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.

 

Idealism

 I am very idealistic, a keen reformer. I am also a realist. One cannot have encountered the works of Eric Hoffer without recognizing that idealists, with military, federal and police power behind them, are quite vulnerable to being totally corrupted by their absolute power, as they used terror, torture, mind-control, and soul-raping to butcher perhaps over 100 million victims in the 20th century.

Corrupted idealists are the most wicked, violent, homicidal, vicious type of humans ever created to roam the earth.

It is admirable to be an idealist, if, one bound, and willingly bound, by several restraining conditions.

First, if any idealist is also a true believer, that one should never have power over another human being.

Second, if the idealist's cause has morphed into mass movement, that movement could lead to societal revolution, the installation of a totalitarian regime, and the Reign of Terror against people internally and internationally will commence as anticipated. Idealists serve or run mass movements, and they are their demonic perpetrators to be crushed.

Third, if the idealist agrees that metaphysical, political, and ethical moderation prevent his cause from becoming one-party rule of a nation, then his cause may be worth supporting.

Fourth, the idealist accepts that the Divine Couple are individuator-anarchists that seek to see any idealistic crusade be advocated by its adherents in a mood and mode of nonviolence, non-coercion, voluntary acceptance, or rejection of the favored creed. Any idealist or idealists rejecting this proposal are enemies of the people to be kept out of power, period. 

Fifth, idealists must agree and accept that each fellow citizen is a sovereign rational individual to make up her own mind about any cause which she is invited to support or oppose, with no consequences whatsoever for her rejecting the cause offered.

Sixth, the culture of healthy idealists will be a community agreement that real, powerful, functioning tolerance is the rule of the day: other, disagreeing others--especially--are encouraged to express and live in a mode of complete intellectual independence, personal liberty exercised to join or rebuff any ism presented, complete freedom of speech accompanied by complete freedom of voluntary choice to join or reject any or all isms presented to them.

Look In That Mirror

 To the degree that you, as an adult, are making no contribution, are living as a scapegrace or even as a criminal, to that degree you need to turn things around immediately.

Preferences

 We all have our sentimental preferences as to whom we would hire or choose to associate with, but these groupist biases must be set aside. The moral worth of each person must strictly or mostly be assigned by us, in our best color-blind, impartial manner. How we accept or reject each person, each time must reflect the fact that  our personal, provisional judgement assessing worth or the lack thereof, is base only or is merited  by their actions as individuals

Proof Of Our Animal Natures

 

 

As an amateur philosopher, my primary areas of interest are ethics, theology, and political philosophy. I have a very complex, original take on these areas of interest. I am confident that what God has shared with me is of fundamental importance for human progress.

On the other hand, I have put the cart before the horse. My philosophy, as semi-explicated in my earlier books, though seminal and profound, is not fully explained by me in clear, concise language as a unified, interconnected whole.

 

To remedy this defect, I have embarked, for some years now, on an ambitious "getting-caught-up" project that entails a need to achieve some level of philosophical adequacy and professionalism (roughly say a master's degree level of proficiency, comprehension and ability to wield formal and technical language and argumentative technique on such subjects as ethics, ontology, logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, epistemology, etc.) basic to conveying the ideas that I am eager to convey for public consumption.

 

I am now deep into epistemological self-education. One pattern emerging is what I wish to relay to the reader this morning. 

 

It seems that much of our free agency, our rationally perceiving and wielding practical syllogisms internally and privately to make sense of our incoming sense data, and to express these impressions as ideas, concepts, and theories about the world, goes on almost unconsciously, instinctively, without being captured, categorized, and shared in the human community as intellectual knowledge that is communicated by formal or informal language.

 

Ernest Sosa is the epistemologist that I have spent the most time studying. Sosa asserts, as a virtual perspectivist, that our first order beliefs, based in common sense, need to be tested and validated so each belief may be categorized as knowledge or as mere opinion. 

 

The crucible in which each belief is to be tested is second order rational, syllogistic testing of each belief to see if one should accept, reject, or suspend judgement about each weighed and tested belief to see if it meets his epistemic, externalist standard as reliably true belief.

 

Sosa suggests that much of this second order assessing and judging the character, type and worth of each of our basic, raw beliefs occurs functionally or teleologically, an implicit, un-self-conscious psychic process that is logical, intellectually normative, and voluntary.

 

The act of applying practical syllogisms to each of our beliefs does not happen often intellectually and internally, in an explicit, self-conscious, rational exercise, verbally, linguistically, and consciously expressed by us. This is what Sosa seems to suggest.

 

The pattern that emerges from his epistemology, as so stated by him, is that much of what humans think and choose, and how they think and will--voluntarily and culpably--is undertaken without being done out loud or formulated as linguistic content.

 

For me, this is empirical and psychological proof that humans are beasts as well as angels. So much of what goes on privately and communally operates without our being consciously and linguistically capturing what is going on and what controls our lives and behavior.

 

Like our mammalian cousins, we are guided and determined by instinct, our animal natures, and our semi-conscious rules of living, far more than we realize and wish to admit.

 

I have long realized and tried to awaken people to the dangers and limiting effects that our herding, conforming and altruistic instincts. If we knew that we were depraved, pack beasts, all conspiring to lie and live in illusions to keep all in the pack, and to keep all down and back, then we could make prefatory efforts for people to raise their consciousness and self-awareness so that they could reason and think for themselves, no matter what elites and their pack are ordering them to believe and conform to, to the contrary.

 

Then, having gained this level of self-awareness, self-control and self-development, people would be ready to reason about how they will maverize their personhood, their lives.

 

I would like, at another time when I have the time, energy and expertise gained, to examine how this rich, semi-conscious, semi-instinctive mental, behavioral, and social activity applies to my theory of free will.

Quickly and roughly, I have long disliked the existential view that people wield complete free agency, for which they are morally and legally responsible and accountable before others, humans and on Judgement Day.

 

I have argued that free will is a weak, recessive power at work naturally in all of us. We are born depraved and are born into and try to function as adults in a world rewarding collectivist ethics and group-living. We are joiners and that entails that we have little self-esteem, weak wills, little taste for personal power acquisition and power-wielding (By contrast, we love power-acquisition and power-domination as joiners, an offering at the altar of our group, our cause and this power-addiction is demonically derived and reinforced.).

 

We are filled with resentment, anger, hatred, ingratitude, arrogance, foolish beliefs, and lust to destroy outsiders. What amazes me is that society functions as peacefully, law-obeying and smoothly as it does. It is not accidental but the result of moral adults agreeing to cooperate and self-restrain themselves to keep things functioning peacefully and smoothly for the sake of everyone that lives here.

 

I have argued that people are not educated with the Mavellonialist values that would awaken them so that they would have fully functioning free wills as rational, moral, conscience-applied free willers.

To individuate is to have a free will, a good will, a good developing character and articulated, fully conscious understanding of right from wrong with full appreciation of one's full responsibility now for being awake and knowing right from wrong and realizing that the community, the law, and God will hold us accountable for what we do and do not do.

 

With Sosa's epistemological study of human thought processes, it has become clear that much of our thinking, our voluntary choice-making and our understanding accepting and living in accordance with rules of discourse and expectations about private and communal standards are comprehended by us instinctively and semi-consciously. 

 

At that level of understanding, humans have and do wield free will even thouh the agent is not fully awake, fully individualized with conscious, clear functioning free will and logically operating thought processes abut decisions made. What was operating pre-linguistically in us privately and during our public social transactions is where we wield primordial if undeveloped powers of agency and thinking and individuation. We are responsible for our choices even at that primitive level of moral choice, and are fully responsible for our choices as maverizers, highly developed. 

 

We, others, the law, and God should judge our personal actions proportionately and as freely chosen and lived by in proportion to how self-actualized we are. We exercise complete free will when we are smart, educated value-rich deciders.

 

An individuated will is a free will and usually a good will, but not necessarily so.

Satan is an individuator with free will with a complete understanding of consequences but he chooses to be bad though he knows the consequences and dangers of imminent hell fire.

Guilt By Association

 People biologically are psychological altruists. They enjoy and find comfort and fulfillment (of a kind) in group-orientedness. To further complicate their negative reaction to egoistic solutions, altruist ethics and altruist solutions are regarded as wholesome and positive by secular and religious thinkers in the West.

Good is defined as self-sacrifice and self-interest is defined as selfishness and vicious.

Therefore egoism and capitalism--the economic system most conducive to a republican, individualistic culture. 

We have not done enough to promote egoism, or its accompanying economic system, free markets.

Stephen Hicks with The Atlas Society wrote a pamphlet called Ayn Rand amd Business Ethics. This is what he writes on Page 2: "Business is a social world governed by self-interest,  and moral evaluations of self-interest that determine moral evaluations of the business world.

My purpose in this essay is to defend the egoism that the business world depends upon. Business is about production and trade. Production is a consequence of individuals' taking responsibility for their lives and exercising rational judgment  about their needs and how to fulfill them. Trade is a consequence of productive individuals' willingness to intract cooperatively to mutual benefit. These principles--responsibility, rationality, cooperation--are core principles in any healthy moral system and for the core principles of the business world." 

My response: I cannot find anything wrong with his definition of business ethics: being reasonable, responsible and cooperative are core ethical principles. I might add that business people and workers need to do excellent work, to be honest, to seek a fair profit but not an eorbitant profit. We should pay our bills to those that we owe money too.

The capitalist system, guided by the natural and superanatural invisible hand, can guided us to republican liberty, prosperity, law and order, peace within the country and internally. We need this system.

What Is God's View of Profits?

 What is God in terms of supporting a business model? I believe the Mother and the Father, being Individualists pursuing primarily their self-interest, would favor capitalism over socialism, though charity for the needy and dispossessed would be standard.