Should philosophers at
universities, by which I mean scholars who hold a Ph.D. in philosophy, try to
be relevant? Nietzsche wrote that no
philosopher is a person of one’s own day, but Adam Smith saw in philosophers the
potential as observers rather than doers to observe occupations rather than
Plato’s eternal moral verities or Aristotle’s prime mover way up high. Opinions
on this question can reasonably differ, but under no circumstance should
someone holding a MBA and DBA or Ph.D. in business claim to be a philosopher.
This is especially true in North America, where doctoral students in business have
not typically even taken ethics courses in philosophy. Indeed, I turned down a
doctorate in business in part because my area would have been business ethics sans
any coursework in philosophy, including ethics. I attempted to take the
core graduate course in ethics, but the professor, Kurt Baier, announced at the
end of the first class session that only philosophy students could enroll.
Baier had the countenance of Schopenhauer, and both, ironically, focused on ethics
academically. To be sure, doctoral students in business who already have
a Ph.D. in philosophy may be counted as philosophers, and the dual degrees fit
an orientation to observing and thinking about occupations rather than just on
metaphysics or ontology.
In The Wealth of Nations,
which is something like a bible in American business schools, Adam Smith wrote
in 1776 (how fitting) that even though philosophers are “not to do anything,
but to observe everything,” they are responsible for ‘improvements in
machinery.”[1]
This sounds a bit extreme: philosophers being oriented in their thinking to making
improvements in machinery that is presumably used in businesses befitting the
specialization of labor given its relative efficiencies and thus
productivities. Nevertheless, “the huge array of occupations ‘present[s] an
almost infinite variety of objects to the contemplation of those few, who,
being attached to no particular occupation themselves, have leisure and
inclination to examine the occupations of other people,’ which ‘renders their
understandings, in an extraordinary degree, both acute and comprehensive.’”[2]
I think this is a compliment for philosophers, whose “work” of contemplation
is actually leisure. But not being in another occupation, philosophers could hardly
be expected to know it inside and out.
“Like the ancients, Smith accords
a high priority to the development of the intellect,” but he “replaces the ‘vertical’
contemplation extolled by the ancients—philosophy as an ascent to the
contemplation of Plato’s ‘ideas’ or Aristotle’s ‘unmoved mover’—with contemplation
of occupations.”[3] Contemplating
accounting, or management, however, may be received by philosophers as rather
boring, and, not containing much thought. Reflecting on the impact of Plato’s
eternal moral verities on the profession of certified pubic accountants, who
are ethically obliged to be fair and impartial rather than exploitive of a
personal or firm-wide conflict of interests, is more deserving of merit,
academically speaking, but this assumes that the philosophers have graduate degrees
in business as well as philosophy, and perhaps even some experience in a CPA
firm.
Once while floating in the
ocean just off Miami Beach, Florida, I happened to chat with the CPA partner
from Deloitte who was in charge of making sure that the auditors don’t perform
their audits in a way in which the client-company would suddenly realize the
need for Deloitte consulting services. Although there were partners at Deloitte
whose position was above the top of the partition, the man in the water
exclaimed his certainty that an intraorganizational separation of the audit and
consulting functions would be sufficient against any ethical lapses. I disagreed. I didn’t want to mention that
auditors at Deloitte even had a tick-mark notation for: “As per comptroller,
discrepancy resolved.” If the greed to retain
an audit client was even in the tick-marks used by the auditors showing that
the audits were not independent after all (i.e., given the reliance on the client’s
comptroller), how much faith could be placed on the “Chinese wall” between auditing
and consulting? Yet the partner in
charge of that wall believed that he couldn’t be wrong—or was he corrupt and
thus lying to me.
I am not a business ethicist;
I refused to accept the Ph.D. in business from a very corrupt American business
school in part because the program in business ethics only had management
coursework. Of course, plenty of minted business-ethics “scholars” eagerly accept
their doctorate. I chatted once with one from MIT, who claimed that ethics is a
sub-field of sociology rather than philosophy. I didn’t want to upset her, so I
did not point out that, given David Hume’s naturalistic fallacy, a social norm
is not an ethical principle, so such a norm cannot be used to justify an action
ethically. You can’t get ought from is; something more is needed:
a reasoned rationale for why something that is ought to be. Instead, I
merely said that I was not an expert or scholar of business ethics; I had
refused that degree, as it was the pits. Fortunately, I would go on to another university
to do four years of doctoral studies in historical political theory after
having earned the MBA and M.Div. degrees. I had moved from business to the
humanities and never looked back.
So, I am skeptical of Smith’s move from philosophical reasoning to the project of improving the machinery of occupations. Even as for business ethics, philosophers are likely to be sidelined by business practitioners. A specialization of labor can exist wherein the contemplation of philosophers is distinct from the manual labor of a construction worker or a manager of a business even though there can be overlap. Smith’s assumption, moreover, that the “practical” world trumps the world of contemplation and ratiocination has by in large been swallowed by Western society from the mid-twentieth-century at least to the 2020s, but here is where the philosophers can come in to critically examine this assumption and perhaps even think about alternatives. At the very least, the default assumption would be viewed in relative rather than absolute terms. When I left business for the humanities, my underlying assumption was different from Smith’s, though not from his more basic assumption that we humans are seldom satisfy with our lot, so we tend to be in motion to better our condition. This more basic assumption allows in the philosophers and even the even less productive religious people. Production, it turns out, goes beyond commercial society.
2. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, V.i.f.51, quoted by Peter Minowitz, Profits, Priests, and Princes: Adam Smith’s Emancipation of Economics from Politics and Religion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 85.
3. Peter Minowitz, Profits, Priests, and Princes: Adam Smith’s Emancipation of Economics from Politics and Religion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 85
