morality — VOICES for REASON

Forbes.com has published the latest column by Yaron Brook and me, “What We Owe Steve Jobs.”

Watching the world mourn Steve Jobs, we are reminded of how massive crowds of Americans used to gather to celebrate the launch of a new bridge or a new railroad. There is a widespread recognition that Jobs was a creative genius who changed our world profoundly and for the better. Even President Obama, not usually given to praising businessmen, said that Jobs “transformed our lives, redefined entire industries, and achieved one of the rarest feats in human history: he changed the way each of us sees the world.”

All of this raises an important and to-date unasked question: what do we owe Jobs and productive geniuses like him?

You can read the entire column here.

Over at the American Thinker, Dr. Harry Binswanger, a member of the Ayn Rand Institute’s Board of Directors, writes:

The American Values Network, a left-wing group, with considerable funding by George Soros, has launched a media blitz under the banner “Ayn Rand vs. Jesus Christ.”  As an Institute founded by Ayn Rand’s heir and devoted to advancing her philosophy, Objectivism, we would like to respond.  Since this is an issue Rand faced repeatedly in her lifetime, our response is basically to let her speak for herself.

Read the whole thing here.

ARC senior fellow Dr. Onkar Ghate has an editorial on FoxNews.com today. “Ayn Rand is everywhere,” he writes, and “her political opponents are growing nervous.” With some Tea Partiers and politicians praising Ayn Rand’s views, what “worries advocates of the welfare state is that they have never before faced any moral opposition.”

Whatever the rhetoric of Republicans and Democrats in the past, they agreed on the basic goal: more and more government controls are necessary to rein in businessmen, “manage” the economy, and minister to those in need.

No matter which party was in power, therefore, we got things like Sarbanes-Oxley, bailouts of GM and Citibank, a huge prescription drug “benefit” and ObamaCare. Politics was a squabble about the efficacy of any proposed controls, not a dispute about the morality or immorality of imposing controls in the first place. As Krugman observes, in years past everyone “accepted the legitimacy of the welfare state.”

But now its advocates sense that this is no longer true, that some Americans are beginning to question the moral legitimacy of the welfare state. To strangle this questioning in the crib, supporters of government controls are trying to persuade their opponents to abandon Rand.

The current tactic is to tell Tea Partiers and “conservatives” that if you take religion seriously, you can’t be a fan of the atheist Ayn Rand. . . .

Dr. Ghate notes that “this much is true. Rand’s moral teachings are fundamentally different from Jesus’ teachings.”  But he goes on to ask the question, “Did Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers not reject the Sermon’s advice in creating America?”

Read the rest of the op-ed here.

Image: Wikimedia commons

Former chairman and CEO of BB&T Corporation John Allison will debate Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein tonight in New York City.  The topic is “Capitalism: Is It Moral?”  This debate is the third event of the three-part “First Principles” debate series co-sponsored by the Ayn Rand Center, the think tank Demos, and WNYC, the local NPR affiliate.

On WNYC’s site, Mr. Allison has written a blog post describing the nature of capitalism and his experience as a commercial banker for thirty years. Mr. Allison writes:

But capitalism is not exploitative. I spent nearly twenty years as the CEO of one of America’s largest financial institutions, BB&T, and one of the things I saw again and again was that a businessman who abandons principle and tries to make money at the expense of others, although he may succeed in the short run, is doomed in the long run. Taking advantage of people is not truly selfish, it is self-defeating: people will not trust you. You might fool Fred and Suzie, but they will tell Tom, Dick, and Harry and no one will trust you. Being untrustworthy will put you out of business.

The reason BB&T has been so successful is because we help our clients achieve economic success and financial security. They voluntarily pay us for this service, allowing us to make a profit. Both BB&T and our customers are better off from this win-win relationship. On a free market, where you can’t seek favors or bailouts from Washington, business is about creating these types of win-win relationships–by figuring out ways to benefit your clients while making a profit doing so. (And, if you do defraud your customers or engage in some other crime, the government in a free market is there to put a stop to it.)

Read the rest of John Allison’s post here.

Tonight’s debate can be watched live via ARC’s Facebook page starting at 6 p.m. ET.  And if you missed the last two debates, check them out on our YouTube page.

The April issue of the Ayn Rand Institute’s monthly newsletter Impact features an interview with Debi Ghate, co-editor of the new collection Why Businessmen Need Philosophy.

Impact: Hello, Ms. Ghate. Thank you for meeting with Impact to talk about the new edition of Why Businessmen Need Philosophy. To begin, why did you decide to revise and expand this book?

Debi Ghate: Thanks for speaking with me! The idea to update Why Businessmen Need Philosophy arose when my co-editor, Richard Ralston, learned that the first edition had sold out. He was interested in printing it again with a few updates. When I learned of this, it seemed like a tremendous opportunity for us to create a new volume that might be of more interest to the academic and business community. It brought to mind all the positive conversations we’ve had about Atlas Shrugged with businessmen, college students and educators interested in free market ideas. We personally meet or otherwise hear of many fans of the novel who say the book was influential on them–and many of them are (or will someday be) in business-related fields.

Yet very few consider themselves to be seriously interested in philosophical ideas, which of course, the novel is full of. The new edition of Why Businessmen Need Philosophy serves as a bridge between the novel and its underlying ideas with an emphasis on how they apply to the realm of business. Hence the subtitle for our new book–The Capitalist’s Guide to the Ideas Behind Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.”

When Richard compiled the first edition in 1999, Objectivist scholarship in this area (and in many other areas) was more limited. Since then, there has been an explosion of excellent articles on themes of interest to the audiences I’ve described. In addition, the new volume provided us with an opportunity to highlight Ayn Rand’s writings on business in a way that had not been done before.

The result is that we now have a much expanded, improved and timely book than was originally planned.

Read the rest of the interview here.  The issue also includes an excerpt from ARC senior fellow Onkar Ghate’s essay ”Atlas Shrugged: America’s Second Declaration of Independence.”

For another excerpt from the book and the full table of contents, check out the website for Why Businessmen Need Philosophy.

The revised and updated edition of Why Businessmen Need Philosophy hits stores this Tuesday, April 5!  This edition contains new essays by ARC writers Onkar Ghate, Alex Epstein, Yaron Brook, and Keith Lockitch.  Check out the website for the book, where you can peruse the table of contents, watch an interview with co-editor Debi Ghate, read an excerpt from the book, and keep up with other updates.

Don’t forget to place your order for Why Businessmen Need Philosophy today!

And if you want to be entered into a drawing to win a free copy of the book, take our survey.

The revised and updated edition of Why Businessmen Needs Philosophy will be released April 5, 2011. This collection explores why businessmen are vilified in the culture today and how they should defend themselves against the plethora of attacks made against them. The book contains several new essays written by ARC intellectuals, including Yaron Brook, Alex Epstein, and Keith Lockitch.

Check out this excerpt of an interview with co-editor Debi Ghate.

You can peruse the table of contents here, and pre-order a copy of Why Businessmen Need Philosophy today!

WNYC has posted round two in the online debate between Yaron Brook of ARC and Miles Rapoport of Demos, on the proper role of government. That online exchange is a prelude to a live debate Thursday night on the same topic at NYU’s Skirball Center, kicking off the First Principles Debate Series.

For those who cannot make it to the Skirball Center, note that there will be a live video stream from the event.

Despite obvious similarities between the scandal now enveloping TV star Charlie Sheen and the one that brought down Tiger Woods a couple of years ago, there’s a difference worth noticing. Reports indicated that Woods’s various contracts with sponsors included “morals clauses” permitting quick and quiet termination of business relationships when it became apparent that Woods was an adulterous philanderer.

Sheen, by contrast, is engaged in an extended, boisterous war of words with CBS and Warner Bros. Television, which have shut down production on “Two and a Half Men.” Sheen contends that he is both able and contractually entitled to work, and he’s threatening to sue. One reason he can take such an aggressive stand despite widely noted scandals is that, by all indications, there is no “morals clause” in his contract. According to one report:

A morals clause allows a buyer—in this case, a TV studio—to bail on a contract if a star’s conduct is “detrimental to the buyer’s interests,” according to a 2005 Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts article by Noah B. Kressler.

But lawyers and studio insiders say that while morals clauses remain a fixture in the popular imagination, they are seldom used anymore in deals for entertainment talent.

“In terms of my own practice, I haven’t seen a lot of them,” said Doug Mirell, a partner and entertainment litigator at Century City law firm Loeb & Loeb.

The clauses, however, are still widely used in sports contracts and product-endorsement deals. When golfer Tiger Woods was caught up in a heavily publicized cheating scandal that led to his divorce, a number of companies quickly dropped or downgraded their sponsorships. Kellogg dumped swimmer Michael Phelps after video surfaced of the gold medalist smoking marijuana. And Sheen himself was nixed as a spokesman for underwear purveyor Hanes after the actor was accused of threatening his wife in 2009.

To see what they’re talking about, here’s a sample morals clause, typical of those found in professional athletes’ contracts:

“The employee agrees to conduct himself with due regard to public conventions and morals, and agrees that he will not do or commit any act or thing that will tend to degrade him in society or bring him into public hatred, contempt, scorn or ridicule, or that will tend to shock, insult or offend the community or ridicule public morals or decency, or prejudice the producer or the motion picture, theatrical or radio industry in general.”

Of course, there are many considerations that figure into inclusion of a morals clause in a contract. After all, it has to be agreeable to both parties. (Plus, I should note that not all relevant details about either the Woods or Sheen situations have been, or perhaps ever will, be made public.) Nonetheless, one of the values of contract law is that it offers a method for companies like CBS and Warner Bros. Television to arrange in advance a way of disentangling themselves from embarrassing relationships when a star starts misbehaving.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

With a new year approaching, we looked back at some of the topics we discussed on VFR since the blog was launched. Here, we highlight a few of our favorite VFR posts that you may enjoy revisiting (or reading for the first time, if you’re a new reader).

Posts by Don Watkins.

• The rich get richer, the poor get richer, the New York Times gets outraged
• Controls breed controls: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3.
• The Unselfish Bernie Madoff
• The irrational argument for rationing health-care

Image: Wikimedia Commons