Business Ethics

 Stephen Hicks wrote an essay for The Atlas Society named Ayn Rand and Business Ethics. On Page 6 he writes this: " . . . William Shaw and Vincent Barry, authors of a widely-used business ethics textbook, wrote 'Morality serves to restrain our purely self-interested desires so we can all live together.' In each case, self-interest is the enemy--of justice, morality and the collective interest. Again, the list of quotations can be extended indefinitely.

For members of this second group, accordingly, the general purpose of business ethics is different: it is to oppose the self-interested practices of business in the name of morality, to try to get businesses generally to limit their profit seeking, to get the businesses to distribute more altruistically whatever profits they do make, and to strengthen other social institutions capable of opposing the advance of business interests."

My response: On the page before Hicks introdues the thought that the first group of business ethicists think that morality and self-interest conflict, but can coexist, but if there is a conflict self-interest should be sacrificed.

It seems that ethicists equate justice, morality and altruism and ethical and extra-business interests while businesspeople, motivated by profits and self-interest, are for injustice, immorality and selfish self-interest. 

Rand and Hicks are trying to educate the public that self-interest and the profit motive are virtuous, and bring about or preserve liberty, prosperity for all and virtue for all, and I concur. 

Note that Hicks warns that these 2nd group ethicists regard self-interest as separate from what is moral and advise profitable companies to give away much of their earning and to invite and strengthen social institutions like governmental agencies to oppose them and their growth.

All of these are bad ideas.

Hicks goes on to point out the historical bias that intellectuals and aristocrats have had against business interests: "In Plato and to a lesser extent in Aristotle we real that practical concerns are low and vulgar. It follows that business, as an inherently practical enterprise, is hardly worthy of esteem. Given the place of Plato and Aristotle on the intellectual landscape, we have a partial explanation of the disdain that members of the cultural elite have always exhibited towards business."

But it was the rise of the middle class under Western democracies and free markets that have been raising the standard of living of the masses for decades if not centuries. Elites, with their socialism, mercantilism, and medieval economies of bartering, kept the masses very poor, ill-fed, ill housed, ill-clad, sick and without rights, liberty, opportunity, or education. These elites were quite altruistic in their value systems, and the proof is in the pudding. Most of history has been a time of suffering and deprivation for the masses, and self-interest was not the primary economic or cultural motive of elites that governed and kept the people under their thumb and felt righteous and heaven bound while doing so.

Hicks notes that Plato and Aristotle dismissed business interests as low and vulgar, but Erich Hoffer has written much about how times of social advancement and cultural achievement mostly occur in settings where trader and merchant run society.

From this I conclude that the interest of the country should be business, and prosperity for all leads to advances in thinking, art, culture, science and  technology.