CRO Association Our mission is to accelerate the profession of corporate responsibility.
Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/139175
Deep Reporting If sustainability performance is a function of impacts on vital capitals relative to corresponding duties or obligations to have such impacts, how can inanimate objects be held to such a test? How, that is, can an inanimate object have a duty or obligation? Of course they can't. describe performance that, in fact, falls on the sustainable side objects, like products, can be described in those terms. It is our of the performance scale, which is less than or equal to 1.0 for contention that the answer is no, and that statements to the impacts on natural capital, and greater than or equal to 1.0 for effect that a product is sustainable, or that one product is more impacts on anthro capital. If sustainability were an analog or sustainable than another, are meaningless and nonsensical. variably progressive state of affairs, this would not be the case. But it isn't; it is a binary construct. A behavior and its impacts are either sustainable or unsustainable, with all actual states falling into one or the other category. There is no third or middling state of affairs. Inanimate Sustainability The basis of our position is simple: If sustainability performance is a function of impacts on vital capitals relative to corresponding duties or obligations to have such impacts, how can inanimate objects be held to such a test? How, that is, can an inanimate object have a duty or obligation? Of course they can't. Only living agents or actors capable of acting in accordance with norms or standards of morality (i.e., moral agents) can be regarded Another very interesting implication of context-based as such. Indeed, the object of sustainability assessments is not sustainability pertains to products, and the question of whether products or any other inanimate object at all; rather, it is human or not they can be sustainable. The key issue here is to be clear behavior or activity. When we speak of sustainability in business, about the type of thing to which the adjectives sustainable and then, what we are talking about—or should be talking about— unsustainable can be applied, and whether or not inanimate is human activity, the actions that people take in the world MAY/JUNE 2013 | www.thecro.com [15]