Consequences of the Dualism: Target Inequalities, Part Three
In all most traditional ethical theories, self interest is the target of morality, but it is the self interest of the better off, stronger, more able, richer parties that is specially targeted. The stronger party is in a better position to take advantage of the weaker, so it is the stronger party’s self interest that is in special need of restraint. It is the stronger party that should be sacrificing to help the weaker party, so it is the stronger party’s self interest that must be overcome. In both cases, inequalities of power, ability and wealth come to have enormous moral significance, and great inequalities polarize the moral obligations and claims of the strong and the weak. Those who are stronger are in special need of restraint, and have greater obligations to redistribute
their resources to the weaker. By contrast, those who are weaker are seen as especially deserving of extra rights against harm by the strong, and the greater their degree of weakness the greater their claims against the strong.
Consequently, in most current business ethics, analysis of business dealings takes as its starting point the relative degrees of strength of the involved parties. For example, consider the following examples of alleged sins of omission:
In each case, we identify a stronger and a weaker party. We take the interests of the two parties to be in fundamental conflict. We then propose solutions that at least restrain the self interest of the stronger party in the name of protecting the weaker party, and in some cases actively sacrifice the interests of the stronger party to benefit the weaker. Since in relation to consumers, businesses are perceived as the stronger party, business ethics today focuses on giving consumers extra protections and limiting the powers of businesses. Since in relation to employees, employer are perceived as the stronger party, business ethics today focuses on giving employees special protections and limiting the powers of employers. Since in relation to small business, big business is perceived as stronger, business ethics focuses on giving small business a boost and on taming the dreaded multinational corporation.
We thus get a business ethic that sounds like the following: The moral big corporation will give much of its profits to charity; it will restrict its profit-making opportunities in poor third world countries; when advertising it will be less persuasive with respect to the helpless consumer; in order to give the little guy a chance to compete it wonʹt use its size advantage; when employing, it will sacrifice some profitability if its employees need it. And if businesses wonʹt sacrifice their interests voluntarily, then weʹll ask the government to force them to. The government will see its job as helping the weak against the strong by giving them extra rights, limiting the rights of the strong, or transferring wealth from the strong to the weak.
Current business ethics thus bases itself on and fosters a general adversarial culture: business vs. consumer, employer versus employee, big business versus small business, and business versus government.
It is against this sort of ethic that defenders of free enterprise have argued. However, they have generally not done so by attacking the ethic directly but rather by showing the impractical political and economic consequences of interfering with free markets.
Libertarians and some conservatives have argued, often well, that the proposed solutions in the above cases undermine incentive, violate individuals’ liberties and property rights, violate the principle of equal rights, and so on. This, however, has had little effect on moral opposition to free enterprise—since most of those concerned with ethics have held that practical concerns are less significant than moral concerns, that the interest individuals have in their property and their incentive to acquire more are merely self interests, and that such self interested concerns can and should be limited, restrained, and overridden.
As long as self interest is seen as amoral or immoral, arguing the practicality of the profit motive and property rights will have limited success. One’s opponents may come to agree that free markets are efficient, but they will still be willing to sacrifice individual liberties and profits— those are merely self‐interested considerations, after all—in the name of higher, moral considerations.
What is needed, then, is a defense of individualism, self interest, on moral grounds. Until we have such a defense, calls for self‐sacrifice—either voluntary or enforced politically—will be the norm in business ethics and in regulatory policy.
I have argued that opposition to self‐interest stems from taking conflicts of interest to be fundamental to ethics, and that this stems from pessimistic economic, psychological, and biological premises. These premises make self interest seem incompatible with long-term human survival. It is those economic and psychological theories that we need to address.
Here I turn to Ayn Rand’s alternative. Rand has not often had a positive reception from the ethics community for a number of reasons. The major one is that she championed self interest loudly and forcefully. For an ethics community committed to the view that morality means restraining and sacrificing self interest this could mean only one thing: She must be urging the strong to do whatever they feel like to the weak. That view, given the long history of ethics, could simply be rejected out of hand.
But such a rejection evaluates Rand’s advocacy of self interest from within a set of premises about economics and human nature that she rejects. She rejects the belief that ethics starts by taking conflicts of interest as fundamental. She rejects the view that ethics starts by reacting to scarce resources; she rejects the view that ethics starts by reacting to the nasty things some people want to do to each other; and she rejects the view that ethics starts by asking what to do about the poor and unable.
It is a philosopher’s starting points that matter most. So what are Rand’s?
स्टीफन हिक्स पीएच.डी.
हिक्स पीएच.डी. एटलस सोसाइटी के लिए वरिष्ठ विद्वान, रॉकफोर्ड विश्वविद्यालय में दर्शनशास्त्र के प्रोफेसर और रॉकफोर्ड विश्वविद्यालय में सेंटर फॉर एथिक्स एंड एंटरप्रेन्योरशिप के निदेशक हैं। 2010 में, उन्होंने शिक्षण पुरस्कार में अपने विश्वविद्यालय की उत्कृष्टता पुरस्कार जीता। प्रोफेसर हिक्स ने चार किताबें लिखी हैं; उत्तर आधुनिकतावाद की व्याख्या: रूसो से फौकॉल्ट, नीत्शे और नाजियों, उद्यमी जीवन और तर्क की कला: तार्किक विश्लेषण के लिए रीडिंग तक संदेह और समाजवाद।
Stephen R. C. Hicks es investigador principal de The Atlas Society y profesor de filosofía en la Universidad de Rockford. Tambien es el director del Centro de Ética y Emprendimiento de la Universidad de Rockford.
Es autor de El arte de razonar: lecturas para el análisis lógico (W. W. Norton & Co., 1998), Explicando el posmodernismo: escepticismo y socialismo de Rousseau a Foucault (Beca, 2004), Nietzsche y los nazis (La navaja de Ockham, 2010), Vida emprendedora (CHEF, 2016), Ventajas y desventajas del liberalismo (Connor Court, 2020), Art: modern, posmodern and more beyond (con Michael Newberry, 2021) Ocho filosofías de la educación (2022). Ha publicado en Ética empresarial trimestral, Metafísica review, y El Wall Street Journal. Sus escritos se han traducido a 20 idiomas.
Ha sido profesor visitante de Ética Empresarial en la Universidad de Georgetown en Washington, D.C., becario visitante en el Centro de Filosofía y Política Social de Bowling Green (Ohio), profesor visitante en la Universidad de Casimir el Grande (Polonia), becario visitante en el Harris Manchester College de la Universidad de Oxford (Inglaterra) y profesor visitante en la Universidad Jagellónica (Polonia).
Sus títulos de licenciatura y maestría son de la Universidad de Guelph, Canadá. Su doctorado en Filosofía lo obtuvo en la Universidad de Indiana, Bloomington (EE. UU. UU.).
En 2010, ganó el Premio a la Excelencia en la Enseñanza de su universidad.
Su Serie de podcasts Open College es una publicación de Posiblemente Correct Productions, Toronto. Sus videoconferencias y entrevistas están disponibles en línea en Canal de vídeo CEE, y su sitio web es Stephenhicks.org.
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