h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

In a discussion elsewhere, the subject came up of the business of expecting one person to do their job, AND the job of another, for no extra pay.

I've been in this position, and I did it for a while and then got a better job somewhere else. I don't hold it against the former employer - they were trying to get the most for their money. They failed, I won, in that instance. Sometimes they win. It was suggested that this kind of behaviour is immoral.

Is it?

Is it immoral for an employer to pay as little as they can get away with? To expect employees work longer for less?

Would you haggle at a market stall? At a hifi shop? With someone selling you a house?

At what point does it become immoral to attempt to press a situation to your financial advantage?

That rather misrepresents the original point. However.

Well I think we'd all agree that there are some ways of unfair exchange that are immoral. Pointing a gun at somebody and saying 'Give me all your money or I'll shoot' is the most obvious one. Another is when we conceal defects in the product being sold. As a society we've declared these illegal - presumably on the base of immorality.

Then there are things like buying a vase from an old lady for £2 although you know fine well it's a priceless Ming. That's perfectly legal - but I personally wouldn't think much of the buyer.

Or an employer who haggles someone down to £6.08/h on a zero hours contract. The law says this is fine. I'm not so sure. (and others, of course, see a moral imperative in chiseling it down further).

Now the last two are value judgements. We've democratically agreed at £6.08/h for wages and a vague idea of fairness for buying things off old ladies. But there's a sliding scale. We make our judgements as to what think is fair from others and what we can live with in ourselves.

*But* - if there's a cut-off point between immoral and moral exchanges it's surely arbitary? I'm not sure it makes sense, then, to talk of one kind of exchange as 'moral' and another 'immoral'. In exchanges where there's a winner and a loser, the best we can say is that some exchanges are less immoral than others. Or more moral, granted. But a neat categorical distinction really makes little sense.

Notice what we've done, as a society, is to make exchanges as moral as we can manage - and even then it's been a long and as yet nowhere near won struggle between the losers and winners. No armed robbery. No insider trading. Is there not a tacit recognition here that the ideal world would be one in which goods and services could be exchanged with as little asymmetric loss as possible?

This is standard liberal democracy, not even dangerous Communism. The inequality and instability that inevitably emerges from a system of unequal exchange is a much longer story (Das Kapital runs to four volumes ). Part of that story is that everyone is locked in to an exchange economy and their behaviour in economic exchanges is determined by that. You can't criticise the employer for pushing down wages: it's a business imperative. You can't criticise a housebuyer for paying as little as possible: everyone has their budget. One of my favourite Marxist quotes of all times is from Al Pacino: 'It's nothing personal - just business.'

So I would say - don't sweat too much about where the absolute distinction between morality and immorality. It's not your fault. Your'e just trying to get by. Just try not to be too much of a canute, eh? Others are entitled to judge you if you are.

And obviously the fiver off you get from Richer Sounds is a fiver less in the bonus of the sales assistant. Is that immoral? Maybe it depends on whether you needed the money more than his poor sickly kiddie needed food. Quite genuinely - we cannot say.





I have, for now, left out discussion of the market's ability to set a fair price. If the buyer and seller both agree on the value of an item, where's the loss?

The brief answer is - somewhere at a distance. Happy to expand. If you insist.

I would say the point depends on the individual, and explains why some people are salesmen and some people are not.

Or thieves.

Or merchant bankers.

"the fiver off you get from Richer Sounds is a fiver less in the bonus of the sales assistant"

See, that's an interesting example you've picked right there. Other more expensive electrical retailers are available, for sure. But in my experience across four or five different branches, if you want to meet motivated, cheerful, knowledgeable, helpful staff, people who know their stuff and will try to sell you the *right* thing rather than the most expensive thing, you go to Richer Sounds. If you want to be ignored, patronised, and given outright wrong information by people who appear bored to be there, then by all means go to one of the bigger box-shifting competition (naming no names, but they like Indian food...)

If RS are achieving their discounts by paying their staff less, then they're doing something else on the HR side *extremely* well, because the principle staff in my local branch have worked there a LONG time. I certainly wouldn't buy a TV from anywhere else. (And no, I neither work there nor have shares in them.)

Or armed robbers.

Oh, indeed, SoRB. I like Richer too. But please don't get hung up om that particular example. It was a general rather than specific point I was trying to make.

The general point is that we're all existing within a complex economic (and therefore moral) framework. Your choice to go with Richer takes food of the mouth of the poor sikly kiddy of the Dixons assistant.

It's quite a *reasonable* choice, from your point of view. From the kiddie's - less so.

And wherever we shop, someone in China is probably having a shit time.

"wherever we shop, someone in China is probably having a shit time"

Indeed. Which is an argument for not giving a monkey's. Or not shopping at all. I know which of those options most people would pick.

And if the Dixon's assistant (you do realise there are no Dixons assistants any more, right?) has a sickly kiddie, that's what the NHS is for. Or they could get a job at Richer, assuming they're not the kind of ignorant nob I usually encounter in the box shifter stores.

"we're all existing within a complex economic (and therefore moral) framework"

If your argument boils down to "I think you'll find it's a bit complicated", I can only agree. I've learned a few meta-lessons from over a decade arguing on this site.

(a) It's more complicated than that - you can't just draw a line.
(b) You HAVE to draw a line
(c) wherever you choose to draw the line, you'll be wrong.

This applies to economics, medical ethics, religion, education, relationships, work, personal finance... the list goes on. It's a lesson I'd teach kids early if I could - that they shouldn't bother trying to find the "right" place to draw their lines, merely the best for them at the time. Pretending to others (or worse, yourself) that there's any "right" answer to complex things is the worst kind of delusion.

>>If your argument boils down to "I think you'll find it's a bit complicated"

No. It isn't. That sounds like I was patronising you. I wasn't meaning to.

It's more that when you unpick the complexity - and I believe you are capable of doing so - you see that our economic structure is, in varying degrees, inescably immoral.

The complexity comes in when one tries to expand upon that point. But I don't want an argument about it.

*Broadly* we're in agreement on the fuzziness of moral boundaries, though. The question is 'Does a tiny bit of immorality matter?' I'll have to get to that anther time

Milton Friedman argued that the social responsibility of business was to make a profit; his argument was that anything else (employee benefits, unusually generous pay, charity donations, recycled paper in the photocopiers) is essentially theft from the owners of the business. He describes it as a form of taxation.

Unfortunately his argument is watertight if tautologous - profit-making concerns do exist to make a profit.

The clincher though is that one of the best way to get investment capital is still to exchange it for ownership rights on future profits. Though there are bonds, of course.

Ben

My bad on Dixon's btw. I have a close friend who was a senior Dixons manager. Until they decided he was (ahem. what was the term someone used?) dead wood, so I really should have known better.

But the name lives on!

>>Unfortunately his argument is watertight if tautologous - profit-making concerns do exist to make a profit.


The tautology is the point, Ben. Economics is not a hermetic system. People's lives are involved. 'The origin of wealth is in Labour' and all that. If your sole concern is the profitability of enterprises, you go to Friedman and the like. If you think economics has some form of bearing on the human condition, you go to...some other guy*.

You are spot on about investment capital, of course, and herein lies the source of a good deal of human misery.





















* No not him! What are you like? It's no accident that the person who wrote 'A Theory of Moral Sentiments' also wrote 'The Wealth of Nations'.

But, yes, also to The Seer or Trier, obviously.

I spent five years trying to disagree with the points he made, Ed, and wrote half a dissertation on the subject. His logic is impeccable. It's a bitch.

B

Well, yes. But as you say - it is impeccable within tautological constraints. However the second you ask 'And what effect does this have on people...?' you have a problem. Or, leastways, *someone* has a problem.

For the idea that things which are to the advantage of some may be at the expense of others, and that this is A Bad Thing...you have to go elsewhere.

(Although like many others I suspect Friedman of politically-motivated disingenuity, I take on board his premise that social good equates to what is good for business. Is this true? I'd say it rests on whether you truly believe that wealth trickles down as much as it accumulates.)

>> I take on board his premise that social good equates to what is good for business.

Well, his stance and his motives were overtly political; primarily he was opposed to big government, in particular left-wing big government. I'm not sure he cared about social good; I think he was more concerned about individual liberties.

The point is, that if you want a mission-driven organisation, or one which rewards all workers equally, or one which does not exist to make a profit, then you have to choose a different governance model. They do exist. You can have an owners' or members' co-operative, a not-for-profit, a partnership; whatever. Alongside which not all corporate governance models are the same. In fact, the relationship between national culture and corporate governance models is a covert and rather geeky interest of mine.

>>I'm not sure he cared about social good;

S'what I said. When he talked about it, he was disingenuous. Didn't even have a clue what he meant, in fact.

Which is why, if we're talking about Friedman in this context, we're talking at crossed porpoises. Corporate governance has *something* to do with society - well governed companies generate wealth and this is good - subject to trickledown and assuming (Friedman would *hate* this part) redistributive taxation. But Friedman is all about how to run an economy so that rich people get richer. (Isn't he? Comment/correction welcome.) He doesn't much care if others get poorer as a result or the human society that results. At best he's amoral - but I would argue immoral. (keeping to the OP)

At least one notable philosopher suggested not only was this a pretty filthy attitude but it doesn't even do what it says on the tin because it is based on an unstable system that will collapse in chaos.

Please come back at me if I'm wide of the mark - obviously you know tons more about Friedman than I do. My issue is whether there is any moral grounding there. I'm not convinced that there is. *But I may have a different take on morality* and that would be worth discussing too.

In fairness:

>>I think he was more concerned about individual liberties.

Individual liberties are important...but we need Otto to come along and explain precisely why they must be considered simultaneously with social justice - not as an either/or but a both/and.

My working theory is that when people emphasise individual liberty as the be all and end all, that is not the starting point for their political philosophy but something they use *to justify* their politics. And their politics amounts to 'What's best for me?' Which sounds like immorality to me.

Screw that Ayn Rand shit, basically.

Thing is... all that "what's best for ME?" stuff is fine while you're young, fit and healthy and have the foresight to be born intelligent to rich parents in a first world country. You can then rationalise, I think quite easily, that people with *most* but not all the same advantages don't deserve the success you get, and the people with NONE of those advantages, well, they live quite a long way away, don't they, and they should rise up and overthrow that communist/military/nutjob government they've got if they know what's good for them. Right?

And again, it's fine if in your dotage you're rich and your kids are healthy. But the minute you're ill, or your kids are born disabled or the economy tanks or whatever it soon starts to become harder to justify the devil take the hindmost... except the only people with access to the mass media were the people for whom it was still all basically OK.

That's how it used to be. But now we've got Twitter. And we can see how that worked out for Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Gadaffi, Ben Ali in Tunisia, and probably more to come. I'm backing out here - I have questions but few informed answers, only opinions, and naive ones at that.

Do go on.

Well...information is good.

I'm a little sceptical about whether teh interwebs is truly game changing though. Information can still be controlled. (Iran? China? Louise Mensch?) Also information is only the *first* stage in building revolutionary momentum. Its nothing new. Marx and Engels used telegrams in 1848. Antonio Gramsci talked about how hard it is for people to overcome the default assumptions ('Cultural Hegemony' imposed on them by the structures within which they live. See also Chomsky's 'Manufactured Consent.

The take home message really is that 'It's the Economy, stupid'. It wasn't teh interwebs that launched the Arab Spring. It was quantitative easing. Banks collapsing and no longer lending. Governments give them (future) taxpayers' money to ease their pain. They use this to speculate in commodities and food prices shoot up across the Maghreb. Mohamed Bouazizi's concern was more immediate and prosaic than freedom of expression.

Economics has a moral context because all economic exchanges affect our material condition. This is all that matters.