximizing, wealth-accumulating, poverty-perpetuating, and socially polarizing purposes. Human Anthropocene history is dotted with them, especially in the developmental context of industrialization and economic infrastructure development.

Hence, the vital necessity of critical thinking for critical self-examination, especially in current MBA curricula. All the three volumes of this book on critical thinking are expressly designed for this purpose.