Greenwashing and greenhushing occupy opposite ends of a continuum. That is, the organizing claim, and it needs defense, not assertion. Greenwashing is the selective release of favorable environmental information together with the suppression or distortion of unfavorable information, so that the audience forms a better impression of the firm than the facts warrant; the practice runs from outright to technically true half-truths (Delmas & Burbano, 2011; Lyon & Maxwell, 2011; de Jong et al., 2020). Greenhushing is the opposite move: a firm with something true and favorable to report says nothing or reports only the legal minimum to avoid scrutiny or controversy (Font et al., 2017; South Pole, 2022). The two images are mirror images. Greenwashing manipulates by saying too much that is not warranted; greenhushing manipulates by saying too little that is.

The idea that disclosure can fail in two directions is not new to the empirical literature, and naming the precedent sharpens its contribution instead of weakening it. Kim and Lyon (2015) separate greenwash, the exaggeration of performance, from brownwash, the undue modesty of firms that understate it, and show that both distort the disclosure environment. In a global study, Marquis et al. (2016) found that firms disclose selectively to manage scrutiny. Fabrizio and Kim (2019) documented reluctant disclosure as a recognizable posture. The present article adds normative. It asks not when firms exaggerate or fall silent but whether each is wrong, why, and what an adequate disclosure between the two would look like.

Both poles share one defect: each breaks the duty of veracity in the relationship between the firm and the public, and each opens the same gap between what the firm knows about its conduct and what its audience can know. Information economics makes the parallel exact. In signalling terms, greenwashing is a pooling strategy, a low-quality firm mimicking the signal of a high-quality firm; greenhushing is the choice of a high-quality firm not to separate itself from the pool (Spence, 1973; Hilton, 2025b). In both cases, the disclosure channel fails to carry the information that would allow stakeholders to distinguish genuine performance from its absence. The harm reaches past the individual deceived party to the integrity of the channel itself, on which every stakeholder depends (Freeman, 1984).

Framing the two practices as a spectrum yields an immediate analytic payoff: it locates the ethically adequate disclosure not at one end but in the middle region, and it shows that a firm can fail by moving in either direction. In this sense, the article speaks of a zone of adequacy between overclaiming and silence. The metaphor of a spectrum should not be read as implying a single quantitative dimension, along which more disclosure is always better up to a point and worse thereafter. Rather, the spectrum is defined by the relation between what is communicated and what is true and material: greenwashing asserts more favorable content than truth supports, greenhushing communicates less material content than the public is owed, and adequate disclosure matches communication to warranted, material truth. These two practices are also historically entangled with the evolution of disclosure regulations, as shown in Figure 1. The section developing the Normative Disclosure Ethics Framework (NDEF) argues that the boundaries of the adequate zone are fixed by three operating together, rather than one criterion. Before that, the article specifies the method by which the spectrum was reconstructed from the literature because the legitimacy of the framework depends on whether it was drawn from the literature or imposed upon it.

Before turning to the two studies, a brief profile of the corpus sets the scene and flags a limitation that recurs below. The 88 sources comprised 53 focused on greenwashing, 16 on greenhushing, 4 on both, and 15 foundational anchors from moral philosophy, methodology, and stakeholder or signalling theory; 52 were empirical studies (Extended data - Figure C2). Two features stand out. First, coverage is uneven across themes, concentrated on decoupling and selective disclosure, definitions, and consumer or employee responses, and thin on emerging greenhushing themes (Extended data - Figure C1). Second, and more consequential for interpretation, the empirical base is geographically narrow; of the studies that state a setting, more come from Chinese listed-firm data than from all other jurisdictions combined (Extended data - Figure C3). Table 1C lists the full profile. These features bound the generalizability of the empirical regularities discussed below, a point the Limitations section develops.

Regarding greenwashing, the field has settled on a working picture: strategic misrepresentation driven by identifiable pressures. This maturity provides normative work a firm base. The concept goes back to Laufer (2003), who cast greenwashing as a failure of social accountability, and later sharpened both its drivers and its forms. Delmas and Burbano (2011) sorted the drivers into external, organizational, and individual levels, showing that the practice is a predictable response to market and regulatory incentives and not an aberration. Lyon and Maxwell (2011) formalized the informational core, modeling greenwash as selective disclosure under the threat of audit. Siano et al. (2017) widened the taxonomy after the Volkswagen scandal to cover outright fabrication as well as selective emphasis. Bowen (2014) and Bowen and Aragon-Correa (2014) brought about symbolic corporate environmentalism, and a recent state-of-the-art review tracked the field’s growth and fragmentation (Zioło et al., 2024). Table 1A organizes the corpus according to the theme.

Research on the antecedents of greenwashing has grown rapidly, and much of it has been built on Chinese regulatory and disclosure data. One stream isolates regulations and policies. Evolutionary game and panel studies ask whether government rules deter greenwashing or merely displace it (Sun & Zhang, 2019; Zhao & Lee, 2024), and newer work ties climate policy, environmental centralization, and regulatory proximity to its intensity (Xu & Zhou, 2026; Luo & Li, 2026; Zhao, W., et al., 2026b). A second stream looks inside the firm at board characteristics, financial constraints, institutional complexity, and political connections (Chen & Dagestani, 2023; Xia et al., 2023; Testa et al., 2018; Chen et al., 2025; Kudłak, 2024). A third tracks the pull of digital infrastructure and public scrutiny, where government digitalization, social media attention, and online investor platforms reshape the incentive to misrepresent (Xu et al., 2024; Ren et al., 2024; Long et al., 2024).

The consequences run through markets, consumers, and employees, and evidence agrees that detection brings real costs. In markets, studies weigh how greenwashing is priced, whether it buys legitimacy, and what penalties follow exposure (Du, 2015; Berrone et al., 2017; Wu et al., 2020; Taddeo et al., 2026), with societal trust and market power shifting the results (Haidar, 2025; Liu, X., et al., 2025). For individuals, perceived greenwashing corrodes consumer trust and satisfaction, breeds skepticism (Nyilasy et al., 2014; Szabo & Webster, 2021; Ioannou et al., 2023; Rinaldi et al., 2026), and moves employees from an ethical voice to negative pro-environmental responses (Robertson et al., 2023; Xiang et al., 2024; Tao, 2025). One thread connects them: The cost lands on the credibility of all environmental claims, not only on the firm that lies.

The most important stream for this article is decoupling, legitimacy, and selective disclosure, because it bridges greenhushing. Marquis et al. (2016) showed that firms disclose selectively to manage scrutiny and that normative pressure constrains the practice; Kim and Lyon (2015) modeled the symmetric errors of exaggeration and undue modesty; Fabrizio and Kim (2019) documented reluctant disclosure outright. Decoupling between commitment and outcome, read by audiences as greenwashing, has been studied at the level of business groups and stakeholder legitimacy (Bothello et al., 2023; Lee & Raschke, 2023; Feix et al., 2026). The materials for a theory of silence are already here: a firm that discloses selectively to dodge scrutiny stands one step away from a firm that discloses nothing. What this literature supplies descriptively, the present article supplies normally.

The last stream concerns measurement and detection, and it matters because the accuracy condition defended in the section developing the NDEF assumes that claims can, in principle, be checked against performance. Researchers have built taxonomies, expert indices, and, lately, machine-learning classifiers to distinguish substantive environmental communication from symbolic (Siano et al., 2017; Abouarab et al., 2024; Zhao, Q., et al., 2026a), and have asked whether even award-winning or highly rated firms remain clear of greenwashing (Marrucci et al., 2025; Zhang et al., 2025). Across all of these, normative judgment remains implicit. The corpus treats greenwashing as harmful and worth deterring, yet its tools are descriptive and strategic; when ethics enter, it enters at the level of consequence, and the deontological and character dimensions go unexamined. That is, the gap that a normative synthesis can fill.

Greenhushing is an emerging field that has named a phenomenon faster than it theorized, although recent empirical work is closing the gap. The term entered scholarship with Font et al. (2017), who found tourism businesses that practiced sustainability but deliberately under-communicated it, and who called it moral muteness, not moral hypocrisy. It gained wider salience through practitioner research, especially the South Pole (2022) survey: roughly one in four of the climate-aware companies it studied had chosen not to publicize their science-based targets, and the report popularized the label green hushing. The first systematic review has since appeared in marketing (Dias et al., 2025), and an institutional account reads Greenhush as a response to institutional complexity and regulatory uncertainty (Hilton, 2025a). Table 1B organizes the corpus according to the theme.

A wave of recent empirical work, again leaning on Chinese data, has begun to pin down the antecedents and effects of corporate silence. Studies tie greenhushing to ESG underperformance, institutional-investor distraction, and peer imitation (Zhang et al., 2026a, 2026b; Liu et al., 2026). Its firm-level effects are not uniformly bad; greenhushing has been found to lower a firm’s stock price crash risk by raising market attention and cutting agency costs (Cheng et al., 2024), which sharpens the gap between private benefits and social costs. The regulatory evidence, in turn, cuts against a simple ‘rules breed silence’ story: China’s 2015 New Environmental Protection Law is associated with less greenhushing, especially among heavy polluters, and its authors read Chinese greenhushing as rooted in institutional fragility rather than strategic silence (Wang et al., 2026). Cross-cultural work compares drivers across East Asian economies (Tao, 2024). This evidence already shows that silence answers many of the same pressures as greenwashing, which is the reason for treating the two as poles of one phenomenon.

The second stream treats greenhushing as a strategic behavior and weighs its institutional and legal standing. Hilton (2025b) models greenhush and greenwash together as equilibria of a signalling game, where silence emerges once signalling costs outrun the benefits of disclosure. Villiers (2026), writing from law and governance, analyzes greenhushing as strategic silence and argues that it corrodes stakeholder engagement; sectoral studies follow it into banking and finance (De Novellis et al., 2025). These accounts land on the same point: Silence is neither neutral nor cautious. It is a calculated communicative choice with distributional consequences, which is why it invites an ethical evaluation.

The third stream asks how audiences react to silence and how it might be measured, which bears on the proportionality and courage conditions developed later. Investor experiments suggest that it is the assurance of ESG disclosure, more than greenhushing itself, that moves investors’ judgments (Sakchuenyos & Haji, 2025), and governance research asks whether board composition curbs the practice (Ma et al., 2026). In hospitality and services, studies have tested whether customers actually prefer silence to communication, and the mixed results warn against treating greenhushing as harmless discretion (Ettinger et al., 2021; Cavusoglu et al., 2026; Khan et al., 2025). Some researchers have measured the construct directly using a consumer-based Greenhushing attitude scale (Yakın et al., 2026). One feature recurs across the corpus: the language of muteness and silence points toward virtue-theoretic and epistemic categories without developing them. The raw materials for normative analysis are as follows: no one has assembled them.

Synthesizing the two corpora reveals a gap that neither field has filled: There is no systematic, philosophically grounded account of disclosure honesty that addresses overclaiming and silence within a single normative structure. Applications of ethical theory to greenwashing exist, but rigorous, peer-reviewed treatments tend to address one tradition at a time, and the explicit tri-framework discussions that do exist are largely confined to non-archival or practitioner outlets and do not extend to greenhushing. Existing integrative treatments of the two practices are descriptive and predictive rather than normative (Hilton, 2025a, 2025b; Kim & Lyon, 2015). No source identified in this review applies deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics in parallel to both poles of the disclosure spectrum and builds a positive framework from the results. Table 2 presents the present contributions to prior work. The remainder of the article occupies that gap, beginning with three lenses.

Read side by side, the two corpora reveal a further pattern: greenwashing and greenhushing answer a shared set of pressures, which strengthens the case of treating them as one phenomenon. Regulation, public scrutiny, investor attention, and reputational risk are antecedents of both sides. Tighter rules deter false claims in some studies (Sun & Zhang, 2019) and induce silence in others (Wang et al., 2026); Sharper public attention can curb exaggeration (Ren et al., 2024) or drive firms out of disclosure altogether (Liu et al., 2026). Under the same incentives, the same firm may swing toward either pole, depending on whether it fears exposure to overclaiming or backlash for claiming at all. A single normative standard should track this shared structure exactly, which is why a framework tuned to one pole alone will misfire as conditions shift.

This section reads both poles of the spectrum through three traditions in turn, and the structure is deliberately symmetrical, so that each tradition is asked the same question about each practice. The point is not to adjudicate among the traditions, but to record what each says, so that the convergence claimed in the section developing the NDEF can be assessed on the evidence of the verdicts themselves. Table 3 maps each tradition to the disclosure criterion it grounds, and Table 4 summarizes the six verdicts developed in the subsections.

The choices of these three traditions were not arbitrary. They are the three families of normative theory that a philosophically literate reviewer would expect any complete moral assessment to canvass, since each locates moral status in a different place, the act, its outcomes, and the agent, and between them, they exhaust the standard typology of normative ethics. The methodological point that follows is decisive in this argument. If a practice is condemned on only one of the three, the condemnation is contestable because it depends on accepting the disputed foundations of tradition. If condemned on all three, the verdict is robust to disagreement about foundations, which is the kind of overlapping consensus a normative argument addressed to a plural audience should seek. Therefore, the value of the exercise lies less in any single verdict than in whether the three coincide, and the section developing the NDEF shows that they do.

Kantian deontology condemns both poles because both treat the audience as mere means and rest on maxims that cannot be universalized. For Kant, the wrong of deception lies not in its consequences but in its form: to assert what one does not warrant, in pursuit of an end, the other would not freely endorse if informed, is to use the other’s rational agency as a tool (Kant, 1785/2012). Greenwashing is a textbook case. The maxim, advertise environmental virtue one does not possess when it is profitable, cannot be willed as a universal law without destroying the very practice of environmental claims it exploits, and manipulates stakeholders by design. Kant’s hard line of truthfulness, including his insistence that the duty not to lie holds even under pressure (Kant, 1797/1996), gives the deontological verdict on greenwashing its characteristic absoluteness.

Greenhushing is a more interesting deontological case, and the tradition has the resources to condemn it as well, although the argument runs through omission rather than assertion. Strategic silence does not need to involve a false statement, so a narrow reading might seem exempt it. The Kantian reply is that veracity is not merely a duty to avoid false assertions but a duty grounded in respect to others as rational agents who depend on warranted information to govern their own choices. When a firm possesses material environmental information that the public has a legitimate interest in, and withholds it precisely so that the public cannot scrutinize or act on it, the maxim of that silence, conceal material truth when disclosure invites accountability, fails universalization for the same reason the lie does: it depends on others generally not adopting it. Greenhushing is thus a culpable omission, a failure of the imperfect duty to make oneself answerable, shading into a violation of the duty not to manipulate when silence is strategically aimed at preventing informed response. In short, the deontological lens treats both poles as offenses against the same duty of veracity, differing only in whether the offense is committed or not.

Classical utilitarianism condemns both poles via another route. It does not ask about the form of the act, but about its effects on aggregate welfare, and the two practices do distinct but comparable social harm. For Bentham (1789/1996) and Mill (1863/1998), an act addresses its contribution to general happiness, and a disclosure regime addresses the welfare effects of the information environment it creates. However, greenwashing degrades the environment by misdirecting it. False positive signals attract capital, consumer spending, and political attention toward firms that have not earned them, wasting scarce decarbonization resources; once the deception surfaces, trust in all environmental claims falls, which raises the cost of credible signalling for genuine performers and weakens the market mechanism on which collective climate action partly relies on (Lyon & Maxwell, 2011; Spence, 1973). Empirical records support this mechanism, with documented trust erosion and financial penalties after exposure (Wu et al., 2020; Haidar, 2025; Taddeo et al., 2026).

Greenhushing does welfare harm that is easy to miss, precisely because no false claim is made, yet on consequentialist grounds, it can be severe. When firms with genuine science-based achievements keep them quiet, effective practice spreads more slowly; peers lose models to copy, benchmarks go unset, and the social learning that drives down the cost of green technology is lost (South Pole, 2022). Silence also thins the evidence base for ambitious policy, since regulators and investors underrate what is achievable when achievers say nothing. Because stronger disclosure regulations are associated with less greenhushing (Wang et al., 2026), the retreat from such regulations threatens to widen this welfare loss (Hilton, 2025b). Therefore, the consequentialist verdict is that greenhushing is a failure of knowledge diffusion with real opportunity costs for decarbonization, even though and partly because it does not lie. On this lens, both poles stand condemned to degrade the welfare-relevant information environment, one by polluting it and the other by starving it.

Virtue ethics condemns both poles by shifting attention from the act to the agent, and it supplies vocabulary that the other two lenses lack for the specific wrong of strategic silence. For Aristotle, truthfulness is itself a virtue, a means of self-presentation between boastful exaggeration and self-deprecating concealment, and it is exercised well only by an agent with phronesis–the practical wisdom to discern what should be said, to whom, and how (Aristotle, ca. 350 BCE/2000). Greenwashing is, in these terms, the vice of boastfulness compounded by a kind of hubris: it is the disposition to claim more than one is, and its persistence signals the absence of practical wisdom that would recognize the claim as both false and self-undermining.

Greenhushing maps onto the opposite vice, and contemporary virtue epistemology precisely names it. Deficiency at stake is a failure of intellectual or epistemic courage, a virtue that disposes an agent to communicate what should be communicated despite the risk of criticism or loss (Roberts & Wood, 2007; Baehr, 2011). Zagzebski (1996) integrated such intellectual virtues into a unified virtue theory in which courage in the epistemic domain is continuous with courage in the moral domain. On this account, the firm that conceals genuine achievement out of fear of activist criticism, regulatory attention, or political backlash exhibits epistemic cowardice, which makes it allows the prospect of difficult to silence its contribution to shared understanding. (The compact term is used here as a development of the courage-and-its-vices analysis in Roberts and Wood (2007) and Baehr (2011), rather than as a coinage of any single author.) The virtue lens thus completes the symmetry: greenwashing is the vice of excess in self-presentation, greenhushing the vice of deficiency, and adequate disclosure of the courageous, practically wise, mean between them.

The central claim is that the six verdicts in Table 4 form a convergence, not an arbitrary list, and that convergence licenses a positive framework. Three traditions disagree about the foundations of morality, whether rightness lies in the form of an act, its consequences, or the character it expresses. They still agree to condemn both poles of the disclosure spectrum. The Normative Disclosure Ethics Framework states the positive side of that agreement: Disclosure is ethically adequate only when it is accurate, proportionate, and courageous. Accuracy is the deontological condition: asserts nothing unwarranted and conceals nothing. Proportionality is a consequentialist condition that serves a welfare-relevant information environment instead of degrading it. Courage is the virtue condition: disclosure from a stable disposition to truthfulness, not because compulsion forces disclosure or fear to suppress it.

The framework’s sharpest and most contestable claim is that the three conditions are jointly necessary and non-substitutable: fail one and excelling at the others does not redeem the disclosure. This is what separates the framework from a checklist of nice properties, so it must survive the two objections that a philosophically trained reader raises first. One: The three conditions are really a single condition under the three names. Two: Non-substitutability makes no sense for the consequentialist condition since consequentialism is itself a doctrine of trade-offs. The next two subsections discuss these in turn, and the third section sets out the internal ordering. Figure 3 shows the framework as an intersection of these three conditions.

If accuracy, proportionality, and courage were the three labels for honesty, they would always travel together. They do not. The conditions come apart in real cases, and the conditions that can be satisfied separately are not synonymous. Three cases make up this point. First, a disclosure can be accurate yet disproportionate: a firm that fears backlash and releases only the legal minimum makes no false statement, so accuracy holds, yet it starves the information environment and fails proportionality, and if fear is the motive, it fails courage too. The Greenhushing-adjacent case, then, shows that accuracy does not entail proportionality. Second, a disclosure can be welfare-promoting yet inaccurate: exaggerating climate progress to inspire an industry to follow, and whatever the effects, veracity breaks, so proportionality does not entail accuracy. Third, a disclosure can be accurate and proportionate, yet cowardly: a firm that discloses fully only because an auditor compels it, and would otherwise have hidden everything, meets both action conditions but lacks virtue. None of these is exotic; each matches a recognizable corporate behavior, and together they show three distinct dimensions, not one renamed dimension.

The fourth case highlights why accuracy must be understood as completeness rather than mere literal truth. A firm can only assert true statements that are still misled by selecting which truths to tell, foregrounding a trivial green initiative while omitting material harm. Empirical literature documents exactly this gradient from outright lies to technically true half-truths (de Jong et al., 2020) and the selective disclosure that exploits it (Marquis et al., 2016). The NDEF handles such cases through the second clause of the accuracy condition, the prohibition on concealing the material: the half-truth fails accuracy not because any sentence is false but because the disclosure as a whole is misrepresented by omission. This is why accuracy, properly specified, already works that a naive truth condition would miss, and why it cannot be reduced to the avoidance of false assertion alone.

The sharpest objection is that non-substitutability cannot apply to the consequentialist condition because consequentialism is just the view that goods may be traded off to maximize the aggregate, so to forbid trading proportionality against the other conditions is to misunderstand it. The objection succeeds against a careless version of the framework and must be answered carefully. The reply distinguishes between these two levels. Within the consequentialist condition, proportionality is indeed a balancing notion: it asks whether this disclosure, against feasible alternatives, best serves the information environment, and whether the internal question is settled by weighing effects. The non-substitutability claim operates at a different meta-level: it concerns how the verdicts of the three distinct traditions combine into an all-things-considered judgment of adequacy. The claim is not that good consequences may never be weighed against each other, but that an act that fails the deontological accuracy test is not made adequate by scoring well on the consequentialist test and conversely. The joint necessity at the meta-level is fully compatible with balancing inside each condition.

This meta-level non-substitutability is not stipulated; it is supported by a consequentialist argument, which is why convergence is stable rather than coincidental. A disclosure regime that permitted welfare-justified deception, which allowed accuracy to be traded away whenever the numbers seemed to favor it, would destroy the credibility that makes any disclosure informative in the first place. Once audiences know that claims may be false when falsehood pays, no claim carries information and the welfare benefits that justify the occasional lie evaporate. Therefore, a sophisticated, rule-level consequentialist has reason to treat accuracy as a near-inviolable constraint rather than a tradeable quantity (Mill, 1863/1998). The three traditions converge not by accident but because each pursued rigorously points to the same structural requirement: honest disclosure must be protected as a condition of the practice, not optimized away within it. Convergence is thus best read as evidence that courageous, accurate, and proportionate disclosure is the only stable equilibrium of the normative system, the position that does not undermine itself when generalized.

Joint necessity is granted, and the framework still needs an internal structure for cases where the conditions pull apart. This structure provides NDEF with action-guiding content instead of leaving three standoff conditions. Accuracy takes the role of a side constraint: it bounds the space of permissible disclosures, ruling out assertion of the unwarranted and concealment of the material before any welfare calculation starts. Proportionality then works inside that space, choosing among accurate disclosures that best serve the information environment. After all, accuracy alone does not tell a firm how much to say or how to frame it, and an accurate disclosure can still be misled by dropping the context or burying the material in the trivial. Courage is not a third action criterion; it is the disposition that explains why a firm keeps meeting the first two conditions when no one is forcing them. The ordering also names a real moral remainder: where only fully accurate disclosure would itself cause grave and disproportionate harm, the framework does not dissolve the conflict by formula. It asks that accuracy not be sacrificed lightly, and that any departure be carried as an acknowledged moral cost, not a balance, struck and forgotten.

This ordering yields a precise definition of an adequate zone between overclaiming and silence. A disclosure sits in the zone when it asserts nothing unwarranted and conceals nothing material (accuracy holds), when it is the accurate option that best serves stakeholders’ warranted information needs (proportionality is optimized inside the constraint), and when it comes from a settled disposition to truthful communication, not from compulsion or fear (courage is present). Greenwashing leaves the zone by breaching accuracy from the side of excess; greenhushing leaves it by breaching proportionality, and usually courages, from the side of deficiency. Table 5 and Figures 3 and 4 summarize the framework and spectrum, respectively.

The argument has limitations that bound its claims, and naming them precisely is a part of the contribution. The first is methodology. The corpus was assembled through open scholarly search and citation tracing, with metadata verified against Crossref, rather than through an exhaustive query of proprietary indexes, which is interpretive and conceptual rather than exhaustive. A formal, reproducible search of Scopus and Web of Science, with explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria and a documented selection flow, should accompany submission and may surface sources that refine the synthesis. The corpus is also asymmetric: although the Greenhushing evidence base has grown quickly, it remains thinner than the greenwashing literature and leans in places on grey literature, principally South Pole (2022), so empirical claims about the prevalence of silence are provisional. These are limits of evidence, not of the normative argument that stands on the philosophical reasoning of Sections 5 and 6.

A further evidentiary caveat concerns the geographic concentration of a recent empirical corpus. A large share of greenwashing and greenhushing studies published since 2022 draws on Chinese listed-firm data and a distinctive regulatory setting (for example, Long et al., 2024; Wang et al., 2026; Zhang et al., 2026a). This concentration reflects data availability and a fast-moving policy environment, but it bounds the generalizability of the empirical regularities, and claims about how firms respond to disclosure regulations should be read with that limit in mind. The normative framework itself is not tied to any jurisdiction, yet the behavioral predictions in the Discussion will require testing across institutional settings, including the European context, whose deregulation motivates them.

The second limitation concerns its philosophical scope. The framework is built from three canonical Western traditions, and this is a substantive narrowing rather than a neutral starting point. Other normative resources could change the analysis: discourse ethics would recast disclosure as a condition of legitimate communicative action and might ground the public’s entitlement to information more directly than any of the three traditions used here (Habermas, 1983/1990); care ethics, relational and non-Western traditions, and indigenous environmental ethics would frame the duties of disclosure differently. The convergence reported here is therefore a convergence among the three traditions, not a proof of universal agreement, and future work should test whether the accurate-proportionate-courageous structure survives contact with these other lenses or must be revised. A further philosophical task is to specify materiality; since the accuracy side constraint depends on a defensible account of which concealed information counts as material, a question this article has treated as given.

The third direction is empirical operationalization. The NDEF is a normative framework, but its three conditions invite measurement: accuracy through verification of claims against performance, proportionality through the fit between disclosed and material information, and courage through the persistence of disclosure under varying enforcement and reputational pressure. The rapid growth of empirical greenhushing research, which has exploited regulatory changes in natural experiments (Wang et al., 2026; Zhang et al., 2026a; Liu et al., 2026), suggests that the framework’s central behavioral prediction is testable: the withdrawal of mandatory disclosure should increase greenhushing among previously compelled firms. Confirming or disconfirming that prediction would connect the normative framework to observable corporate behavior and would test, rather than merely assuming, the claim that courage is the condition that stabilizes honest disclosure when external pressure relaxes.

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