Vindauga

I’ve been playing around with obligations and responsibilities that businesses have, mostly because I am teaching a class with the title Ethics and Business. This may not work but let me run it by you.

A common attitude of folks walking into my class was the businesses have one and only one responsibility: to make profit. I have been attempting to argue that there are constraints to fulfilling that goal which limit that possible set of actions and override the profit motive; that there are responsibilities greater than making profit. Usually, the acceptance of any purported extra obligation is rolled into the concept of “long-term” benefit; students are willing to accept certain other obligations but they make sense of those obligations by claiming that it really is just self-interest, profit motive on the part of the business. Care and concern for your customers is what is necessary to make money, so it is an obligation for the company to care for the customers. I have been resisting this on Kantian grounds (or maybe Aristotelian); the motive for the action is not he motive that we would accept if there were perfect transparency (we would choose to shop at a store that actually cared about us over a store that acted like it cared because it knew that doing so made you come back - its obviously Kantian but it works out as Aristotelian if you consider his position on friendship). So, I keep trying to make arguments for obligations and responsibilities that deny or ignore the “long-term benefit” approach.

AAA failed my pretty badly recently, which made me wonder if I had an obligation to cancel my membership. I joined AAA in order to get protection for the vagaries and uncertainties of traveling, to feel safe. But, when I called them on Sunday (for a locksmith) they told me that they couldn’t send anyone out to help me until the next day. Further, they gave me no other options (like telling me that they would reimburse me if I went with my own locksmith). Thankfully, I wasn’t in some remote location, I was at my parents house, so I was safe and staying longer wouldn’t cost me anything. But staying in Miami an extra day meant that I would have to cancel my class. And, I was in Miami. AAA couldn’t find me a locksmith in Miami? What would happen if I were in Egypt, Mississippi? AAA is essentially insurance and although I had been paying my premiums regularly for over a decade now, when I needed them, they were not able to help me. And, this is important, in exactly the situation in which they were supposed to help me.

In a free-market system, the only real way for a consumer to affect change is through her purchasing power. It is incongruous for me to claim that I am against exploitation of workers in foreign nations and yet to continue to purchase shoes made under those conditions, even if they are inexpensive; my actions do not match my beliefs. Behaviorists would argue that I don’t actually hold those beliefs but, thankfully, I’m not a behaviorist. Still, the problem persists. If I tell Nike “what you are doing is wrong” but continue to purchase their shoes, Nike has no reason to change. Accepting that the free-market is the proper venue for determining what things humanity values seems to demand that I purchase in accord with my beliefs. That is, I must be ethically obligated to purchase or refuse to purchase in line with the set of beliefs that I hold.

AAA failed me, it wasn’t particularly concerned with my well-being as a consumer. Am I ethically obligated, is it demanded of me morally that I cancel my subscription?

Certainly it is the case that I am justified in canceling my subscription. But I am justified in canceling my subscription for any, including trivial, reason. What I am wondering is will I have done something wrong if I do NOT cancel my subscription? AAA, at the moment, has no reason to take seriously my complaint about how I was treated. There must be the serious threat of approbation, which, in a free-market system, can only take the form of a boycott on goods and services. Which leads to me second, and perhaps more interesting question.

Does my obligation reveal an ethical responsibility on the part of the company?

Its easy to point out that, as part of a contract that AAA was responsible in the situation described above. It was an exchange relationship; I traded money for X, X was not delivered. But, I am fairly certain that if I read the fine print X would only be due me under a certain set of conditions and that AAA was under no particular obligation to go beyond what they had. Exchange doesn’t answer the question I am asking. It is obviously in the best interest of a company to not become known as failing to fulfill their contractual obligations. If rights imply duties then the existence of a duty should be a sign that there is a right. If A then B, A, therefore B would allow me to move from the existence of a particular right to a corresponding duty. But, if there is a duty that exists must there be a right associated with it? I think so. This would mean that if I have a duty to quit my membership, it must be because there was some right associated with it, which, under the model I am currently using, was violated.

If I have an ethical obligation to behave a certain way it must be trigged by some ethical fact of the matter (the IS/OUGHT distinction holding back a material fact from trigging an ethical obligation). So, what ethical obligation was violated? Was it simply failing to uphold its contractual obligation? I don’t think so. It seems that what was violated was having the proper concern for me and my well-being. That is, I, as a consumer, believe that companies should have a certain regard for the well-being of others (and not simply because there was is an exchange relationship present). The company failed to fulfill that and in doing so violated a ethical maxim that I think is important, which should mean that companies have ethical obligations beyond simply making money.

It might be that I have simply suggested my preference for how businesses should behave. And though I am loathe to rely on intuitions it seems that I have to here, at least for a little while. So, I turn your attention back to the idea of what is required of me given the failure. It may be that I can forgive AAA for the breach. But, if I am to forgive them, they must first have done something wrong (forgiveness is the admission of a violation which overlooks the violation, it is not excusing the violation or even denying it). If I must act in some way in order to assure that moral approbation be given, which, because of the free-market system cannot be accomplished simply be telling them that they have done wrong, then it seems that there MUST have been an ethical violation. This indicates that it is not simply my personal belief about the correct behavior of companies but rather a collective understanding of the situation (I suspect that even an executive at AAA would recognize my right here).

One might say that I am not obligated to act but merely permitted, which would deny that there was an moral obligation on the part of the company. This seems to deny the functioning of the free-market system. I have no problem with this tack except that it mixes modes. If the argument is that businesses have no moral obligations in the free-market system and that argument starts with the presupposition that the free-market system is not the appropriate place to make judgments about ethical value, then the argument takes a denial of what it is trying to prove as evidence that what it is trying to prove exists. Besides, if you deny that the free-market system functions this way, that I should instead be concerned with, say, power relations and exploitation of persons then I have an entirely different venue for making my position, a venue that already denies that profit is an end that carries moral worth.

I don’t know. I think it works. I am certain it will meet with resistance and, even, outright denial. But I think it shows that business has obligations beyond making money. It may not however be motivationally convincing. Pah!