Ethics In Action

For Sustainable & Integral Development

Ethics in Action proposes businesses produce goods and services that facilitate human flourishing and dignity rather than “bads” that cause addictions, diseases, environmental degradation, and other harms. Meet real human needs rather than false needs created by advertising.

Ethics in Action proposes businesses commit to becoming carbon neutral by using clean energy sources and to eliminating all forms of environmental degradation, including pollution and oil spills.

Ethics in Action proposes businesses do not seek to create or exploit monopoly power and monopoly rents, accept and cultivate a healthy balance between corporate competition and collaboration, and support antitrust efforts at the national and international level to ensure a competitive environment where market power is limited.

Ethics in Action proposes businesses Do not avoid or evade taxes, take bribes, offer bribes, or engage in any kind of financial corruption or malfeasance. Support the elimination of tax havens all across the world, and promote greater transparency, stricter reporting standards, and stronger criminal penalties for corporate managers and Board members in cases of corruption and criminal fraud.

Ethics in Action for Peace
Ethics in Action to End Poverty
Statement on Corporate Responsibility
Statement of Migration

Sustainable development seeks a holistic approach to well-being based on poverty reduction, social inclusion, and care for the earth, while integral development adds the concern for full human flourishing across all dimensions of life. The Ethics in Action initiative starts from the position that the challenges related to sustainable and integral development are profoundly moral, requiring not only technical solutions but the actualization of universal ethical principles such as human dignity, social justice, the common good, and shared well-being.

Such challenges include forms of violence and coercion (war, violent religious and ethnic extremism, gender violence, modern slavery, drug trafficking), environmental threats (climate change, species and habitat destruction), and social exclusion (poverty, inequality, deprivation, gender discrimination, and the marginalization of indigenous peoples and minorities). Individuals and communities on all levels have genuine capacities to respond to these challenges and thus, have related moral obligations to do so.

Ethics in Action seeks to advance the moral efforts essential to grappling with the challenges to sustainable and integral development. The moral dimension focuses on the human capacity to achieve sustainable and integral development and the corresponding moral obligations to actuate that capacity. Pope Francis’ encyclical, Laudato Si’, offers the foundational text for this effort.  The encyclical, as Pope Francis wrote, addresses “every person living on this planet. … In this Encyclical, I would like to enter into dialogue with all people about our common home.” Ethics in Action is guided in a significant fashion by the Sustainable Development Goals, which offer a compelling global framework for action and cooperation on behalf of our common home and its people.

With the election of Pope Francis came a new area of championing the SDGS and spiritual leaders, scientific leaders, business leaders, foundation leaders have been flocking to the Vatican to discuss world issues. In the wake of a new era, Blue Chip participated in these initial discussions and co-founded Ethics in Action. The initiative began in 2016 and will culminate in 2018, having facilitated multiple sessions bringing religious and civic leaders together “to draw out the underling ethical values and principles needed to inform a shared moral vision of human flourishing—including the development of a multi-religious moral consensus that can be communicated widely across diverse religious communities and other stakeholders to equip them with the moral agency essential to overcoming these challenges.”