Can business be evaluated morally?

IIt’s not a given that business is like that. Only as good or bad as the members. After all, business is a human endeavor, and its success or failure depends on the ability and goodwill of its members. However, attacks on hierarchical corporations and market economies, often in the form of the Philippines that constantly spring up from the news media, Hollywood, etc., often do not address the particular nature of corporations and their members. , which probably says little other than solving the problem. Eliminate a few bad actors from the company’s executive ranks. We often hear about how greedy, selfish, wasteful, and evil corporations are, with little mention of their nature or value, so we might naturally start thinking, yeah. work Human institutions are themselves especially susceptible to serious immorality.

it’s not. Business can be clearly immoral and sometimes disastrous. However, they should not be treated as particularly bad or evil. Above all, it is governments, not corporations, that have killed more than 100 million people in the past century.

Many companies mistreat their employees, communities, or engage in other morally objectionable behavior. But what does “many” mean? There are currently more than 300 million companies in the world. For example, if 100,000 companies are “bad” companies. many• Assume there is irrefutable evidence of their bad activities and character. Is this an indictment of business itself? Does it even make us question the moral character of the entire global system of corporations?

Considering we’re talking about 0.03% of companies, the answer has to be no.

Companies, or more specifically some of their members, force their employees to work long and difficult hours. do not have moral justification. Companies control employees’ lives outside of work, destroy the environment, promote products manipulatively, and much more. However, there is nothing new when it comes to commercial activities. For as long as there have been corporate societies, people in commercial societies have continued to abuse each other.

But suppose we can arrive at a general moral judgment about the long-pervasive human phenomenon known as “business.” If possible, you probably want to fully understand all the major positives and negatives of your business in relevant detail.

Increased wealth for society as a whole is a major advantage of recent “business” following the development of industrial capitalism. In other words, it is a system of decentralized markets with hierarchical, privatized, profit-seeking corporations (see Gaus 2009). Jason Brennan (2014: 3-4) says:

• Many people accept a common historical explanation. In the 20th century, the world experimented with two major social systems. Countries that experimented with different forms of capitalism became rich, including the United States, Denmark, Sweden, Australia, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea. In contrast, the countries that tried socialism – the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, and North Korea – were hellholes. Socialist governments murdered approximately 100 million (possibly more) of their own citizens.

While markets and corporations within capitalism were often busy enriching the least wealthy, socialist governments were wreaking havoc on the lives of innocent citizens. Gerald Gauss (2009: 86, italics mine) writes of this huge increase in human prosperity: “What is surprising is not simply the difference in absolute levels of wealth, but the range of choices, the It’s the difference in work.” Execute consumable products, the life one can have”

Despite the fact that business in this political and economic system has made possible such an explosion of wealth, many scholars are willing to experiment with different forms of the economic system or replace the judgment of “expert” bureaucrats with judgment. recommends significant or fundamental deviations. Millions of decentralized market players who typically know their situation best. Presumably, the idea is that if we can “discipline”, “discipline”, “supplement” or “suppress” the market while keeping it in place, we can maintain core benefits while avoiding costs. It means you can. At first glance, this seems very reasonable. Because perhaps doing so would allow millions of people to achieve prosperity, or at least avoid the evils of poverty, while preventing the rather unfortunate worker abuse and other unpleasant features of some companies. Because you can.

I like this idea, but I have a problem. The problem is about our reasoning. How can we properly reason about the political and economic system as a whole when making such recommendations?

Critics of markets and the corporations that make up parts of them have long advocated for a thorough evaluation of “business” within a capitalist political economy. For example, Elizabeth Anderson (2017: 37-38) opposes American-style capitalism itself. She argues that corporations, like communist dictatorships, include:

• …a government that assigns almost everyone a boss that they must obey. Bosses give most subordinates a routine to follow, but there is no rule of law. Orders are arbitrary and subject to change at any time without prior notice or opportunity to challenge. Bosses are not responsible for the people they command around them. They cannot be elected or removed by those below them. Except in a few narrowly defined cases, subordinates have no right to complain in court about how they are treated. The highest ranking person receives no orders, but issues many orders. Those at the bottom may have their movements and words closely regulated for most of the day… This government does not recognize personal or private autonomous territories that are not subject to sanctions.

Similarly, G. A. Cohen (2009: 44-45) argues that:

• …Motives in market trading consist primarily of greed and fear, and people typically have fundamental concerns in market interactions, such as how well or badly someone else is doing. I don’t care.

We argue here and elsewhere about the companies themselves and the market transactions themselves. But there are real questions about whether any of these claims are based on a sufficient sample of business activity to justify moral judgments about business itself or about the political and economic system as a whole.

To begin with, we express “business” in the same abstract way as “government” or “religion.” But let us consider that each takes an infinite variety of forms. Consider the seemingly countless cultures and time periods in which business, government, and religion have operated. Abstraction helps us arrive at generalized judgments about different forms of activity and structure.

But abstraction can be both a blessing and a curse.

Abstraction is not only an important epistemological ability, but also a way to move evaluations too quickly, often without realizing it. If you ask a chemist about the value of profitable business or religion, she might think of it in the abstract and say, “It’s an important part of civilization!” “Oh, the problem is…!” If you ask this proverbial man on the street about government, he might say, “Oh, the problem is…!” “Look, what we (the government) should do is…!” If you were to ask me, a philosopher, about the car problem, I might confidently reply, “Maybe that’s…!” Epistemological dangers seem to be prevalent in such thinking at every turn. It is necessary explanation. Does abstraction really enable everyone to speak deeply and well about almost anything? all What about government, business, and religion? Is there access to trained personnel with deep subject matter expertise? a (e.g. Chemistry) Make sure to express your opinion on the subject B (business or religion) or an expert in the field B I can definitely express my opinion a?

There are serious difficulties in understanding business in particular, which influence much thinking in related fields such as political economy and business ethics. This problem is a pattern that tells us what “the” company should do. What exactly is a referent? What should we ask indexically? these company, or those company, or this Should I do it properly? If it’s better, please note the following: You will then learn that the speech requires you to choose from among millions of companies (for example, the more than 30 million companies in the United States today). We then need to discuss a specific subset of those businesses, but it is unclear whether we can select the appropriate number and type of businesses to justify a general conclusion about “businesses.”

But fundamentally, if we want to understand and morally evaluate businesses and corporations, we need to ask whether there is something stable and fundamental about every corporation, from a small bakery to a large oil company. It’s important to ask. Otherwise, we would like to translate the characteristics of “doing You’re going to try to apply it to companies that make different things for different people, different times, and different purposes. reason.

I believe that if we are to evaluate “business,” we should start with businessmen and their characteristics as individuals. But what is people?Why do people start businesses? What businessmen should and shouldn’t do Kura people? what types of people Should businessmen aim to get a job?

I think the answer is both surprisingly complex and surprisingly simple. Human societies are quite complex because individual humans are very complex. But perhaps we all want to come together for good. And in our lives, it’s probably part of our nature to thrive if we do this well and decline if we don’t. If so, the question of how to evaluate a company becomes a question of how, and to what extent, if a company promotes good. Will it help people live better lives? What counts as “better”?

When key scholars such as Anderson examine debates about the entire political and economic system of corporations, they pass judgment on millions of corporations and even more people at once. However, the answer to the above question is likely to be a matter of a company’s particular circumstances and its treatment of all affected parties. Perhaps the answer is that we should not focus so much on corporations themselves, but rather as if corporations, which are man-made objects of various shapes rather than natural kinds with stable structures, are morally assessable as such. It should be done as if it were.

We naturally want to evaluate businesses through a wonderful tool called abstract reasoning. However, we should avoid being led astray by facile abstractions that assume that we can generalize to a community of humans (e.g., corporations) of around several million by simply thinking seriously about even the many specific cases of bad business practices. is. When “many” here means 1,000 cases, that’s 1,000 cases of worker treatment compared to millions of companies, and there are many more cases of such abuse. means. Deplorable incidents of abuse do not entitle us to infer that capitalist enterprises themselves are morally objectionable.

So the point is not that corporations are morally pure, but that they are far from moral at all. The point is that condemning a business itself or an entire political and economic system requires careful and comprehensive reasoning about more facts than critics often realize. In fact, the very idea of ​​understanding business that way is even a bit puzzling. We are often opaque to ourselves and do not fully understand our communities, let alone our nation-states. So how can we better understand and morally evaluate an entire commercial system of millions of businesses across many cultures, continents, and time periods?

Of course, saying that business itself is difficult to challenge is not to say that business is unchallengeable or that it provides all the key human goods. In fact, focusing too much on your role as a consumer, income earner, or employee can distract you from what matters most.

We should actively condemn bad behavior by corporations and other human societies when we see it. Sadly, we inevitably do. But we should also have epistemic humility when attempting to morally assess “business” itself based on instances of unethical business practices. Our evaluation risks systematically overlooking the real danger of selection bias. After all, the news media, Hollywood, etc., and even some business academic journals, typically say relatively little about the millions of consistently high-performing companies in the world. This omission may be understandable, as long as it makes sense to prioritize identifying and fixing problem cases. However, this is a deficiency that we should be aware of, and one that cannot be overlooked in any legitimate moral evaluation of “business.”