To review:
As far as I can tell, these are, or are intended as, Carr's arguments.
1. Severely damaging lies by business people are okay because lying by business people is like bluffing in poker, which is morally okay
Fact Claim: Lying in business is morally like bluffing in
poker.
Fact Claim: Bluffing in poker is morally okay.
Logic Claim: If two activities are morally the same, and one is moral, then so is the other. (I call this the "candidate principle" of the argument.)
Analysis: I think the logic claim and the second fact claim are correct, but that first fact claim is way wrong. Bluffing in poker is known and expected by all even minimally experienced players, but lying in business is not known and expected by all consumers. People generally expect business people to be telling the truth, and businesses rely on people believe the claims they assert as fact. It would perhaps be better for society is everyone assumed that businesses cannot ever be trusted, but that is definitely not the case today, so business lying is not sufficiently like bluffing in poker for this argument to work.
2. Severely damaging lies by business people are okay because lying is okay when nobody expects to hear the truth.
Fact Claim: Lying is okay when nobody expects to hear the truth
Logic Claim: If lying is okay when nobody expects to hear the truth, then lying by businesses is okay.
Analysis: I guesssssss lying is okay when no-one expects to hear the truth, but this is because in that case no-one relies on the word of anyone else. However in business, almost everyone expects everyone else to be telling the truth. Consumers, in particular, generally rely on claims made in advertising and so on. Thus, while Henry Taylor may be making a good point, it is irrelevant to the situations covered by the article, and thus the argument fails.
3. Severely damaging lies by business people are okay because distinguishing ethical politicians is haaaaaaaaaaaard.
Since I suspect I might have missed something here, I'm going to back up a bit and quote Carr's exact words.
"I mentioned Representative Omar Burleson, the Democrat from Texas, who was quoted as saying, in regard to the ethics of Congress, “Ethics is a barrel of worms”1—a pungent summing up of the problem of deciding who is ethical in politics."
Based on this, I'm going to say that this is two nested arguments:
3A: Omar Burleson says distinguishing ethical politicians is hard, therefore distinguishing ethical politicians is hard.
3B: Distinguishing ethical politicians is hard, so severely damaging lies by business people are okay.
You will notice that the conclusion of 3A is a critical premise of 3B, so if 3A fails, 3B will also fail.
Argument 3A: Omar Burleson says distinguishing ethical politicians is hard, therefore distinguishing ethical politicians is hard.
Fact Claim: Omar Burleson says distinguishing ethical politicians is hard,
Logic Claim: Whatever Omar Burleson says is true.
Analysis: Riiiiiiiiiiiiight. Carr gives no reason to think that Omar Burleson is an authority on anything. This means 3A fails, so 3B fails.
As for 3B, even it is prohibitively hard to tell what politicians are ethical (it isn't), that wouldn't make it okay for businesses to lie to people.
4. Severely damaging lies by business people are okay because it's okay to lie to bigoted, unfair employers.
Fact Claim: It's okay to lie to bigoted, unfair employers.
Logic Claim: If it's okay to do a thing to evil people, if it's okay to do that thing to innocent people.
Analysis: I personally think that in at least some situations it's okay, perhaps even desirable to lie to bad people, however, there's such things as fairness and justice, and the fact that it's okay to do a bad thing to prevent a bad person mistreat you, that doesn't mean it's okay to do that same bad thing to innocent people who aren't trying to mistreat you.
5. Severely damaging lies by business people are okay because only game rules apply to business.
Fact Claim: Businesses are only bound by game rules.
Fact Claim: Game rules allow people to lie about pretty much anything.
Logic Claim: If something is allowed by the applicable rule-system, then that thing is totally morally okay.
Analysis:The idea here is that moral rules such as "don't trick people into buying products that may harm them or their children" do not apply to business because the only rules that apply to businesses are the rules of games. But that factual claim, "only game rules apply to business", is unsupported. We don't have any reason to think that the mere fact that something is a business transaction means it is exempt from morality.
6. Severely damaging lies by business people are okay because they are profitable.
Fact Claim: Lies that harm people can be very profitable.
Logic Claim: If something is profitable, then it is always morally okay
to do that thing.
Analysis:The logical claim that profit justifies anything is not supported. (After all, it would justify stealing from businesses, or robbing the houses of businessers, and I don't think Carr would like that.)
7. Severely damaging lies by business people are morally okay just as long as they don't break any laws.
Fact Claim: Severely damaging lies by business people can still be
perfectly legal.
Logic Claim: If something is legal, that means it is also morally okay.
Analysis:We have no reason to think that everything that is legal to do is also morally okay to do,
8. Business espionage is not considered morally wrong, therefore it is not morally wrong.
Fact Claim: People do not consider business espionage morally wrong.
Logic Claim: If something is not considered morally wrong, it is
therefore actually not morally wrong
Analysis:This is the ad Populum fallacy, in which the popularity of a belief is taken as proving that the belief is true.
9. Businessers do no wrong as long as they keep to the letter of the law because in their view they do no wrong as long as they keep to the letter of the law.
Fact Claim: Businessers hold the view that they do no wrong as long as
they keep to the letter of the law.
Logic Claim: If one holds the view that something is okay, then that
thing is definitely okay.
Analysis: No. Merely believing that something is true does not make that thing true.
10. It's okay to violate FTC rules as long as you "stoutly defend" the practice.
Fact Claim: Businessers stoutly defends practices that violate FTC rules.
Logic Claim: If one stoutly defends a practice, then that practice is morally okay.
Analysis: This sounds a lot like saying that businessers get really angry when they're criticized. Whatever. It's clear that if the only reason we have to excuse some apparantly immoral activity is that it's practicioners defend it stoutly, then we have no actual reason to excuse that practice.
11. It's okay to do immoral things because banning evil stuff would cause a large economic crisis.
Fact Claim: Banning evil stuff would cause a large economic crisis
Logic Claim: If something would cause an economic crisis, we should not
do that thing.
Analysis: It's not clear that punishing evildoers would cause any kind of upheaval, especially if changes to the law were made progressively, starting with the worst problems. Furthermore, even if there is an upheaval, it will be temporary. Remember that the downside of an economic crisis is just that it has bad financial effects on an awful lot of people, whereas the downsides of failing to better regulate bad behavior by businesses is that people become sick, are injured, and even die, and these harms are not temporary, as they will continue as long as businesses are not properly regulated.
12. It okay to do bad things if the justice system, for some reason, fails to punish you
Fact Claim: The justice system sometimes fails to punish evil people.
Logic Claim: If the justice system, for any reason, fails to punish you,
what you did was morally okay.
Analysis:We have no reason to accept the logical claim here. And there are plenty of historical examples of truly evil people who were never punished.
13. People who advocate ethical behavior are actually being selfish rather than being ethical.
Fact Claim: People who advocate ethical behavior are actually being
selfish rather than being ethical.
Logic Claim: If some of the advocates of a view are in any way hypocritical, then that view is false.
I'm not sure how to analyze this, so I'm bringing in the original quote: "The illusion that business can afford to be guided by ethics as conceived in private life is often fostered by speeches and articles containing such phrases as, “It pays to be ethical,” or, “Sound ethics is good business.” Actually this is not an ethical position at all; it is a self-serving calculation in disguise. The speaker is really saying that in the long run a company can make more money if it does not antagonize competitors, suppliers, employees, and customers by squeezing them too hard."
Analysis: I'm really suspicious of people who presume to decide what other people are really saying. (Actually, I despise such people.) In my judgement, Carr is being unnecessarily nasty to such speakers. There's not a lot of daylight between "it's profitable to be ethical" and "it's profitable to be somewhat ethical", so these speakers are explicitly saying something that is not all that different from what Carr says they're really saying. There's no basis for saying this is not an ethical position, or for calling them self-serving.
History tells us that an awful lot of immoral business decisions have been immensely profitable, so claims like “It pays to be ethical,” or, “Sound ethics is good business.” really are not supportable by the available evidence.
However, this whole thing is a bit of a red herring, and the question is whether or not lies like saying "this care is safe" when it is actually lethally unsafe is morally okay, not whether or not some of the people who advocate morality in business are hypocrites, especially since Carr just says their position "is a self-serving calculation in disguise" without giving any reason to think this is so.
14. It's okay to do immoral things because choosing between morality and profit makes businessers angsty.
Quote: "If an executive allows himself to be torn between a decision
based on business considerations and one based on his private ethical
code, he exposes himself to a grave psychological strain."
Fact Claim: Executives who consider doing the right thing rather than the
profitable thing will find this a very stressy experience.
Logic Claim: We should not expect people to do things that subject them
to a lot of stress.
Analysis: If choosing between right and wrong stresses you out, maybe you should just simply do the right thing. This idea of grave psychological strain actually works against Carr, because it gives an additional reason, besides morality itself, to always do the morally right thing. Certainly, "it stresses me out to think about the harm I might do" is not an excuse for not thinking about the harm you might do.
I've been taking Carr as talking about morality. However, it might be the case that he's not talking about morality at all, but is instead saying that business lying conforms to some arbitrary set of rules that is not at all connected to what people should or shouldn't do. But if that is the case, why did he write the article? If what he says has no connection to what people actually should or shouldn't do, conformity to what Carr calls "ethics" is a meaningless academic exercise. Thus, either this is, in some way, an essay about actual morality, or it's an essay everyone can safely ignore.
(Besides, treating it as an essay on morality allows me to develop some pretty clear and simple examples of argument analysis, which is all I really care about here.)
Carr seems to recognize four possible rule sets that people may or may not be morally obligated to follow:
1. Religious "morality", which for him seems to be coextensive with commonsense ideas of moral behavior. (Rules against telling harmful lies, against breaking promises, against cheating people, against extortion, and so on.)
2. In-game rule sets, such as the rules of poker, which allow drawing or discarding cards, betting, checking, calling in various combinations, and do not prohibit conning other players into thinking that your hand is better or worse than it actually is. Carr seems to think that there is a set of in-game rules for business, which allows "bluffing",
3. Customs of game-play, which regulate things which, like bluffing, are not explicitly prohibited by the formal rules of games, but which are nevertheless frowned upon, and sometimes punished by some of the players. These include hiding cards, marking cards, trying to distract or drunken other players, etc.
4. The letter of the law. At least at times, Carr says or implies that actions that follow whatever laws exist at the time
Copyright © 2024 by Martin C. Young
