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.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid, italics added for emphasis.
