>Date: Wed, 27 Sep 1995 08:58:24 -0500 (CDT) >From: Tibor R Machan [This is work in progress, not to be quoted for publication.] The Malady of Business Bashing Tibor R. Machan No Reason for Rejoicing Many who prize the free society and its free market place believe that we are witnessing a powerful trend, but I believe that this is premature. We have not reached the "end of history," when democratic capitalism and liberalism triumph. No such end is forthcoming, and we have no basis for believing that current developments amount to even a significant temporary trend.1 The embrace of privatization during the early 1990s -- including the softening of the post-Soviet Eastern European attitudes toward some elements of private enterprise -- was not motivated by the view that commerce is honorable. Rather it rested largely on the pragmatic perspective that commerce, however distasteful, is a useful way to achieve some measure of economic prosperity. Without recognition of the right to liberty of professionals in the field of business, and without respect for human commerce, the initial move toward privatization has already subsided in Russia, for example. Once government officials believe that the economy has been revitalized enough, or that they may squeeze out the work from their citizens by means other than free individual motivation, it will revive the old agenda of sacrificing everything for the securement of some absolute guarantee of universal and equal welfare through government regimentation. In short, if one neglects the principle that men and women not only have the right to seek prosperity in life but in fact act properly or virtuously -- i.e., prudently -- in the bulk of the cases when they do so, the privatization or liberalization movement cannot steer many cultures away from their fundamental and tragic ambivalence about commerce. They will continue to condemn an honorable institution and all of its practitioners to a morally inferior status. Schizophrenic Thinking Abut Business The thinking about business and commerce in America is mixed. Most educated opinions, coming from the liberal arts and social sciences, follow Charles Baudelaire's view: "Commerce is satanic, because it is the basest and vilest form of egoism."2 Along with many Hollywood TV and movie writers, many intellectuals would prefer to eliminate or subdue commerce. Ambivalence toward business began in ancient times. Plato, for example, consigned the trader to the lowest rung of the ideal community.3 As Joseph Baldacchino, reviewing Charles Taylor's scholarly book, Sources of the Self, observes, "on this scale [Plato's order of social reality] the philosopher, who devotes his life to contemplation of the unchanging Good, is highest. The citizen, who acts to order the political life of the city-state, though less exalted than the philosopher, also participates in the order of the Good and therefore shares in the good life. By contrast, the mundane work of the household or of commerce, though providing the material without which mere life would be impossible, does not itself partakes of the good life."4 Plato's opinion of profiteers was that their values were plebeian.5 Aristotle was less of an intellectual elitist but in his ethics and politics trade fares no less badly. Somehow despite their brilliance in so many spheres of human concern, the temptation to elevate their own mode of striving to be good as the dominant or perhaps even sole mode was not well enough resisted. History and the Bad Rep of Business Medieval Europe certainly embraced disdain for commerce. The Biblical idea that the rich will find it awfully hard to enter into the kingdom of heaven indicates clearly enough that the pursuit of wealth was not approved.6 The Jesus' only act of violence is when he "cast out all those who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers."7 In short, Jesus attacked merchants - money lenders - conducting business in a temple, presumably leaving others be who may well have been usurping holy matters as well, only in other ways. Most of the prominent moral systems, East and West, have had no sympathy for money making, profiteering, enterprise and, thus, for the profession of business. In modern European thought the most sustain critique of commercial life of those may have been advanced, albeit largely implicitly, by Immanuel Kant.8 The reason is that for Kant the pursuit of any material (empirical) objective has to be at least irrelevant to the moral quality of one's actions and most probably pernicious. Moral merit must flow from intending to do what formal moral law commands and because it commands it; thus the moral law is not tied to any goal or end we might choose to pursue. It is a force all on its own, based on pure reason -- a point that is fraught with philosophical difficulties yet has commanded much respect in subsequent moral philosophy.9 In modern Europe Jews were both envied and later systematically liquidated for flourishing in the world of commerce. Marxism, supposedly a radical departure from Western culture, joined the chorus when Marx used Jews as the typical bourgeois citizens, the models of callous capitalists whose pursuit of prosperity was dismissed as crude commodity fetishism.10 Business as a profession has never been secured an honorable place in Western culture. The irony of this is that without mistrust of the institution, genuine failings of business go unidentified and unchecked. When the profession of business is viewed as nearly synonymous with huckstering, then genuine criticism gets devoured by uniform cynicism; no proper standards of the profession will be identified since that would be an admission that the field could be honorable after all.11 The profession of business lacks respect. This is evident throughout contemporary culture -- the movies make people in business the worst types, sitcoms suggest it, dramas from the highbrow such as Death of a Salesman to the ordinary, such as Wall Street present people in business as largely evil, callous, greedy, insensitive, and murderous to boot. It is perhaps the main obstacle to genuine reform in Eastern Europe, where despite the demise of the centrally planned system, the bulk of the people are still clamoring for the leadership of meddlesome politicians who will, they believe, stem the rapaciousness of those in business, people who, everyone "knows," are up to no good. This, in part, has led to the reelection of hundreds of old communists in Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland, and elsewhere, all on the ticket that they will do in the profiteers, who, everyone "knows," deserve no liberty to embark upon their enterprises. Such attitudes are killing not only the chances the Easter Europeans have for some measure of economic recovery, after decades of debilitation by "idealistic" bureaucrats, but also many countries in the West that could use a bit of fervent commercial recovery. Business versus other Professions The same is not the case with other professions, even if all of them have detractors in our culture, except in so far as they are closely associated with making money. Medicine is generally respected, as is even law (once it's divorced from money), education, science, and art, although whenever people in these fields are said to be financially ambitious, their reputation suffers. Politics has its own troubles mostly because of its close ties to fund raising and to the desire to gain power and profit. Even in politics there are some exceptions, usually characterized as "statesmen," who are respected -- a George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Adlei Stevenson, J. William Fulbright, Helmut Schmitt, Winston Churchill, or Michael Gorbachev gains respect for skills independent of economic considerations. What is important is that all these professionals are respected as practitioners of their craft or art, whereas when people in business are respected it tends to be in spite of their profession -- Lee Iacocca, Henry Ford, Bernard Baruch, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, et al., because they made contributions to the arts, sciences or education. It is business itself -- the profession and the underlying activity and its purpose -- that lacks respect. Commerce is maligned everywhere -- "commercial" is a pejorative term, as in "Christmas has become commercial" or "Dentistry has become commercialized." Or is it merely that various professions have exhibited a tendency toward being corrupted as they eye the bottom line? Or maybe it is morally odious to seek prosperity, especially by means of making money? Certainly innumerable influential thinkers from Plato and Plotinus to Marx and Sartre, as well as innumerable contemporary followers, have held this view. Yet at the same time as the critical chorus continues, it is accepted that both small and big business is extremely useful, as is the host society. Repair shops, stores, retail merchants of all types, dams, factories, massive shopping centers, huge aircraft, saving and loan services, franchising establishments, hotels and motels, credit cards, newspapers, television and thousands of other products and services could not function as efficiently as they do in society without the institution of the freely flowing business corporation. Big business seems especially indispensable in assuming much responsibility for industrial mishaps, and their attendant lawsuits.12 Governments, which enjoy near immunity from such suits, would not be very accommodating entrepreneurs. When governments do take on such tasks, they tend to turn their society into a kind of forced labor camp, evidenced by what we now know about the industrial processes of the Soviet Union. Without the profit motive, except in rare and intimate circumstances, it is fear alone that motivates people to work hard. Never Mind Business's Value Despite the obvious utilitarian benefits of business, the institution simply lacks high moral standing for most of our prominent commentators. Superficially one might trace the anti-commercial sentiment to the creation of big businesses by the feudal governments of the tenth through 18th centuries, when the great joint stock companies had been established. These were efforts by governments to gain wealth and power, especially abroad, by permitting the select establishment of heavily taxed business ventures, by means of public investments in enterprises that were granted monopoly status and limited liability privileges. Yet, many noncommercial organizations are big and powerful, especially governments, and there is no comparably generalized disdain toward them. Indeed, despite widespread misbehavior on the part of politicians, government service is still treated, by most of those who set the moral tone of a community, as an honorable calling. Why Is Commerce Derided? The most important reason for anti- commerce is that business focuses on something with which most people have a moral problem, even in our time. Those working in the profession of business unabashedly strive for profit, for prosperity. These are earthly objectives -- happiness, joys and pleasures -- that people seek by way of commerce and business. This is what tends to be the main focus of business, even while those who work in the field may cherish other objectives and pursue other, less mundane, goals. Let me put it another way. Businesses engage in massive efforts to satisfy and please people. They get rich when they read the market right. And the market is nothing other than people spending money chasing various goods and services that will satisfy or please them. People want to live well. And business is "in cahoots" with them, encouraging them to do this in a very efficient way. Even those critics who acknowledge all this will claim that the desire to live well is superficial, or even dishonorable. By this they betray an anti-humanism, a bias against taking comprehensive care of ourselves. Consider, for example, how business thrives from satisfying customers who wish to take care of minor annoyances, such as dandruff, itches, body odors, etc. These objectives are demeaned by the critics, yet they are arguably a significant contribution to a more comfortable life. But that is seen as something unworthy of pursuit. Now it is one thing for people to actually seek joy and happiness, and it is another thing for them to be morally confident about it. In short, many people tend to be divided: they want to live well, to seek joys and delights, but they also claim to honor and respect those who care very little for such "trivial" things. They often feel and express disdain for people and institutions who explicitly pursue the satisfaction of desires, or make a living off such pursuits. Anti-Commercialism and the Mundane Anti-commercialism is the doctrine that satisfying our earthly nature via exchange of goods and services, taking advantage of the chance others offer us to satisfy our desire for comfort, pleasure, delights, joy and excitement, is either the devil's work, or that of our base or lower instincts. What is objectionable about commerce is its unabashed respect for our "mundane" or terrestrial desires and our relationship with other people sometimes exclusively for this purpose. Businesses, specializing in commerce, make it possible for everyone to pursue the satisfaction of these desires and the attainment of prosperity by means of trade, without extracting a proper penalty for this. Business is unashamedly focused on what is fulfilling about this world and exploits the opportunity for satisfying such fulfillment through trade with others. This makes the profit motive (or "greed") at best a tolerable but by no means a respectable trait. Business still has a lowly role in community life. For many (even among professionals), this amounts to a kind of legitimization of sin. (In the highly touted movie Wall Street, the villain -- an amoral financial genius -- makes a speech spelling out the "virtue" of greed. Some academic economists follow suit -- recall the late Proctor Thompson's motto: "Greed is good.") There are several major sources of the anti-materialist or anti-prosperity viewpoint: Western philosophy, Western theology, Eastern philosophy, Eastern theology, contemporary literature, classical literature; history, sociology and psychology In contrast to both the attacks on and defenses of business, I submit that the institution is noble. I base this on the fact that human beings are doing the right thing when they concern themselves primarily with their own and their loved ones' well being or with that of their own communities before the welfare of the society at large. For human life to flourish as a whole, it is necessary for each person to act prudently about his or her material well-being, about the mundane, yet not base, aspects of life. Business and commerce are part and parcel of a fully integrated, decent human culture. Human nature requires we treat them so. Classical liberalism made some headway toward clearing up our ambivalence toward commerce and capitalism. The legality of commerce had been more or less firmly affirmed in Western society. Yet this is insufficient -- it is also necessary for it to gain moral standing. Once the virtue of prudence is sufficiently understood -- as the prescription that every human being ought (naturally) to look out for his own well-being and the well-being of his loved ones -- commerce should no longer suffer a bad reputation.13 Once commerce is recognized as an honorable endeavor, once business takes its place among the respected institutions or professions, it will also be possible to evaluate its genuine problems -- and to propose ways to remedy them. In our ambivalent atmosphere, when all of commerce is under a moral cloud, it is very difficult to identify the moral principles that should guide the profession. If an activity is regarded to be innately immoral, such as child molestation or rape, there can be no thought of its ethics. There can be no ethics of theft or murder. Nor can there be an ethics of breathing or blood circulation -- these occur automatically and one cannot choose to do them well or badly. If business is viewed analogously to either of these, there can be no question about how one ought to engage in it -- it's either morally evil or something that simply happens. As it now stands, with business under a pervasive moral cloud, the very idea of making improvements in how to conduct it loses its meaning. And trying to help as economists are won't to, by making business a kind of unconsciously driven human endeavor, cannot improve on its reputation.14 Making profit in business requires producing something for which people will pay. Business is the profession in which such production for profit occurs. Business as a profession accomplishes its task by addressing itself to the economic needs of people. In other words, the people in business who produce a profit are competent professionals. Of course, there is more to living a human life than being competent in one's profession. Artists, scientists, entertainers, doctors, teachers, politicians, and so on all may be competent, even outstanding, in their work and yet fail in other respects as human beings. And even in the context of one's profession, competence is itself guided in part by ordinary virtues. In all professions it is assumed that competence or excellence involve adherence to ordinary moral principles -- for example, a great artists is not a forger, nor a great athlete a cheat. So, too, a great business professional or doctor or lawyer does not carry forth by immoral means. A person in the world of business is not considered competent if he or she makes headway by fraud, deception, exploitation, or other immoral conduct. Furthermore, if someone succeeds at extortion, deception, etc., even in connection with his or her profession, this does not make one a competent or excellent professional. It makes one a clever charlatan. Business is the black sheep of the professions because it is forthrightly concerned with pleasing people and satisfying their wishes for a pleasant life here on earth. This is an objective which supposedly detracts from spiritual and intellectual pursuits. Economists try to remedy business's reputation by proposing the view that it is useless to fret about the evils of commerce since all people have an innate drive to seek for material riches. As Milton Friedman states, "every individual serves his own private interest ... The great Saints of history have served their 'private interest' just as the most money grubbing miser has served his interest. The private interest is whatever it is that drives an individual." (Encounter, November 11, 1976) But this simply isn't true, as so much economic imprudence and negligence evident in the world clearly testifies. People often fail to pursue their own interest, quite the contrary, they all too frequently neglect and even obstruct it. So the ploy will not work -- we need to show that such a pursuit is right and just and those who help us facilitate it are honorable people, not shysters. In the end, the only sensible stance is that the goal of prosperity, balanced with other objectives in life, is morally commendable, a feature of the fulfilled, flourishing life, even if it may not be the highest good for which all human beings should aim. The profession that helps us attain this objective is, not unlike medicine, science, education and other practical field that help us live well, honorable and should be so regarded. Once this is appreciated, the immensely useful works of business will be allowed to proceed without all the nagging and interference that politicians relentlessly unleash against it. It is scandalous how many of them to this day capitalize on business bashing, on indicting the wealthy among us, for ills they had not only nothing to do with but are mostly counted on to remedy. Without some basic changes in the attitude toward business pretty much everywhere around the globe, our economic vows will not only continue but worsen. But, most importantly, those attitudes that prevail today are doing a grave injustice to a members of a profession who, on the whole, deserve it no more than those of others routinely idolized -- the arts, education, and science. Endnotes: 1 These lines were written prior to the reversals in the 1993 Russian parliamentary elections that have subsequently lent them greater weight. 2 Charles Baudelaire. The source of this quotation has been lost. 3 In The Laws Plato's central character tells us, for example, that "For there are in all three things which every man has an interest; and the interest about money, when rightly regarded, is the third and lowest of them; midway comes the interest of the body; and, first of all, the soul...." 4 Joseph Baldacchino, "The New Public Order: Within and Above [Review of Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self]," Humanitas, Fall 1992/Winter 1993, p. 50. 5 Allan Bloom tells us that "The companion, hence, belongs to, and represents, that lowest class of the Republic which Socrates calls the money-loving or profiteering class, even though the companion professes to berate profiteers...." Allan Bloom, Giants and Dwarfs (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), p. 109. Bloom was one of the most astute translators and interpreters of Plato - see his Plato's Republic (New York: Basic Books, 1972). 6 For a good discussion, see J. D. M. Derrett, "A Camel through the Eye of a Needle," New Testament Studies, Vol. 32 (July 1986), pp. 465-470. Derrett argues that the rich must at least unload their wealth before they can gain God's favor. 7 The New Testament, Matthew, 21:12-13. Jesus is quoted as saying "My house shall be called a house of prayer; but you have made it a den of thieves." Are we not to infer from this that Jesus did not regard selling and buying and money changing as better than theft? 8 A start on developing this line of analysis is made in Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels (New York: New American Library, 1982). The central idea is that Kant's influence strengthened the belief that any practical, productive undertaking lacks moral significance unless it was done without any desire to benefit anyone but only to realize some formal moral law. If one acts so as reap benefits, the act has no moral value whatsoever. And since commercial activities and business primarily aim at profiting the agent or someone the agent wishes to benefit, such conduct and business cannot possess moral value. 9 Consider Amitai Etzioni's highly critical book about economics, The Moral Dimension (New York: The Free Press, 1988), in which he embraces a moderate yet pointed deontological or Kantian view of morality from which commerce and business are evaluated. Etzioni is an influential sociologist and business ethics teacher who edits the journal The Responsive Community, a publication dedicated to promote communitarianism and criticize the kind of individualism associated with economics and commerce. I share Etzioni's dismay with the imperialistic tendencies of economic science, its professed value free stance, and many of its practitioners' disdain toward ethics. But Etzioni's insistence on a purely deontological approach to ethics throws the baby out with the bath water. 10 See Karl Marx, "On The Jewish Question," in Robert C. Trucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), pp. 26-52. Consider the passage, in the concluding section of this essay: "As soon as society succeeds in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism - huckstering and its conditions - the Jew becomes impossible, because his consciousness no longer has an object." 11 In a mid-1980s broadcast on the CBS television news program 60 Minutes, Diane Sawyer labeled loot that trained young Italian pickpockets garner as "profit" in one of her reports. 12 Judging by the well publicized figure of the first lawsuit filed against Union Carbide Corp., namely $15 million, in response to the company's conduct at its Bhopal plant in India, where over 2000 persons were killed or injured as a result of the company's operations. 13 If one equivocates on "loved ones" and insists, quite unreasonably, that this includes the human race -- and for animal rights advocates, many higher animals -- then the point does not hold. Yet it would be corrupting the concept of "love" to include other than those with whom one is reasonably intimate, those one values especially -- family, friends, etc. One needs also to keep in mind the idea that no one can be responsible toward others if that responsibility cannot be fulfilled; nor can anyone truly love those whom one does not know well enough as individuals. The contrary point rests on a misunderstanding and confusion -- e.g., mistaking acknowledging the dignity of others with loving them. 14 One reason the field of business ethics is treated so confusingly within departments of philosophy, where it is usually taught, is this ambivalence about the merits of the profession.