environment – The Sense of Fairness blog

As I was researching for my (now very shortly) forthcoming book, I found less evidence for the benefits of fairness in relation to one of the traditional stakeholders of business than the others. This was the environment. In part, this was because of the strength of that evidence almost universally across the other key stakeholders. But perhaps more significant is the fact that the business relationship with the environment is not mediated by people. There is something built into how we interact with other humans, an ongoing push and pull of interests and mutual expectations, that leads to an arrival at a degree of fairness. Where humans are less immediately involved, there’s less of a gravitational pull to fairness, more scope for unfairness.

This left me focusing more in the environmental chapter on the need to strike a fair balance. Inevitably, I also discuss the challenge of externalities and the risks that businesses take when they depend on the persistence of those externalities – they can mask unprofitability when the ability to externalise costs is removed, as it usually is, sooner or later. I also discuss the so-called tragedy of the commons, whereby shared resources can be over-exploited and destroyed, and the remarkable work of Elinor Ostrom in identifying how readily communities can manage such common resources and preserve them into perpetuity. Ostrom’s work provides powerful insights helping support the delivery of intergenerational fairness.

It’s therefore been a pleasure for me to discover more recently that this idea of the need for environmental balance has support from a source I wasn’t aware of. That support comes from Islam. Indeed, for a number of Islamic scholars, the concept of balance is the religion’s key framing of the human interaction with the environment. Take the following, for example:

“Islam looks at the environment from the standpoint of balance. It envisions the environmental balance as a part of the universal ‘grand balance’. The Quran describes the notion of environmental balance in various terms like ‘adl’, ‘qadar’ and ‘mouzoon’.
“The term ‘adl’ literally means acting justly, rightly, or equitably. While explaining the meaning of ‘adl’, one interpreter of the Quran has observed that the universe has been created in balanced form.”

This scholar goes on to argue that this requirement for balance implies constraints on the demands humans can make in terms of both what they extract from the environment and what they discharge into it by way of pollution.

Others have gone further in this analysis, and used the concept of balance to develop a wholesale approach to environmental matters. Al-Mizan apparently also means balance, and is the name for an approach developed alongside more than 300 Islamic institutions and international partners. Making clear that this concept of balance is intimately associated in Islam with equity, fairness and justice, the Al-Mizan Covenant for the Earth was finalised in 2024 and sets out a fair and just approach to environmental matters.

Among other things, the Covenant asserts:

“The economic values of our faith are embodied in frugal moderation while taking joy in the sources of life for humankind and other living beings, respecting their inherent limits by forsaking wasteful excess for just, equitable sharing of their fruits, and forsaking exploitation of the Earth and its inhabitants for charity and cultivation.”

Given that the wealth of a number of Islamic nations arises from their role as fossil fuel producers, it is particularly notable that the Al-Mizan Covenant makes a call not just for a transition away from the burning of fossil fuels but for a wholesale phasing out of fossil fuel production. It does so while noting the need for a just transition for affected workers and communities. The Covenant also seeks sustainable and ethical farming practices, railing at the imbalances brought by monocultural industrial farming practices.

The Covenant’s commitment on the issue of indigenous people’s rights is particularly strong: “To remind leaders and decision makers that it is essential that people of all social and ethnic groups, traditional societies and indigenous people be consulted without discrimination, and that the weakest be held as strongest until their rights are fully secured, and the strongest held as weakest until they comply fully with the law.” The paper’s articulation of what is required by way of truly fair and empowered consultation of those who might otherwise be powerless is particularly striking.

The Covenant also argues strongly for enhanced education on environmental matters and for more community-led approaches to addressing environmental challenges. Again, this appears to be about empowering those whose power might otherwise be limited, and ensuring that there is a readier balance of power and influence in the preservation of biodiversity and natural resources.

While these ideas are clearly grounded in a specific religious perspective and culture, the lessons they teach are more general. Seeking to balance the interests of current generations with those to come, to balance the interests of the wealthy with the disempowered, seeking a balance in the level of exploitation of natural resources, are steps that are in our own interests as well as those less empowered or yet-to-be-born, they are fair. Ostrom, among others, shows clearly that we don’t need a faith-based approach to see that such a balance is fair to ourselves and others. However, we are sadly some distance from striking such a fair balance at present.

I am happy to confirm as ever that the Sense of Fairness blog is a purely personal endeavour

Fairness in Business and Investment, Paul Lee. Routledge, 2026

Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Elinor Ostrom. Cambridge University Press, 1990

Towards an Islamic Approach for Environmental Balance, Muhammed Ramzan Akhtar. Islamic Economic Studies, Vol 3 No 2, June 1996

Tafheem-ul-Quran [Towards Understanding the Quran], Syed Abu Al Ala Maududi

Al-Mizan: A Covenant for the Earth. 2024

Business as usual is where – for the time-being at least – the money is, and in our world that means it is where the power is. That power gives business-as-usual a gravitational force even when good sense and science call out for change, and even when in the long-term it’s a losing game financially. Power leads us astray, and fairness requires that we find some counterbalance to this force. Only then will change come.

We see this gravitational force of business-as-usual most powerfully in the world’s climate negotiations. The vast majority of the world’s scientists tell us that we have no time to lose and that economies and business must change. The Pacific island nations and developing economies more generally (without the money that might pad them from the increasing physical impacts of climate change) are increasingly urging change. Unusual and devastating weather patterns are being felt worldwide. We cannot continue to pump the same levels of CO2 and other climate-changing gases into our atmosphere.

A carbon-constrained future will look economically very different, and the companies that prosper in its business-as-usual will differ from those that look good now. Yet the status quo predominates in the political process. Most strikingly, governments of the world have been content to allow petrostates to co-opt the climate COP process. The last two Conferences of the Parties Serving as the Meeting of Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (no wonder the COP abbreviation is preferred) have been held in the UAE and Azerbaijan, respectively the world’s 9th and 25th largest oil producers and perhaps more importantly with at least two-thirds of their economies dependent on fossil fuel industries. The chair of each conference was a senior executive in that country’s oil industry. It can be little surprise that agreements for rapid change to our fossil fuel-dependent economies have not been forthcoming.

The greatest thought experiment in fairness is John Rawls’s idea of the veil of ignorance. Those designing a just society must sit behind a veil of ignorance so that they are unaware of where they will fit in that society: this makes it most likely to be fair to all, Rawls argues. In our unveiled world, those with power, meaning those with money, continue to set the rules – and knowing that they will benefit, they continue to skew the world towards the status quo, which means in their own favour.

This favouring of the rich and powerful is of course nothing new. My latest secondhand bookshop purchase was a collection of three plays by the deeply unfashionable JB Priestley. Published in 1945, it is eager to make clear its obedience to wartime strictures. “This book is produced in complete conformity with the authorised economy standards” it reads. Like his most famous play, An Inspector Calls, there’s an undercurrent of class resentment and frustration with a status quo that keeps power in the hands of the old and frustrates youthful ambition and opportunity. We don’t always see those tensions in modern depictions of the interwar years, not least because they and we know all too well the changes that were to come as the war swept away past structures and strictures.

All three plays are terribly dated, displaying the careless heavy misogyny of that age, and an odd metropolitan superiority. But one still has interesting elements. Called The Golden Fleece, it is set in the eponymous hotel in Cheltingate Spa, a scarcely disguised Cheltenham. The title also has a second meaning, referring to the wealth generated from taking advantage of others (the play’s original title, Bull Market, at least to modern ears carries some of the same connotations of trickery). The Golden Fleece centres around a debate between those who feel justified in taking such advantage because that’s how the world works and those who are unwilling to do so because it would be better if it didn’t. It involves some stock market manoeuvrings that are certainly no longer legal, and seem barely credible even at the time (though that may simply be failures in the playwright’s understanding, or elisions in his story-telling).

Youth’s frustrations at age and tradition in the 1930s come out clearly from the ambitious young doctor, railing at a gouging tendency in private health (this was, of course, before the creation of the National Health Service). Talking about his doctor boss, Alec says: “He may look like a harmless old pussycat, but really he’s a pest and a menace. Instead of being a man of science, which he pretends to be, he’s something between an old charlatan and a rich old woman’s butler. He doesn’t speak or even think the truth. He doesn’t care about anything but fat fees and fat dinners. He’s an example of what’s wrong with this pussy-footed, rich old man’s country.”

But the core of the play’s arguments come from the mouth of a different character, who calls himself William Lotless. “Money! Money! It’s a servant that’s become a master,” says the scoundrel trader, for once using his skills for good – though rather tempted by the excitement to act just for the joy of it. Tongue loosened by alcohol but with his thoughts made staccato, he goes on:

“Money – was intended to be simply a sign, a token, a convenience – something like a – well a railway ticket. That’s all. But what’s happened to it? Got all out of hand. Become a source of power. The way we allow people to handle money as power, it’s just as if we let ‘em handle battleships and bombing squadrons for their own private benefit.”

Military images abound in a play written in the first months of the war. It’s impossible to read it now without thinking of the coming destruction of all that is established. It feels like, and is, a wholly different world from our own.

We know that the 1950s and 1960s brought strong economic growth that was broadly shared across the population. It may not have been entirely fairly shared (certainly not, for example, between the sexes), but economies operated largely to the benefit of all, not the few. The existing order was overturned by the war. Let us hope it doesn’t take such a destructive dislocation to shift the pull of the current business as usual; we need a veil of ignorance, or some other way to escape our ready tendency to listen harder to those who already have power through money, as that traps us in a business as usual that isn’t working.

I am grateful to my colleague Nick for the conversation where we linked COP to Rawls.

I am happy to confirm as ever that the Sense of Fairness blog is a purely personal endeavour.

The Golden Fleece, JB Priestley, 1940

A Theory of Justice, John Rawls, 1971

Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, John Rawls, 2004

Tag: environment

Environment in the balance

Unveiled: fleeced by power and business as usual