Greenwashing and Green Marketing Virtues

Abstract

Many companies publicly promise that their business policies and products are environmentally sustainable. But while green promises abound, few companies have truly environmentally sustainable business practices, especially when the long-term consequences of business policies and products are factored into the equation. By pointing to a handful of seemingly sustainable business decisions, companies routinely distract consumers from general business patterns that are not actually environmentally sustainable. This chapter begins by explaining and defining the concept of greenwashing and then explores the economic and legal factors that systematically encourage greenwashing. Since moral agents cannot flourish without a healthy ecosystem to support them, greenwashing undermines the conditions necessary to a life of eudaimonia. Greenwashing also undermines virtue in companies since it entails dishonesty in one’s relations with others as well as compromises the physical conditions necessary for sustained human flourishing. I will discuss the most common vices of greenwashing as well as the virtues embodied by companies that actually engage both in sustainable business and in virtuously communicating those business practices to consumers and to the public at large.