Non-Human Stakeholders : Testing the Boundaries of Stakeholder Theory

Stakeholder theory has gained widespread popularity in corporate governance rhetoric. However, this adoption has been accompanied by a correspondingly expansive interpretation of who should be counted as a stakeholder. Many modern stakeholder theorists are arguing for the inclusion of the environment and non-human animals as stakeholders. This Article provides a valuable framework for assessing the feasibility of these additions.The Article concludes that including the environment and non-human animals as stakeholders in a stakeholder ethics analysis is largely untenable. The inability to ascertain preferences from animals and the environment, the highly subjective practice of attempting to quantify the level of benefit and harm attributable to business decisions, and the even more subjective nature of trying to weigh these benefits and harms across broad categories provides such broad latitude that nearly anything could be posited as ethical. With no limiting principle, including these non-human stakeholders creates a largely arbitrary ethical framework where corporate decision makers are empowered to justify a broad range of behaviors as ethical — a dangerous proposition in corporate America.This analysis comes at a valuable time as we appear to be at a critical juncture given the convergence of large-scale agriculture, shifting paradigms regarding corporate ethics, and a world population approaching eight billion. For this reason, this Article should serve as a catalyst to spark future research into this subject specifically and the broader subjects of corporate ethics and stakeholder theory more generally. With the rise of ESG investing and increasing numbers of firms supporting stakeholder-based initiatives, this issue will no doubt increase in significance during the twenty-first century