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Beyond Profit and Politics: Reciprocity and the Role of For-Profit Business

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Abstract

Standard accounts of reciprocal citizenship hold that citizens have a duty to participate in politics. Against this, several business ethicists and philosophers have recently argued that people can satisfy their obligations of civic reciprocity non-politically, by owning, managing, or working in for-profit businesses. In this article, I reject both the standard and the market accounts of reciprocal citizenship. Against the market view, I show that the ordinary work of profit maximization cannot take the place of traditional political activity. Yet contra the standard political account, I show that a special class of the actions we perform in our work as employers and employees in for-profit companies can fulfill our obligations of reciprocity. Business ethicists must therefore develop a more nuanced account of the relationship between for-profit business endeavors and the debts we owe fellow citizens who undertake burdensome political work to our benefit.

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Notes

  1. The behaviors that qualify as political are typically unspecified in these discussions, but the list described here involves the acts typically mentioned. For similar lists, see Brennan (2012), citing in part to Oldfield (1990), and Klosko (2004). As we will see, it is a benefit of the civic works account I defend in section five that it provides a clear framework for assessing the status of specific acts.

  2. While some defend the special status of political activity explicitly (Oldfield 1990; Pettit 1999) an even larger array of philosophers do so implicitly, by contending citizens have duties to undertake specific political actions like voting or obeying the law (Gilbert 2006; Klosko 2004; Dagger 1997; Beerbohm 2012).

  3. Jianfeng Zhu (2014) argues citizens have no standing duty to obey because they can contribute value in other ways, including through non-political actions.

  4. For example, Ram Nath Kovind, President of India, declared, “That young person who founds a start-up and becomes a job creator is a nation builder” (“President Ram Nath Kovind,” 2017).

  5. After the September 11th terrorist attacks, for example, President Bush famously urged Americans to do their part by shopping more (Bush 2001; Murphy and Purdum 2009). Economists and sociologists note there exists widespread belief that it is patriotic to spend (Shiller 2012).

  6. Assuming the citizens and state exercise political power in a sufficiently just manner.

  7. This idea is commonly promoted by scholars who argue that a concern for fairness gives citizens a duty to obey the law. Though advocates of the market account accept (at least for the sake of argument) that citizens of just states owe debts to co-nationals, they do not explicitly endorse fairness as grounding these debts. Indeed, many provide no explanation of what grounds such debts (Brennan 2011, p. 49). However, in accepting the possibility of these debts advocates of the market theory become responsible for an account of what characteristics an act or set of acts would have to possess to satisfy these debts. That is what we consider here.

  8. At issue is what citizens owe when they are subjects of (at least relatively) just states that provide these goods. Different concerns arise in malevolent or unjust states. Since neither the market nor the standard account is directed toward non-ideal conditions, we will not take them up here. Reasonably just states provide citizens with levels of health and security they would not otherwise enjoy. This is true both because they aid citizens against others’ wrongdoing (as in the case of police protection) and because fellow citizens take risks that protect us against harms that might ensue even if others acted in accordance with moral ideals (as in the case of volunteer firefighters).

  9. Readers unfamiliar with the literature on political obligation might be surprised to see paying taxes described as morally discretionary because it is legally mandatory. However, whether citizens have a moral obligation to obey such laws is one of the most prominent debates of contemporary political philosophy, and the contention that citizens have a moral responsibility to comply is widely defended as following only from the duties of reciprocity we consider here. It is not thought entailed even by the conclusion that governments are legitimate in coercively compelling the behavior in question (Klosko 1987, 1994, 2004; Koltonski 2016; Sangiovanni 2007; Sartorius 1981). For our purposes, it is notable that many citizens do not pay taxes only because they are forced to do so or fear punishment. Instead, they act out of a desire to contribute or a belief that they ought morally to do so, for much the reasons detailed in this article (Klosko 2005; Williamson 2017; Stern 1995). Indeed, this is central to the functioning of most western political communities. It would be very costly—and likely unworkable—if all tax compliance had to be extracted by force. By paying their taxes absent active force, individuals thus work to the benefit of fellow citizens, in a way many philosophers contend is morally discretionary.

  10. Extensive empirical research suggests that morally (and in many cases legally) discretionary civic behaviors play an important role in providing benefits like public health, safety, and desirable opportunities. (Freeman 2000; Claibourn and Martin 2007; Lowry 1997).

  11. Importantly, these debts are owed to fellow citizens who take up such morally discretionary work to our benefit, not to the government itself. This is one of the factors that distinguish reciprocity-based accounts of civic obligation from gratitude theories (Walker 1988; Klosko 2004).

  12. For example, even Jason Brennan (2011, p. 49) who doubts that citizens have a debt to society, takes the issue at hand to be a theory of what repayment requires if they do.

  13. We will be considering only debts owed to those who benefit us at a cost, not retributive debts or costless benefits.

  14. There is an interesting question as to whether benefactors can specify the form a return must take. I set that aside; however, since our point persists no matter how, this question is answered.

  15. There is significant dispute as to whether reciprocity requires the return of a good that is subjectively or objectively good for a recipient. Because this question lies outside the scope of our discussion, I will not take it up here.

  16. Two further things cause confusion. First, many things people associate with the repayment of debts often involve moral obligations of promising or contract, not reciprocity. Take, for example, a case where one person lends another five dollars. Many will have the intuition that repayment demands five dollars, regardless of burdens incurred. What generates the duty, however, is that one party agrees to pay the other a certain amount for an act, which the former has no otherwise existing moral obligation to provide. Such up-front contractual arrangements differ from circumstances that trigger moral claims of reciprocity. The benefit is extracted as part of a mutual promise, not simply a good deed done. Second, we often employ epistemic shorthand that lead to confusion. It is ordinary to think that if you give somebody five dollars when they forget their wallet, they should pay your five dollars. The burden-based view suggests this need not follow, which may seem a mark against. However, I believe our intuitions about such cases arise from the fact that for most of us, five dollars means (roughly) the same amount of burden. Most of us are not billionaires lending to paupers, which generates an ease of shorthand that such debts should be repaid in the same degree. This shorthand proves misleading when burdens meaningfully differ.

  17. In fact, your bringing the lost keys would provide her greater benefit, since it would be more difficult for her to get the keys herself.

  18. The relationship between disability and justice is more complex than we can take up here. However, others have considered the issue in detail. For example, Nussbaum (2009) complains that acts of the disabled are not given full credit in most discussions of reciprocity.

  19. Becker (2005) makes a similar point.

  20. There are, of course, reasons of justice beyond reciprocity why Gates may owe the child this lifesaving opportunity. Nevertheless, the case is illustrative.

  21. It is an interesting philosophical question whether this requires that we work to provide them with as much benefit as possible, with a comparable benefit, or simply with some benefit. However, we will set such questions aside since advocates of the market view do not take up these issues with any precision, and they lie outside the immediate scope of our concern. For our purposes, any of these standards will serve.

  22. To be precise, or until further action becomes so burdensome that the receipt of the original goods would cease to qualify as a benefit, given the cost involved in repayment. (This is definitional of what it means to receive a benefit.)

  23. Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky note this is the primary claim advanced in defense of a duty to vote (2000, p. 75). Klosko (1987) and other fairness theorists advance similar claims with regard to a duty to obey the law.

  24. Jason Brennan hints at this defense, writing that, “the division of labor tends to free people to do what they are good at, or, at least, to allow them to become good at doing something useful … the overall effect of business activity… is to make the overwhelming majority of people vastly wealthier than they would otherwise have been” (2012, p. 320).

  25. At least in expectation.

  26. And indeed, many non-profit ventures.

  27. When they do—as for example professional lobbyists—we typically do not think their behavior generates or pays civic debts.

  28. Such that a participant would prefer engagement to free-riding even absent moral considerations.

  29. Salk’s research was funded by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis which did not permit researchers rights and royalties for discoveries (Johnson 1990).

  30. Even Senator McCain praised his rival then Senator Barack Obama for choosing to forgo a lucrative job to work as a community organizer in Chicago (Loven and Pickler 2008).

  31. The salary for an associate Supreme Court Justices in 2014 was $244,400. Equity partners in a law firm listed in the American Law top 100 earn an average of about $896,000 a year. Justices, of course, receive salary and benefits for life and can earn more from books or speaking engagements. Nonetheless, their financial prospects would be higher in the private sector (Lat 2012).

  32. Consider the justices could retire at any moment and reap these financial rewards, and do not do so.

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Correspondence to Brookes Brown.

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Brown, B. Beyond Profit and Politics: Reciprocity and the Role of For-Profit Business. J Bus Ethics 159, 239–251 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-018-3777-6

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