A commonly-heard refrain in law school, whenever the topic of careers comes up, is that people are "thinking about" going into a public interest job, but they are also wrestling with whether or not they should instead "sell their soul and go into Big Law." Now, what's sad about this way of putting it is that, statistically, it would appear very few people ultimately make the public interest choice (many will not make the competitive cut for Big Law either, but land somewhere in the middle), so it would appear the market for souls is going strong.
I'm worried by this fact that relatively few people make the "idealistic" choice, to be sure—but what troubles me even more is what this says for the future of corporate law firms. Evidently, these firms are staffed by people who go in already believing that the work they will do there has no moral worth. They therefore have already made the choice at the front end to check their conscience at the door. They have compartmentalized their moral selves from their work, and will presumably feel just fine therefore about acting in the workplace for the most mercenary reasons.
The person I would love to meet is someone who works for a corporation because they believe that corporations accomplish some worthy purpose in society—even if it is only selling soap. I'd like to encounter even one person in law school who believes that working for a business in the private sector would be a means of expressing their moral self. After all, it's not clear why corporations should necessarily be the Faustian choice, in the career bifurcation set up above; they just have become that way due to the accidental organization of our current society.
It is true that I have worked my whole life so far in progressive advocacy organizations, which are generally agreed—at least among the Left—to be on the angelic side of the ledger. Working for "social change" is an idealistic choice; working for society's present needs is often considered not to be. Yet, presumably we are trying to change society in order to arrive at some sort of eventual just equilibrium. It can't just be change for change's sake.* And in such a future just state—will people no longer need soap? Why is supplying them with soap seen as the immoral choice of career?
The problem surely stems from generations of corporate leaders who have been trained to believe that the purpose of executive leadership is to maximize shareholder value. Relatedly, many of the biggest names in American business of the past half-century have made a fortune as fund managers, where the rate of return is quite literally the only metric of success, and they have no responsibility for the underlying management of the companies in which they invest. To suggest that corporations should act for non-mercenary reasons therefore seems almost a contradiction in terms.
If we accept the premise that "corporations exist to make money," then such a conclusion is indeed inescapable. But we tend to forget that such a definition of the purpose of business is by no means self-evident. It is true that people in business often make money from their trade. But, as John Ruskin points out in Unto This Last, the great work of Victorian social criticism we discussed last time, so do doctors, lawyers, and clerics. Every one of these professions expects a fee or honorarium to live. That does not mean that obtaining the fee is the purpose they serve in society.
Indeed, Ruskin points out, most of the traditional liberal professions are expected to be willing to put the fee aside as soon as collecting it would interfere with their higher purpose; and, the greater the amount of sacrifice their work requires of them, the higher the esteem in which we hold them.
This accounts, in Ruskin's telling, for the paradox of why soldiers are so admired in society, relative to businesspeople, even though—arguably—the first is engaged in the work of destruction and the latter in the work of creation. This preference for the military career, Ruskin writes, is not purely an atavistic love of violence; it is due more to the fact that the soldier is expected—and often indeed required—to sacrifice their life in the line of duty. To be sure, they also receive a wage for their service; but few would regard this small pay as the primary reason people go into the military.
If the fundamental purpose of businesspeople in society is to "make money," then they must forever be foreclosed from this circle of honor. If we accept this definition, then a businessperson who loses money is not a hero, but simply a failure. Thus, their sacrifice can never be noble, because they had no higher calling to serve than the effort to make money itself. They have suffered what a character in William Gaddis's A Frolic of His Own—his great satire on the legal profession—describes as the worst of fates: "to fail at something that wasn't worth doing in the first place simply because that's where the money was."
But businesses don't actually just exist to make money. After all, the reason why non-shareholders tolerate their existence at all is not to give them money gratis. It's because we need the things they produce and distribute—such as soap. And there is no intrinsic reason why soap should be less needful, or a less worthy good to provide, than legal services, medical care, or spiritual counseling, say.
This is why Ruskin seeks to reframe the essence of what business is about. He writes that the "merchant" is in fact one of the five "great intellectual professions," each of which serves a social purpose that is unrelated to any "fee or honorarium" they may receive for their services. The purpose of the merchant is "to provide for us." This is why we have merchants in society in the first place. And it is no less worthy a social purpose than curing the sick or helping clients to comply with the law.
We cannot simply dust our hands at this point, however, and say that we have rescued the reputation of business by this sleight-of-hand. Because the fact remains that precious few corporations in practice recognize this social purpose as the primary reason they exist—and still fewer as something they would put before the goal of making money. They are often staffed, as we saw above, by people who went into them for frankly mercenary reasons; these people "sold their soul"—or at least checked it at the door, to be retrieved on their way out at closing time. So they cannot imagine sacrificing financial gains for the purpose of provisioning society.
Yet, Ruskin's point is that there is no necessary reason whatsoever why they could not do so. A business that regarded its mission as supplying the public's need for soap, and which regarded any fee it received for its services as an incidental bonus, would conceivably be willing to suffer a loss on its balance sheet—or even a failure of the business—rather than fail in its task; just as a soldier might die for their country, a doctor might serve the sick even at risk to their own health, a lawyer might (too rarely does, but might) decline a fat fee because they don't believe their client's position is just.
Thus, Ruskin writes, "in true commerce, as in true preaching, or true fighting, it is necessary to admit the idea of voluntary loss;—that sixpences have to be lost, as well as lives, under a sense of duty, that the market may have its martyrdoms as well as the pulpit; and trade its heroisms as well as war." Such a notion of "voluntary loss" of course makes no sense if we think of business on the model of a hedge fund, the sole value of which is based on its returns; but it makes a great deal of sense if we conceive of business's purpose, as Ruskin does, as being "to provide for the nation."
It seems to me that this is the sort of thing that business management programs ought to be teaching their students. Too many, as we discussed last time, treat "business ethics" only on the basis of the two mercenary motives—either, corporate responsibility is worth undertaking as a form of "enlightened self-interest" (i.e., will yield higher returns), or as a way to avoid punishment from the law. It makes sense that these would be the only two reasons to be ethical in business, if we accept the premise that business exists to do nothing other than make money.
But we wouldn't tolerate or respect a medical profession that saw its purpose as being solely to make money. Why would we expect any less of the providers of our soap? Is soap less necessary to us? If not, why should we not expect soap-producers to be actuated by the same motives as the other professions? Of course, they need to earn an income to live. But could they not also be motivated by an altruistic desire to serve the public's needs?
Either way, I'd much rather have people staffing our great industries who at least believe this is possible—rather than people who work for these companies willingly, yet believe all the time their work is evil—and who will therefore presumably feel no obligation to be anything but evil, when the time comes that there is an actual conflict between the public good the company serves and the bottom line for its shareholders.
The person who went into that work to "make money," and "sold their soul" to do so, will not be the one to accept Ruskin's "voluntary loss" for the sake of the social good.
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*As the elder Samuel Butler wrote in Hudibras, one should not act "As if Religion were intended/For nothing else but to be mended." And surely the same should hold of society in general!
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