'Environmental and ethical considerations sometimes get ignored when sourcing supplies.' Discuss

'Environmental and ethical considerations sometimes get...

Key Concepts

Environmental Sustainability

Environmental sustainability refers to the responsible use and management of natural resources to prevent depletion and degradation, ensuring that future generations can meet their needs. In business practices, this concept involves minimizing negative impacts on the environment through measures such as reducing waste, lowering emissions, and conserving water and energy during production and logistics processes.

Ethical Considerations

Ethical considerations in a business context involve the commitment to fairness, transparency, and accountability in all aspects of operations. This includes ensuring that practices such as labor conditions, supplier conduct, and community engagement adhere to moral standards and do not exploit people or resources, thereby fostering trust and long-term positive relationships with stakeholders.

Supply Chain Management

Supply chain management is the strategic coordination of business functions involved in sourcing, procurement, production, and logistics to deliver products efficiently and effectively. It encompasses the selection of suppliers and materials while balancing cost, quality, and social responsibility, making it a critical area where environmental and ethical aspects must be integrated into decision-making processes.

Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a business model in which companies incorporate social and environmental concerns into their operations and interactions with stakeholders. CSR emphasizes that organizations have obligations beyond profit maximization, encouraging them to act in ways that positively impact society and the environment, particularly in how they source and manage supply chains.

Transcript

00:01 Let's kind of discuss biological richness, the ethical and moral arguments of why it should be preserved versus kind of the utilitarian arguments that are kind of taking a louder voice to ethical and moral arguments.

00:22 So mostly this is meant to be your opinion based on what you know.

00:27 So i'm just going to bring up some points that you should think about when forming that opinion.

00:36 Obviously, since it will be your opinion, you needed to gather the information at hand to be able to form it fully.

00:44 So i will just bring up some talking points and then let you write what you think.

00:53 So just to define utilitarians, it is a theory of morality, but it advocates actions that foster happiness or pleasure, basically just opposing actions that will cause unhappiness or harm.

01:11 So utilitarians would say an action is right if it results in the happiness of the greatest number of people in a society or a group.

01:23 But as we know from certain situations, what will make you happy in the moment is not what will make you happy in the future.

01:33 So it's kind of utilitarians kind of live in just that moment instead of kind of looking forward to the future.

01:44 So instead of pleasure and happiness having intrinsic value and that everyone's happiness counts equally, we want to focus on what would be better just for the future, more forward thinking.

02:00 So, i mean, just a couple of reasons why the value of biological richness over just being happy, just wantonly using resources for happiness in the moment would be obviously different moral reasons.

02:20 There should be a culture that would encourage respect and stewardship for.

02:24 Wildlife and ecosystems that that would be preferable to a culture that does not take those things seriously so if we look at utilitarianism that kind of if you just kind of look at our at our societies right now we're kind of focused on overconsumption will these products make me happy however these products are destroying a valuable ecosystem but they make me happy right now so this is the right choice instead of looking forward to the future where this overconsumption is going to lead to the annihilation of a very important portion in biodiversity.

03:03 You can also look at aesthetic reasons.

03:09 Landscape, species, ecosystems should be conserved because they're beautiful and they enrich the lives of humans.

03:15 So they could make us happy.

03:17 I don't know about you, but i always am happier when i spend time outdoors.

03:21 And it has been proven that humans, when they are connected to nature, are happier, they are healthier both mentally and physically.

03:30 So it is important there.

03:33 Ecosystems do serve humans because they provide natural functions.

03:37 They provide the things that we need.

03:41 So i know talking about germs and microbes does not make everyone happy.

03:47 They can often be seen as bad things...