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For-Profit Business as Civic Virtue

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Abstract

According to the commonsense view of civic virtue, the places to exercise civic virtue are largely restricted to politics. In this article, I argue for a more expansive view of civic virtue, and argue that one can exercise civic virtue equally well through working for or running a for-profit business. I argue that this conclusion follows from four relatively uncontroversial premises: (1) the consensus definition of “civic virtue”, (2) the standard, most popular theory of virtuous activity, (3) a conception of the common good widely shared by liberal political philosophers, and (4) the mainstream economic theory of for-profit business.

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Notes

  1. “Civic republicanism”, as used here, refers to a body of related political theories that hold that heavy political participation and political virtue are required from citizens in order to maintain a political order in which no one is dominated. (A related but distinct view, civic humanism, holds that such participation is constitutive of a good, fully human life.) Some republican theories can be regarded as alternatives to liberalism, while others are a variety of liberalism. I focus here only on the republican idea of civic virtue, taking no stance on republican theories of justice or liberty.

  2. For instance, the civic republican Oldfield (1990, p. 181) claims that citizenship is “a practice or activity…underpinned by an attitude of mind” and demonstrated by “public service of fairly specific kinds”, including military service, political deliberation and participation, and raising children to participate in politics.

  3. See the 2011 Index of Economic Freedom, published by the Heritage Foundation, at http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking.

  4. In particular, this paper should be contrasted with Friedman (1970). Friedman argues that corporate managers, in order to be responsible managers, have a fiduciary duty to their principals (shareholders) to increase profits, because the capital managers control belongs to the shareholders and is entrusted to the managers for the purpose of making profits. This paper makes a very different claim: a citizen can exercise civic virtue through for-profit business activity.

  5. For e.g., see Lovett (2010; Dagger 1997, p. 17, passim. Dagger argues that 1) it is part of the common good that all citizens be free, that 2) freedom is autonomy and self-government, and that 3) therefore freedom is participation in government.

  6. For some liberal arguments against P3 and P4, see Brennan (2011, pp. 17–42, 2012d), Brennan and Lomasky (2006), and Patten (1996).

  7. See the Phil Papers survey at http://www.philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl.

  8. See Footnote 4.

  9. Schmidtz 1995, pp. 169–170. Schmidtz understands exploitation as follows: Exploitative institutions, laws, practices, and so on, make some people worse off, or take unfair advantage of them, as a means or method of making other people better off. More specifically, exploitative rules, etc., make some people better off in virtue of the existence of the targets of exploitation. So a rule disallowing rape or mugging does not exploit rapists or muggers, because it does not improve people’s lives in virtue of the existence of muggers and rapists. However, a rule allowing slavery does exploit the enslaved. It makes the enslaved worse off as a method of making the slave owners better off, and the owners are better off in virtue of the existence of slaves.

  10. See citations in Footnote 6.

  11. See the data available at http://www.bit.ly/cbe3Bf

  12. Schmidtz and Brennan 2010, p. 121 say, “… the most commercially advanced societies of any given age produce not only the widgets and the food, but also the artists, poets, and inventors. It is no accident that, historically, cultural hubs have also been commercial hubs: Athens in ancient Greece, Venice, and Florence in Renaissance Italy, or New York today.”

  13. Thanks to David Schmidtz for this point.

  14. I have argued that a wide range of other private activities can be exercises of civic virtue in Brennan 2011, pp. 43–67.

  15. A fortiori, the worst evils businesses have done pale in comparison to the worst evils political agents have done. (Suppose the Great Depression and every financial crisis since 1900 have completely been the fault of business, and no blame should fall on governments. These evils pale in comparison to, e.g., Mao’s Great Leap Forward.)

  16. Indeed, each time I presented this articler and other papers on civic virtue, an audience member has made this objection.

  17. A version of this objection was suggested by an anonymous referee.

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Correspondence to Jason Brennan.

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Brennan, J. For-Profit Business as Civic Virtue. J Bus Ethics 106, 313–324 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-011-0998-3

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