The Social Business of Business

Abstract

Imagine a slaveholder trying to be fair in settling a dispute between two slaves, trying to be just in distributing the slop made available to the slaves as food, or in making sure that they are all whipped equally, or at least equally for equal offenses. There is certainly a sense in which the slaveholder is trying to be fair, just, or moral within the slave-owning system. Yet most Americans would readily admit that slavery is immoral. The slaveholder who tries to be moral within the system of slavery may have some grounds for feeling superior to the slaveholder who cares not at all about the slaves, who beats them arbitrarily, who starves them out of malice, or who settles disputes between them by whim. But surely a discussion of the moral way to treat one’s slaves, though it might do some good, has an odd ring to it. For it deals with the morality of practices within a system that itself should be morally evaluated—and if morally evaluated by our standards is morally condemned.