Yesterday, Matt Yglesias published a piece on his Substack arguing that corporations ought to do good things rather than bad things. This may seem obvious—but it actually flies in the face of some conventional wisdom in the pro-market literature, which tends to see all economic activity as morally neutral.
Indeed—for the true ideologues (Yglesias cites an article by Milton Friedman as an example)—profit-making transactions are good precisely to the extent that they make money. After all, if a company can realize a profit from a transaction in a free market, that means they have created something of value that people cannot obtain elsewhere.
Yglesias points out, though, that people "value" different things for better and worse reasons. You may be willing to pay a premium for a product because it enhances your life; or you may be willing to pay it because you find it addictive.
The example Yglesias leads with is a contrast between two contemporary tech companies—both engaged in AI innovation. One is using the new technology to make it easier to translate between different languages—an obvious improvement for human life. The other is using it to create 9-second AI-generated slop videos of nonsense.
Yglesias's point is that we should socially value the first of these more than the second—for reasons totally extrinsic to which one is more profitable.
The standard response to this argument from the left is something like "there's no ethical consumption under capitalism" and therefore voluntarily choosing moral virtue will only get us so far. If we really value AI slop videos less than translation tools, we need to use the power of the state to disincentivize or punish the former.
But Yglesias points out—there's no good reason why AI slop should be illegal. It's not so harmful that the government would be justified in regulating it; and anyway there's the First Amendment to consider.
So, if it doesn't make sense to regulate it—does that just mean we have to passively accept it? Or is there a role for making moral judgments and discernments between different economic activities—even if they all should be technically legal and permitted in a free society?
Many of us take it as axiomatic that this moral path will never work, because we think "the whole point of business is to make money."
But John Ruskin, in his Unto This Last, points out that this is not in fact the "whole point" of business. Making money is an incidental byproduct of doing business. The reason we have business in society in the first place is not to make money for business owners—but to supply the products that people need to live.
Likewise—Ruskin points out—doctors and lawyers make money from practicing their trades. But few of us would say that the "whole point" of medicine or the law is to make money for their practitioners. Rather, the "whole point" should be to make people well or to pursue justice.
Of course—Ruskin was well aware—people will snigger cynically at this point and say "you must not have met a lot of doctors and lawyers." And indeed, many a doctor and lawyer may in fact see the "whole point" of their careers, to themselves, as making money. But the rest of us aren't invested in their profits; and we honor them precisely to the extent they at least seem to pursue money over the ostensible goals of health or justice.
Indeed—Ruskin argues—we always honor people most in direct proportion to the extent they appear to engage in self-sacrifice. This is the true "root of honor" in society. And it is the reason, he says, that the military career has always been the most highly revered, in every society. It's not because we glorify violence so much. It's because soldiers put themselves in the line of fire. We don't honor soldiers for signing up to kill; we honor them for signing up to die.
So too—argues Ruskin—if currently in our society we don't honor business as highly as the other professions, it is because we hold self-sacrifice to be alien to the businessperson's ethos. We don't expect people in business to sacrifice their own interests. To the contrary—we expect them to try to maximize their profits. This was already true in the 19th century, when Ruskin wrote; and it is even more true now, in the post–Milton Friedman era of "shareholder capitalism."
A tech company may earn more money from generating AI slop, then—but we will and should honor them more for using the technology to pursue some pro-social end; even if it means slightly lower profits.
And to help encourage this, perhaps we should start to believe in the ideal of the self-sacrificing businessperson. Perhaps we need to at least consciously formulate it as an ideal. In much the same way we still idealize certain altruistic doctors or crusading lawyers—even as we know the bulk of each profession never manages to live up to such sterling examples—so we should at least make an aspirational legend of some businesspeople who actually devote themselves to solving real human problems.
Of course, there is a danger in this as well—the danger of creating a self-justifying ideology. The danger of myth-making, which always risks breeding the type of person who believes their own hype. (Indeed, was not the career of Elon Musk forged through exactly such a myth?—the myth of the business genius solving real-world problems—and behold how the myth created a monster.)
In the 19th century, after all, Thomas Carlyle gave us the aspirational ideal of the "Captain of Industry." And so—an idea that was born out of a critique of capitalism ended up becoming a self-reinforcing plank of the system's ideology.
Carlyle created the myth of the "Captain of Industry" in a book—Past and Present—that was otherwise a scathing critique of the ethics of Victorian industrialism. Carlyle spent the book railing against the Benthamite avatar of greed, his invented character who stood in for the typical 19th century manufacturer: "Plugson of Undershot."
Carlyle hated the warped and selfish ethics of Mr. Plugson, with his single-minded focus on profits and the bottom line. He encouraged businesspeople to aspire to something greater. Why not imagine themselves as self-sacrificing military men instead? Why not be "Captains of Industry"—leading their battalions of workers as a commander would lead his soldiers; sharing in their mutual sacrifices; helping to shoulder their burdens?
The term—with its heroic overtones—was quickly taken up; but not its substance. Plugson of Undershot liked the idea of himself as a "Captain of Industry." It gave him a new reason to commission portraits and equestrian statues of himself. But nothing outwardly changed in his behavior. Indeed, capitalism in the decades after Carlyle wrote became if anything even more ruthless.
And perhaps—as already hinted above—that is precisely what has happened in our own era as well. Part of the reason we mythologized and "honored" Silicon Valley so much for decades was not only because it was making money—but because we thought the people there were motivated by ideals. These were companies that not only wanted to make a buck—but to "change the world."
It is these modern-day Captains of Industry, though, who—after promising to unleash a new age of infinite material abundance and social progress—have in fact given us Nazi meme–spouting chatbots and 9-second slop videos.
Plugson of Undershot had the last laugh.
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