American Airlines: Caring for People

What is the purpose of a business? According to Aristotle, there are different kinds of purposes. The final cause of a tree seed, for example, is a tree; the material cause is whatever biochemistry went into the seed. The final cause of a human sperm entering a human egg is an adult human being—hence the question of the ethics of abortion. A human embryo is potentially an adult human being. The material cause of an embryo lies in the biochemistry of the seed and the egg. But I digress. As regards a company, we can distinguish different kinds of purposes. Somewhat crudely, the real purpose can be distinguished from the ostensible purpose. The former has to do with what can be thought of as the bottom-line purpose: maximizing revenue or profit. Any ostensible purpose, such as feeding people or transporting them, is functional in nature, and can be viewed as a means of achieving the real purpose. A third kind of purpose can be labeled as a marketing purpose, the promotion of which is merely to serve the real purpose. In terms of Shankara’s Hindu metaphysical framework, the real purpose is in the real, the ostensible purpose is in the realm of appearance, and a marketing purpose is in that of illusion. I contend that business managers, especially in marketing, are accustomed to conflating these three types of purposes in being oriented to the real purpose. Not being transparent about the differences between these three purposes is, I submit, unethical in nature. I have an incident involving American Airlines in mind.

Eight Black men were ordered to leave a flight in early 2024 because a flight attendant complained about the men’s body odor. They were not seated together, and did not know each other, at least altogether, and yet presumably they all smelled the same. As far as business ethics cases go, this one is a whopper. When one of the men exclaimed, “So this is discrimination,” a woman wearing a badge (and thus was presumably an airline employee) replied, “I agree, I agree.”[1] With no other flights to the destination that day, the company reboarded the eight passengers on the same plane. To be sure, I don’t know whether any other reasons for the airline’s action in deplaning the eight men existed and, if so, whether any of them were valid but were not known to the press. Were all of the men covering their faces with masks or talking loudly or using fowl language, for instance, the airline may have had sufficient cause to remove the men. It seems odd that a company manager would take the decision to remove the men based only on an employee’s claim of a bad odor, especially given that none of the men reported having been told of the odor before being asked to leave the plane. In other words, I suspect that there is more to this story.

In any case, the airline’s statements can themselves be analyzed in terms of the real, ostensible, and marketing purposes of the company. One such statement is the following: “We take all claims of discrimination very seriously and want our customers to have a positive experience when they choose to fly with us.”[2] This is a very good statement, as it disavows the legitimacy of racial discrimination and is straight forward in situating a positive experience as something that, while relevant to the company in terms of providing a product/service, is not the company’s purpose.

I contend that the real purpose of American Airlines, and virtually any private company, is to make money. The company’s ostensible purpose is to transport people (and cargo). Next to these two purposes, it can be readily seen that providing a positive experience to customers does not in itself rise to the stature of being a purpose. Rather, providing a positive experience is a means. So far, the response of the company is fine.

The problem lies in the further statement, “Our teams are currently investigating the matter, as the claims do not reflect our core values or our purpose of caring for people.”[3] The choice of the word, “teams,” is immediately suspect, as companies have employees rather than bad sport analogies. The whiff of a marketer can thus be detected. Although the lack of honesty on this point is tedious, it points to a mindset that plays with words for effect. Gilding the lily is one way of expressing the mentality. The real problem lies in the second part of the statement, wherein caring for people is said to be the company’s purpose. Upon reading this part of the statement, my initial reflex was to think, an airline is not a nursing home. The latter does have as its main purpose the caring of people. The function of an airline is otherwise, being in transporting people from one place to another. So we don’t even have to go to the real purpose—that of maximizing profit—to catch a lower good being portrayed as a higher one. Aristotle refers to this as misordered concupiscence, and it is not ethical in nature. Placing the good of one’s car above the good that is in God is an example of placing a lower good above a higher one.

In actuality, stating “caring for people” as the airline’s purpose serves marketing. As if trying to turn lemons into lemonade, the manager who came up with that statement was using the incident to promote the airline, which in turn is in line with revenue and profits. I contend that using an error for self-promotion is morally squalid in nature, for the self-aggrandizement does not take seriously enough the need to accept the error publicly. Especially if no other reasons exist for having ordered the men off the plane, the seriousness of the harm to the Black men warrants significant attention be taken publicly by the airline. Beyond an easy apology that wouldn’t cost the company anything, an explanation was called for, and thus due publicly to the men at the very least. The airline was on much firmer ground in affirming that the company’s employees do try to give customers a positive experience. That employees are only human, and thus can make even bad mistakes, is more easily digested if a company does not invent feel-good purposes that are actually embellishments or even outright lies. Ecclesiastes has it that for everything there is a season. The season for atonement does not include self-aggrandizement.

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1. Marnie Hunter, “Black Passengers Sue American Airlines . . .,” CNN.com, May 29, 2024 (accessed June 2, 2024).
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid, italics added for emphasis.

Frank Lloyd Wright: A Modern Renaissance Man

Perhaps no greater Renaissance man has been cited in American history than Thomas Jefferson. He wrote on the native plants of his country, Virginia, ran a plantation, designed buildings, founded a university, surveyed land,  was the head of state in Virginia, wrote a declaration of independence, and was the third president of the new American Union. More than two centuries after Mr. Jefferson, however, a cleft had become well-ensconced in American society between being an intellectual and a practitioner. The typical lawyer or physician, who holds two undergraduate degrees due in part to the political sense that a well-rounded citizenry makes a good electorate, has scant interest in intellectual endeavor. Indeed, one might even say that the “professions” place scant value on such activity; it is not “real work” or of the “real world.” The disdain is palpable, particularly in among the self-righteous in America. Yet Mr. Jefferson was able to bridge this gulf; so too can we. More contemporary examples can be cited to illustrate the mere possibility. The requisite delimiting "pruning" self-discipline might come as a surprise to people who presume that Renaissance breadth is borne of a wayward inability to "stay put."

When it was announced in 2012 that Frank Lloyd Wright’s archive was to be moved from his foundation to Columbia University and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, it was reported that the architect had some six hundred manuscripts, as well as more than 23,000 drawings and forty large-scale architectural models and more than 300,000 pieces of correspondence. He also had a formidable art collection, though it would stay with the foundation. The number of manuscripts is what caught my eye. How many manuscripts is a leading lawyer or physician likely to written, even in his or her own field of work? What was behind Wright's foray into writing?

It can be said that Wright was a genius. In a world populated by victorian houses, he saw something very different. Seeing something different (having that genius) might have been enough to stir the jealousy of the city bosses in his native Madison in Wisconsin—they twice ignored the results of the referendums (which they wrote!) to ok the construction of a city building designed by the famous architect. Genius, however, does not account for Wright's foray into writing; rather, he must have valued the endeavor and sensed that he could do it very well. Even though he could have rested on his architectural laurels, he wanted to excel beyond his native fauna, and he was willing to put forth the effort.

Frank Lloyd Wright's "Falling Water" house.           FLW Fdn Archives/NYT

Similarly, the famous  clothing designer in the E.U., Karl Lagerfeld, came to excell at more than one field. Specifically, from having taking pictures of the models wearing his designs, he branched off into photography in its own right late in his career (instead of taking retirement), even though he could have rested on the reputation of his clothing line. He gained a reputation as a photographer from publishing a book of his photos taken at the French palace.

It is not that a genius in a field feels entitled to venture onto other fields as if doing so is of value in itself. Rather, there must be a sense of being able to extend one’s excellence without sliding onto mediocrity. This does not necessarily mean that the two fields are related. Excellence can be found in a disparate discipline. Yet this does not mean trying anything. Even within one's native field, one must limit oneself to what one can do well.

Being willing to let go of what is beyond oneself is part of being able to extend one’s excellence. The director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, for example, was willing to give up most of the valuable archive because he recognized that Columbia and the museum were better-fitted to house it. “It’s what guarantees the deepest impact, the highest level of conservation and access in perpetuity, said Sean Malone. “The potential for new audiences far outweighs the personal desire to have it close by.”  All too often, people feel a clinginess to what they have, or want to have something both ways. We want to retain our cake and eat it too. In being willing to give up something valuable out of a recognition that another institution would be better suited to house it, Malone evinces the sort of mature mentality that modernity could use. Moreover, delimiting what his foundation can do well enabled Malone to ask: “what else can I do excellently?” It is ironic that pruning lays the groundwork for a Renaissance person being able to extend his or her excellence (a virtue) on to other, even disparate, fields. In Malone’s case, in being freed up from the care of an archive for which is organization was ill-suited for anyway, he freed himself up to apply his strengths to other vintures, such as writing on virtue ethics, for example.

Beyond intelligence, a certain mentality that includes character or a virtue ethic involving self-discipline undergirds the bringing together of intellectual endeavor and praxis in the “real world” in a way that exudes excellence. A willingness to strive while others snooze and a value on excellence can catapult a person from the confines of a profession. A deeper, or more enriched sense of what it means to be human can result as one experiences the best in more than one domain of human experience. Just as a Buddhist would say that the “other shore” does not really exist (at least as another shore), one could say that the gulf between academia and the excellent practitioner exists only in the mind. It is a societal illusion perpetuated by a certain culture that values some things and not others. Fortunately, examples that transgress this illusion exist even in modernity. It is up to the rest of us to notice, and then decide whether we have it in ourselves to go the extra mile on a second or third course.

In the end, it is the human spirit that flourishes in the context of excellence achieved in more than one way. No one is inherently trapped in the routine of a lifeless job whose boredom reduces the task to money. Nevertheless, I suspect that sometimes it takes the words of a friend or two to enlighten a person so trapped as to where his or her passion lies. Then it is up to the person to seize the excellence within (carpe diem) and put forth the effort, to be active rather than static before it is too late.

Source:
Robin Pogrebin, “A Vast Frank Lloyd WrightArchive Is Moving to New York,” The New York Times, September 4, 2012.

Company Police-States: United Airlines Attacks a Passenger

A manager of United Airlines boarded on the ground in Chicago to have three security employees of the Chicago Department of Aviation bloody and drag a physician off the plane to make room for an employee not on the flight’s crew. Although the airline was technically within its rights to forcibly remove the man for refusing to give up his seat, which he had paid for, removing paid passengers at the last minute to make room for additional, non-essential staff showed a lack of judgment. Accordingly, the police-power of the company is problematic and should be dialed back.  In fact, the power of the industry, including its companies, may need to be reduced.

 A passenger--a physician--being dragged from his paid, reserved seat as a United manager looks on. (Source: Tyler Bridges)

The full essay is in Cases of Unethical Business, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.com.  

Amtrak: Running on Empty

Letting Amtrak expire in the U.S. in favor of encouraging other companies to pick up new high-speed routes is, I submit, in America’s interest. I make the claim not because Amtrak trains are slow and cumbersome—which they are—or because the food is over-priced—which it is; rather, the company culture is the true culprit, being sordid in a way that I suspect few employees or passengers suspect.

The full essay is in Cases of Unethical Business, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.com.  

Trading Egalitarian Reputational Capital For First-Class Business: JetBlue Airline

It may sound trite, but managers really do compromise or expunge their company’s reputational capital altogether in order to chase down the additional revenue obtainable from a market segment that had been extraneous to the reputation. If the new advertisements have a Janus-like duplicitousness air, the source is not likely even to admit to the previously long-held principles. Indeed, the contrivance can be discerned from the way in which artful managers use words themselves—stretching them for an intended effect well past their respective meanings and customary usages. Unfortunately, the made-up diction can be contagious in a society that esteems organizational position.

I have in mind Jet Blue’s switch from its egalitarian single-class cabins to the first/coach bifurcated model. Left in the jet-wash is the company’s long-standing principle of egalitarianism, lost in the anticipation of more revenue from business travelers. Jami Counter at a website that includes reviews of airlines suggests that Jet Blue would no longer be “challenged winning their fair share of corporate and business contracts because they didn’t have a true premium experience.”[1] What, pray tell, is a premium experience? How does a true one differ from the mere garden-variety? In the case of JetBlue, the benefits to the business traveler include “the longest, widest flatbed seats” on any route within the U.S., and four “suites”—single-seat “pods” with their own doors.[2] The latter reminds me of the forts my elementary school friends and I used to make in the woods behind the school; each of us would pick a bush and use its base to build a tiny enclosed “fort.” It would seem that adult business travelers have the same instinct.

In any case, we don’t have to look far to see where verbal garbage like “a true premium experience” comes from. Perhaps the experience-warping complimentary “signature drink” before take-off and a “cocktail” before dinner might render experience itself transparent, such that the airline could indeed market “experience” itself. All the same, I would be more interested in the 100 channels on the seat’s 15-inch screen, and whether I could plug my laptop into it as I sit in my little fort as the elongated tin can careens forward at 30,000 feet at 500 miles an hour.

Jamie Perry, the airline’s director of product development, delivered a line as if on cue that the novelty would not be limited to the “Mint,” or first-class” experience; an “effort to reinvent the core cabin”[3]—where “core” is a cover for coach—boils down to bigger seats, power-outlets at each one, and up to 100 channels of television undoubtedly to placate perturbed pre-existing customers accustomed to flying egalitarian. Perry's linguistic over-reach—the larger seats and additional plugs hardly constituting an invention in any sense of the word (and reinvention being an oxymoron, like rebeginning)—points to a certain round-aboutness that is anything but up-front and transparent. 

Behind the "reinvented cabin" is a manufactured shift from the longstanding egalitarian premise to that of all boats rising—just not to the same level. The lack of equivalence is precisely what the fuzzy word-play is meant to blur. That is to say, the crafty wordplay—“core” for coach and “premium experience” for first-class service—dovetails with the wily switch from the long-held principle to one that allows for broader revenue streams. 

I disagree with Counter’s contention that JetBlue did not change its business model in the process; in fact, I would say that the first-class/coach standard fare deprives the airline of the more distinctive model, and thus of the associated reputational capital. To be sure, Counter does acknowledge that the change “could alienate the loyal JetBlue flier who now has to walk past (five) rows of a very premium experience.”[4] There we go again! How exactly does a person walk past an experience? Does a person say, “Hey, guess what—yesterday I was out doing errands and I drove right past an experience!” The response is likely to be, “Time for your medication again, dear.”

In actuality, the coach passengers are to walk past rows of more spacious seating arrangements and larger television screens. Putting the matter thusly, rather than artfully and without concrete substance, makes the cost to the airline’s reputational capital transparent—especially with respect to the loyal (i.e., long-standing) passengers who will of course instantly notice the unpalatable change. Such passengers need only look over at Southwest Airline, whose approach to attracting more business passengers was to expand to big-city airports and offer “business select” priority boarding, a free drink, and extra frequent-flier miles rather than introducing a separate class of seating.[5] That is to say, Jetblue managers could have went with alternatives to the old first-class/coach model. The principles that a company supposedly “stands for” are indeed expendable, particularly when they grind up against an untapped source of revenue.

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1. Charisse Jones, “Egalitarian JetBlue Tries Out First Class,” USA Today, June 12, 2014.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Ben Mutzabaugh, “Southwest Finds Itself at a Crossroads,” USA Today, June 30, 2014.