Walmart: Encroaching on Employees' Private Lives

In 2023, Walmart relaxed its policy requiring anyone applying for a job at the company to get a drug test, including for marijuana, which at the time was legal in several U.S. member states. Once hired, however, employees were still subject to random testing. An employee in a member state in which the drug is legal could be fired even if the person is never affected by the drug while working. I contend that the practice is unfair, unethical, and an over-reach in terms of the nature of a labor contract. 

The ethical principle of fairness is violated because both marijuana and alcohol can impair the brain and yet the company only tests for one even where both drugs are legal. An argument can be made that the alcoholic personality is less than suitable, and yet taking marijuana outside of work (with no impact during work hours) is reason enough for an employee to be fired. Whereas alcohol can inducive hostility and even aggression, marijuana has a calming drug—something that could actually help busy cashiers.

Besides being unfair, the policy of even random tests for marijuana is invasive, beyond the legitimate scope of an employer’s reach—assuming that the employee using marijuana is never “high” at work. In selling one’s labor, an employee does not agree to a company’s management being able to control the employee’s legal activities outside of work if those activities do not affect the employee’s work. Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, was against marijuana; for him to impose his ideological opposition on others where the drug is legal was over-reaching and impious; he was not a god. An argument can also be made that it is none of the company’s business, literally and figuratively, whether an employee uses the drug where it is illegal, again as long as the employee is not “high” at work. Law enforcement is the job of police, not a company’s managers. Of course, if an employee is convicted of a crime, an employer may not permit convicted employees to continue. In the case of Walmart, it hires people who have criminal records, which shows just how nonsensical the policy of random testing for marijuana is (especially as more and more U.S. member states legalize recreational use of the drug). In terms of a contract between an employer and an employee, an employer who presumes to dictate an employee’s recreational activities imposes a cost on employees that is not offset by the monetary compensation.

Imagine what would happen if a labor union informed a company’s management that an abrasive supervisor must be subject to drug and alcohol tests and fired for any positive results, or else the employees would strike. Suppose too that the supervisor does indeed have a problem with alcohol, but is not under its influence while at work. Still the union insists that the company fire that person. Suddenly, the company’s management would object with a mighty roar, How dare employees tell us what we cannot do on our days off! The nerve! Well, it goes both ways, folks. The attitude is the same: the unethical vice of invasiveness (in peoples’ personal, not work-related lives) is noxious and may even point to a toxic organizational culture.

See: Walmart: Bad Management as Unethical

Starbucks: A Racist Company Against Racism

In June, 2023, Starbucks had to face a unanimous jury decision in favor of a regional manager whom Starbucks' upper management had fired because she had resisted the company's racist policy of punishing innocent Caucasian managers for good public relations, which the CEO felt was needed and appropriate after a store manager had legitimately called the police on two Black people in a Starbucks restaurant who presumed the right not only to sit in a restaurant without ordering anything (before Starbucks allowed this),  but also to ignore the authority of the store's manager. Starbucks cowered to the unjust negative publicity, and thus showed a lack of leadership, and went on to act unethically in wanting to show the world that the company can go after Caucasian employees. This racism is ironic, for several years earlier, Starbucks' CEO had ordered employees at the store level to discuss racism with customers. Interestingly, the anti-racist ideology being preached was partial, and thus contained a blind spot wherein racism such as the company's upper management would exhibit is acceptable. 

As the CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz had employees promote his political ideology on two social issues: gay marriage and race. Regarding the latter, he ordered employees, whom he artfully called partners, to write race messages on cups so customers would unknowingly enable employees to impart Schultz’s position on the issue by raising the topic. I assume that the employees could not begin such conversations. I have argued elsewhere that Schultz’s use of the employees for such a purpose was not only extrinsic to making coffee as per the employees’ job descriptions, but also unethical.[1] In terms of corporate governance alone, the shareholders, as the owners of the company, should have decided whether to have their company used to promote partisan positions on social issues. In 2023, Target and Budweiser would learn of the perils in wandering off the knitting to get political on social issues. In terms of jurisprudence, the “right” of a company, a legal entity, to have free speech is dubious, as abstract entities, even if legally recognized as such, are not human beings. Rather, the “free speech” claimed by companies is really that of the human beings who work for the companies. Using an abstract entity that itself cannot speak to gain additional publicity for one’s ideological views is unfair because the vaulted or amplified speakers are not so from a democratic standpoint. In short, why should Howard Schultz have access to a megaphone and employees to propagate his political ideology on social issues, when you and I have no such means of self-amplification? Whether we agree or disagree with the former CEO’s political ideology on race is not relevant to my point. To be sure, that his employees were told to speak against racism is in my opinion much better than had they been told to advocate racism against Black people. That Starbucks would then engage in racism is that much harder to understand, but perhaps the hypocrisy reflects a hidden negative aspect of Schultz’s ideology on race. American society could benefit by having that aspect uncovered; such a benefit vastly outweighs any benefit to business. Even in a pro-business culture, a lower good should not be put over a higher one. Aristotle refers to this error as misordered concupiscence.

In June, 2023, a jury in New Jersey “found in favor of former Starbucks regional director Shannon Phillips, who sued the company for wrongfully firing her, claiming she was terminated for being White.”[2] The company’s position was that Phillis’ boss fired her because she had displayed weak leadership. The use of such vague jargon as leadership for what is actually management is itself problematic. Even if Phillips had “appeared overwhelmed and lacked awareness of how critical the situation had become,” as her boss presumably had written, does not constitute weak leadership, for she was not in a leadership role[3]; instead, the company’s CEO should have got out in front of the issue and provided a vision for the company.[4] If Schultz was the CEO at the time, the failure of his leadership would be especially telling, considering his earlier foray into politics using the company to promote his ideology.

The triggering incident that had overwhelmed Phillips, according to her boss, whom the CEO at the time must agree in retrospect failed as a supervisor but presumably was not fired, involved two Black men who had refused to leave a Starbucks store in 2018 even though they would not purchase anything. They were thus not customers, and the incident occurred before the company allowed non-purchasers to be in the stores. That the two Black men refused to leave the company’s private property means they were trespassing, so the store manager was on solid legal grounds in having the local police remove the men from the store. Being Black, even if that race has been (and is) subject to racism generally, does not give a person the right to trespass on private property, and efforts to remove such trespassing is not racist, for anyone trespassing would be legally subject to removal from the property. 

I contend that Howard Schultz’s notion of racial reconciliation suffers from the weakness of being blind to the racial presumption displayed by the two Blacks. In having employees talk about the need not to be racist to customers, Schultz was assuming that racism is something that non-Blacks do to Blacks. Employees were not told to suggest to Black customers that being Black does not give them special exemptions from the law or in society. Schultz could have had employees suggest to Black customers that jay-walking between intersections in a major street even if cars are coming is not “a Black thing” that is justified because the race in general has been subject to discrimination. Furthermore, the use of the word, nigga, cannot be allowed only if the speaker is Black, for that would be a racist position. For a Black person who uses the word to become hostile or aggressive towards an Indian, Oriental, or Caucasian who also uses the word is itself racist (and of course the hostility is unjustified unless the related word nigger is used in a hostile manner). The U.S. Constitution does not indicate that free speech depends or is limited by race; such a clause would be prime facie racist.

Phillips’ complaint, which the jury accepted unanimously, states that following the arrest of the two Black men, Starbucks “took steps to punish White employees who had not been involved in the arrests, but who worked in and around the city of Philadelphia, in an effort to convince the community that it had properly responded to the incident.”[5] Phillips was ordered “to place a White employee on administrative leave as part of these efforts, due to alleged discriminatory conduct which Phillips said she knew was inaccurate. After Phillips tried to defend the employee, the company let her go.”[6] It does not sound like Phillips was overwhelmed; in fact, she was being pro-active and ethical in defending an employee from an unjust punishment. The implication is that the person who fired Phillips acted unethically.

Moreover, in being willing to sacrifice Caucasian employees based on their race for good public relations, the company’s upper managers were being racist. An unseen implication is that those managers believed that the public reaction against the company for having the two Black men removed from the store in Philadelphia had some validity—that Black people should not be treated like that or that Black people deserve special treatment due to their race. But such a belief is itself racist. Schutz’s talking points for his employees to discuss with customers on race did not include mention of the racism in such beliefs. Moreover, he did not have the company’s employees talk about racism by Black people stemming from resentment. Any ideology is partial, rather than whole, and even claim of being against racism can fall short. In going after Caucasian employees, including Phillips, Starbucks’ upper managers fell short; the failure of leadership ultimate belongs to the CEO at the time. At least at the time of the trial, Howard Schultz was the CEO.

---

1. Skip Worden, Bucking Starbucks’ Star.

2. Danielle Wiener-Bronner, “Starbucks Ordered to Pay $25.6 million to a Manager Who Says She Was Fired for Being White,” CNN.com, June 14, 2023.

3. Ibid.

4. Skip Worden, The Essence of Leadership.

5. Danielle Wiener-Bronner, “Starbucks Ordered to Pay $25.6 million to a Manager Who Says She Was Fired for Being White.

6. Ibid.

Nissan's CEO Caught in the Crosshairs of Business and Society in Japan

Ordinarily, courses that include business & society (with business & government, and business ethics material also included as if the three fields were somehow one) have been relegated to the periphery in American business schools. Perhaps the business sector and its sycophantic deans have simply assumed that little actual cost comes from business managements deviating from societal norms and values. Admittedly, such a schism decreases reputational capital, a long-term intangible asset. Even so, the long-term-oriented and intangible can manifest as immediate jolts to such capital, with actual, measurable financial costs kicking in. They are triggered by news-worthy incidents in which a company or even one high-level manager, such as a CEO, are perceived societally as being in the wrong. The general perception of wrongness in turn depends on how far a company or manager have deviated from societal norms and values. Crucially but typically ignored, even though societal norms and values can absorb certain ethical principles or theories, business ethics is a distinct field because reasoning from or to ethical principles or theories lies at the core there. That is, no philosophical reasoning is involved in business & society; rather, the norms/values of a business sector, industry, or company are compared or contrasted with relevant societal norms and values. In this essay, I analyze the case of Carlos Ghosn, who was CEO of Nissan, Renault, and Mitsubishi on November 19, 2018 when he was arrested “on allegations that for years he had withheld millions of dollars in income from Nissan’s financial filings.”[1]
In 1999, Ghosn came to Japan “to carry out an American-style restructuring of a failing Nissan. The Japanese carmaker had $35 billion in debt, provided lifetime employment to a bloated work force and produced a fleet of the kind of cars you’d dread getting at the rental counter.”[2] He closed factories, cut suppliers, and laid off 14 percent of the workforce. As a VP at Renault, he “had helped oversee a turnaround at the middling French automaker, which had agreed to spend $5.4 billion to buy a 36.8 percent stake in Nissan Motors.”[3] On both counts, he was successful even though the CEO of General Motors at the time said Nissan was fixable.

In Japan, whose culture generally viewed outsiders with distrust, Ghosn “achieved a status bestowed on only a handful of chief executives. . . . In 2004, Emperor Akihito awarded him a Blue Ribbon Medal for his extraordinary contributions, making him the first foreign business leader to receive the honor.”[4] Ghosn, “a brash Brazilian-born and Lebanese- and French-educated engineer,” had been accepted in one of the most closed societies in the world.[5] Accolades aside, this made him extremely vulnerable should he intentionally or unintentionally violate a major societal norm or value. “From the start, he faced distrust from the Japanese policymaking and business establishment. The very idea of an outsider’s bringing free-market capitalism to Japan’s quasi-socialist corporate culture jabbed at historical wounds” even though Ghosn was not an American.[6] In other words, in “representing” a foreign economic system that a victor in World War II wore like a crown for the world to admire (even where it didn’t), Ghosn inadvertently put himself in a long-simmering wound in Japan. Not that any ethical principle had been violated; rather, his subtle predicament was predicated on a divide between a strongly valued societal norm and him as well as the company he ran. At the firm level, his “splashy—some would say autocratic—presence was out of sync with modest Japanese culture.”[7] As one Nissan employee put it, “No one dared to say anything that would confront [Ghosn’s] opinions.”[8] So a cleft between business and society can affect the degree to which a business leader’s style is accepted organizationally. That he cut 21,000 jobs but spent more than $200 million for Nissan to be a sponsor of the Rio Olympics in 2016, and that he hopped between homes paid by Nissan and flew in company jets would likely put him out in virtually any society in the world only gave the Japanese fetter for distrusting the foreigner in spite of his early contributions to Nissan and thus Japan’s economy.

The triggering incident that brought down Ghosn’s reputational capital in a flash stemmed from a divergence between how he had handled the matter of his compensation (i.e., business) and how CEO’s in Japan were supposed to handle it (i.e., society). “In Japan, salarymen slave away at the kaisha (or company) with a sense of communal pride almost as important as the salary.”[9] In 2017, Ghosn made $16.9 million ($8.4 million from Renault, $6.5 million from Nissan, and $2 million from Mitsubishi), which was nearly 11 times what the chairman of Toyota, the world’s largest automaker at the time, earned.[10] Astonishingly, Ghosn had “made the case to the public that he was underpaid.”[11] Even at the annual meeting in June, 2018, he said the company remained “financially very disciplined” in rewarding senior management.[12] Asked at the time by the Financial Times if he was overpaid, he laughed and replied, “You won’t have any C.E.O. say, ‘I’m overly compensated.”[13] Breaching yet again a valued societal norm in Japan, his “brazenness rankled employees and the public in Japan.”[14]

So when a whistle-blower in Nissan said in October, 2018, that the CEO had been instructing Greg Kelly, a top aide and a board member (which represents a conflict of interest) to split Ghosn’s compensation between that which would be paid in the current year and reported in the annual report and securities filings, and that which would be paid only after the CEO will have left the company. Nissan went to prosecutors to allege that Ghosn had been underreporting his income since 2009. The company added that Ghosn and Kelly had developed future plans to pay Ghosn a further $124 million in cash and other financial instruments—some as compensation for an advisory position after the CEO’s retirement. The issue was that of committed compensation (yet not to be paid in the year committed) not being reported in securities filings (as well as the annual report). Stakeholders, and the Japanese public at large, could be harmed by not knowing the full amount of the company’s long-term liabilities.

While such harm (as well as the economic inequality even in the CEO’s current compensation) could be useful in an ethical analysis, but in this business-and-society analysis, the issue comes down to whether Ghosn’s deviations from valued societal beliefs and norms added to the severity of the government’s response in going after the gilded CEO—a foreigner nonetheless and thus at bottom to be distrusted in Japan. The issue is not whether Japan’s norms are ethical; rather, in this analysis they are taken as given so a qualitative measure of Ghosn’s deviations can be made and related even causally to the outcome (i.e., the arrests without bail, as well as the extent of the blow to the man’s—and perhaps even his company’s reputational capital). It is indeed easy to conflate such an analysis proper in the field of business & society with that of business ethics, for we tend to apply should or should not to valued norms whether in business or society. Whereas existing norms (and cultural beliefs) are descriptive, ethical principles are normative. The two fields do share a border, however, as in asking whether a cleft between the norms (and related policies and conduct) of a business and of societies in which it conducts business is ethical or not. In going from the descriptive to the normative, ethical analysis is necessary, so I would classify this matter to lie within business ethics, drawing on the descriptive in business & society.

To be sure, legal analysis of the acts of Ghosn and Kelly would carry us a considerable distance in getting to bottom of this case study. Just when the Japanese police were going to release the CEO on bail, they rearrested him “on new charges that he shifted personal losses during the 2008 financial crisis temporarily onto Nissan’s books.”[15] The matter of an associated deviation from societal values may not be a material factor due to the crime itself, which rendered it offensive in virtually any civilized society at least at the time. This crime arguably goes beyond the failure to include committed but not paid out compensation in financial reports to the government (and in company annual reports). The impact of business & society as distinct from legal analysis was likely more significant in the failure to disclose committed compensation because Ghosn had at least gone through the company (admittedly via Kelly) in structuring his compensation. It was not as if he would get the total committed compensation in the years committed. In other words, going against valued societal norms can render a person or company particularly vulnerable, other things equal.

Business managers—even CEOs—may not recognize their own vulnerability and that of the company at which they work. For one thing, we humans tend to discount low-probability, high-cost events, especially if they are not expected in the short term. The immediacy of quarterly earnings (whether for their impact on managerial compensation or investors in the stock market) is typically of much greater concern. The design of Capitalist economy systems that emphasizes the short term is likely due in part to the fact that human beings (homo sapiens) have been “hardwired” through almost 2 million years to be oriented to immediate cravings such as hunger and sex (i.e., survival) and threats (i.e., to avoid getting eaten). Almost all of the natural selection, which gradually changes a species, took place during the hunter-gatherer stage of humanity; agriculture has only existed for the last 9,000 years. In other words, immediacy being foremost is a result not just of economic, political, and social systems giving it emphasis, but also of the context (i.e., hunter-gatherer) of human natural selection. As the context today is greatly different, perhaps systems should be designed that emphasize the long-term so as to counter how our species has evolved.

On the impacts of human evolution (and other sciences) on modern management, see William C. Frederick, Natural Corporate Management, available at Amazon.
For cases of unethical business, see Skip Worden, Cases of Unethical Business, available at Amazon.

---

1. Amy Chozick and Motoko Rich, “The Rise and Fall of Carlos Ghosn,” The New York Times, December 30, 2018.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

Business and Religion: Financial Ethics Found Lacking in the Vatican's Institute of Religious Works

In probing corruption leads in the Vatican Bank, Italian financial police stumbled on to a plot back in July 2012 to smuggle €20 million into Italy.[1] The alleged culprits include a monsignor, a financial broker, and a former member of Italy’s secret service. For his part, the cleric is said to have had people pretend to have given him donations of €560,000 so he could furtively pay the financial broker for his role. Crime, Italian politics, and the Vatican Bank—hardly a novel discordant tune. That not just any bank, but that of a Church, could stray so far from what would reasonably be expected from a bank whose formal name is the Institute of Religious Works boggles the mind. Even so, the intersection of ethics, religion and business is fraught with complexity.  A religious verdict from ethical premises is possible nevertheless.

The full essay is at "Business Ethics in the Vatican."

Saving the Fisheries: Greenpeace Praised Safeway for its Ethical and Stately Leadership

In April 2011, Greenpeace gave fifteen supermarket chains a passing grade; five others failed. Surprisingly, Safeway came out on top, above even Whole Foods. Safeway pledged to stop selling Chilean sea bass (Patagonian toothfish) because current fishing levels are unsustainable. Furthermore, the grocer called on governing bodies to declare the area in the southern Antarctic where the bass is fished a marine reserve. According to Casson Trenor of Greenpeace, such an act of “corporate marine activism” had “never been done before.” Safeway also discontinued the sale of orange mughy, which is unsustainably being fished in the deep sea off New Zealand.  In fact, the company stopped adding red-list species to its inventory.

Beyond any added sales from the enhancement of Safeway’s reputational capital, the company’s moves, going even as far as activism, are in line with facilitating the future supply of the seafood products.  In other words, the moves represent a sort of long-term investment, with the cost being the additional money that could be made in the short term from selling the fish. That other grocers, such as Giant Eagle and Publix, failed in the Greenpeace grading suggests that other companies are profiting in the short term from Safeway’s self-imposed restraint for a long-term benefit available to every grocer. 

In other words, it goes against the law of externalities for one company to voluntary exclude an otherwise salable product from the shelves while competitors benefit from not only that exclusion, but also the long-term benefit of full fisheries available to any grocer. Ordinarily, this dynamic is why a cartel or government regulation is necessary—so all companies recognize the constraint in the short term for the good of the whole industry in the long term. As compelling as that long-term benefit may be, some people will refuse to shove the trough away while there is anything left in it—such is the instinct of instant gratification over deferred enjoyment in human nature.  Hence, it is amazing that any one business would observe a self-imposed constraint at the expense of expediency that is not being observed by others in the industry.

Safeway may represent a case of ethical leadership that is in line with statesmanship. In addition to being ethical (i.e., following an ethical principle such as sustainability), standing alone in the activism (i.e., the leadership) in this case forsakes immediate self-interest for the public good (i.e., statesmanship).  The three elements—ethics, leadership, and statesmanship—can thus be distinguished and related.

An interesting question is whether corporate managers are being ethical in terms of their fiduciary duty if ethical leadership in line with statesmanship is not in stockholders’ financial interest even in the long term. In the present case, it could be argued that the foregone profit is not worth the added profit in the long term from sustainable fisheries.  Additionally, it could be argued that Safeway could have continued to sell the unsustainable fish as Target and Wegmans sacrificed for the eventual benefit that Safeway too could enjoy. The problem of fiduciary duty could be obviated in such scenarios by securing stockholder approval at an annual meeting. 

At the level of property rights, profit-maximization is only a default that a company’s stockholders, as the owners, can modify or even replace.  Therefore, if a majority of shares vote to use the company to save the fisheries even at the overall financial detriment of the company, such a use of property/wealth is proper and legitimate for owners, with the caveat of minority stockholder rights being respected. Such rights can be satisfied by giving minority stockholders the right to sell at a worthwhile and fair price. Such selling would result in more solid ownership support for the new mission. Moreover, to use one’s property not only to make money, but also for a cause that one is passionate about can make life itself more enjoyable and thus worth living.   

Source:

Kim O’Donnel, “Safeway Scales the ‘Seafood Scoreboard’ by Greenpeace,” USA Today, April 18, 2011, p. 5D.

The Natural Wealth Model of the Modern Corporation: A Basis for Sustainable Organization

Going to the Humanities to construct a sustainable organization based on ecological theory, this essay presents a theory of the firm that is at odds with the profit-maximization premise. I draw on the notion of the natural wealth of the Golden Age as depicted by such ancient Western poets as Ovid and Hesiod—who assumed such wealth to be devoid of greed—as a basis for sustainable organization from ecological theory to produce an alternative theory of the firm.

The essay is at "The Natural-Wealth Model of the Modern Corporation."

Apple’s CEO Manufactures a Human Right

People with disabilities represented 19% of the U.S. population in 2015—exactly 25 years after the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) became a federal law.[1] With computer technology being by then integral to daily life, the matter of accessibility came to the fore under the normative principle of equal, or universal, access. With major tech companies getting behind this banner, one question is whether they did so simply to sell more computers and software—better access translating into more customers. I contend that the stronger the normative claim being made, the greater the exploitation of the underlying conflict of interest.

In 2015, the American computer sector still suffered from “a lack of industry-wide expertise in accessibility development.”[2] So companies including Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo put together the Teaching Accessibility program to teach engineers, designers, and researchers how to include accessibility development in their skill-sets. "Increasing awareness and accessibility learning through core education, academic leadership, learning tools, industry initiatives, and partnerships with disability organizations will further enable graduates in relevant disciplines to enter the workforce and begin creating future technologies that are truly inclusive," Eva LaManna, policy manager for AAPD, said in a statement.[3] The premise, according to Larry Goldberg at Yahoo, is that making tech products accessible “is simply the right thing to do.”[4] Of course, doing so would not hurt sales either. This point undercuts the credibility of Goldberg’s normative claim, for it would be naïve to suppose that he and his colleagues would be motivated by “the right thing to do” were it not in the company’s financial interest. In other words, I contend that the normative claim is sheer marketing designed to garner the company reputational capital and at the same time advertise to the disabled.

Although Apple was conspicuously absent, the company had been training its engineers in the development of accessibility features. Indeed, the CEO, Tim Cook, wrote on July 24, 2015, went further than Goldberg in asserting the value of accessibility for everyone. “Accessibility rights are human rights. Celebrating 25yrs of the ADA, we’re humbled to improve lives with our products.”[5] To claim that a right is a human right is of course easy; the assertion may simply be a way of saying that something is very important. That is to say, if you value something highly, one way of expressing this is by asserting that it is a right—in fact, a human right. This implies that the thing that you value should be valued by everyone. He is essentially universalizing his maxim, making it a universal normative law. Obviously, we can wind up with loads of human rights going well beyond sustainability this way. Cook was indeed making a claim that human rights extend beyond needs, and thus are potentially limitless, unless access to computer technology was at the time essential to survival in the interdependent society.

If accessibility was at the time vital to survival, then government may have had an obligation to see to it that every person has access to a computer regardless of wherewithal to pay. This point presupposes that survival itself is a human right. Interestingly, Cook’s assertion that the right to accessibility is a human right can be interpreted as a claim obligating Apple to see to it that every person has access to a computer regardless of ability to pay. Faced with the implication that the company must hand out free computers (and accessibility software) to the poor, Cook might have sought to walk back his statement to something like, “At Apple, we believe it is important that computers be accessible to people with disabilities.” In retrospect, the man’s human-right claim may seem over the top. His conflict of interest may explain why he went so far without taking into consideration the implications.

For one thing, he may have been seeking to tout Apple’s record on accessibility. This is, after all, why Apple had not joined the training initiative. At the time, the iOS operating system included features like voice over, “speak screen,” dictation, zoom, and support for Braille displays.[6] To the extent that Apple had a sustainable competitive edge in accessibility, Cook had a huge financial incentive to make as bold a claim as possible. In business terms, a strategic competitive advantage should be highlighted in marketing so the potentially high profitability is more likely to be realized.

Interestingly, the marketing dimension itself undercuts the message in more than one way. First, the self-interest belies the claim of humility, and possibly even the claim of wanting foremost to improve lives. Given the manager’s fiduciary duty to the stockholders, his primary motive is to increase profits. Second, readers of Cook’s claim that accessibility is a human right can justifiably doubt the validity of the claim itself because Cook had a vested commercial interest in making the claim. That is, greater accessibility means more people are using computers, and thus are potential new customers of Apple products. Cook had the motive, therefore, to make the claim even if doesn’t believe it to be true, and to beg off any inconvenient implications such as the obligation to give away computers to people unable to afford them. In terms of Kant’s ethics, that Cook’s maxim cannot be universalized without internal contradiction (i.e., everyone should have a computer, but only if they can afford it) renders the claim unethical. In other words, it would unethical for Cook to have made the claim then refuse to give away computers.

In short, public statements by CEOs should not be taken at face value because more is probably behind the assertions than meets the eye. I suspect that the general public is naïve concerning such statements; we are too willing to assume that persons of high stature societally—and this includes CEOs of large companies—are good natured, for we don’t have access to the discussions that go on inside corporations. We are not familiar with how business managers think, and what motivates them. We suppose them to be like us, and we do not tend to carefully craft our utterances to manipulate other people in a self-aggrandizing way. So we take a statement such as Cook’s at face value. He claimed that computer-accessibility rights are human rights, and thus every person has a just claim regardless of ability to pay, and yet he clearly did not mean to suggest that, for Apple would then be obligated, and that would not be in line with the bottom line.  

---

[1] “IOD Report Finds Significant Health Disparities for People with Disabilities,” Institute on Disability/UCED, August 25, 2011.

[2] Lorenzo Litato, “Silicon Valley Vows to Improve Tech for People with Disabilities,” The Huffington Post, July 24, 2015.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Larry Goldberg, “Teaching Accessibility: A Call to Action from the Tech Industry,” Yahoo (accessed July 25, 2015).

[5] Alexander Howard, “Apple CEO Tim Cook: ‘Accessibility Rights Are Human Rights,” The Huffington Post, July 24, 2015.

[6] Ibid.