Who Heard a Who?
In conclusion, business ethics is a field of inquiry and debate among fairly divergent views. I have offered some Seussian thoughts to lend support for taking account of multiple stakeholders over washing managers’ and owners’ hands of responsibility. Consumers should be treated fairly and with an aim to offer them something of genuine value, not just because profit is to be had by doing so but also because business activity is one that takes place among persons who owe each other such respect. Similarly, employees should be fairly compensated and provided with dignified work environments, not just because doing so will keep up productivity but because they are persons who deserve proper treatment. Finally, the environment itself deserves to be respected, if not for its own sake, then at least for the sake of all of those persons who live within it. There are obviously more stakeholder groups that we can identify, but the general approach should now be clear.
To be fair, though, there are larger and more complicated political, economic, and social issues at play, and perhaps the followers of Friedman are right to restrict the role responsibility of a businessperson to making profits. My worry is that defining one’s role in business narrowly will externalize these moral concerns to be dealt with on a societal and global political level (perhaps meaning they will not be attended to properly). To be sure, defining one’s role broadly results in having to make even more complicated business decisions, perhaps making one more vulnerable to less scrupulous competitors. Yet, even though attending to profit and competitive advantage is crucial, commerce is a human activity. It emerges among human beings and affects human beings, as well as the environment we all live in. The myth that business is impersonal does ideological work, making immorality seem acceptable and moral deliberation inappropriate. Abolishing that myth opens up the requirement for decision makers within a company to retain their sense of personal moral responsibility in their roles and to recognize the many stakeholders as persons as well. Acknowledging as much makes managing a company a morally weighty activity. The morally responsible manager admirably pursues profit in the most beneficial and least harmful way, gathering her creative resources and leadership skills to navigate the challenges. By comparison, it reveals profit-maximizing managers to be merely the adolescent McGurks, devious McBeans, and self-destructive Once-lers that we could all do without.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Speaking for Business, Speaking for Trees: Business and Environment
in The Lorax
Johann A. Klaassen and Mari-Gretta G. Klaassen
Questions about the role and responsibilities of business in adult society are not, generally speaking, addressed in the stories of Dr. Seuss. Perhaps, if we stretch the topic a bit, If I Ran the Zoo and If I Ran the Circus could be read as a child’s understanding of how adults can and should act in the world—but both are obviously written from the child’s perspective and show the limits of even a child’s imagination when applied to the problems of adult life. This means that The Lorax is unusual among Dr. Seuss’s works in two respects: first, it is a story told by an adult to a child, from the adult’s point of view; and second, it is one of a very few stories that Dr. Seuss admitted having begun with a clear moral in mind.1 In The Lorax, the main character, the Once-ler, tells his story to an unnamed child: a story of how he built a business and destroyed an ecosystem in the process, despite the interventions of the Lorax, who “speaks for the trees.” The book ends hopefully, with the Once-ler asking for the child’s help to restore that environment—almost hopefully, we should say, as it is not entirely clear that the child is actually willing to participate or that any amount of effort will restore the land, water, and air.
In this chapter, we will examine the three questions we think drive this book—questions that ride a fine line between business ethics and environmental ethics. First, what IS a “Thneed”? It’s the product that the Once-ler produces in his factory, “a Fine-Something-That-All-People-Need!”—an object that has so many uses that it is really, to all extents and purposes, useless. However, people still buy it, perhaps due to a sudden fad. Or, in other words, when we buy things like Thneeds, do we consume too much? Second, is the Once-ler really so focused on the growth of his business that he cannot see the destruction he is causing? The Lorax warns the Once-ler, pointing out the harms that his factory is doing as it grows—but these warnings do not cause him to reconsider his environmental policies but rather to shrug off the problems. Or, in other words, are there alternatives to economic growth? Third, why does the Once-ler ignore the long-term sustainability of his business? It seems he forgets that there are a finite number of Truffula Trees, and doesn’t plant any new ones. He allows the resources the business relies on to run out; his business is ruined, and the local environment has been permanently altered. Or, in other words, can attention to a longer time frame have positive impacts on both business and the environment? Such questions lie at the intersection of business ethics and environmental ethics—and might be seen as central to understanding our place on the planet.
Do You Need a Thneed?
The Once-ler begins his story by describing a beautiful place full of interesting animals, clean water, and fresh air—and, most importantly to him, Truffula Trees. The “Truffula tufts” are full of a soft fiber that the Once-ler knows he can knit into . . . well, a “Thneed.” This is an indescribable item with more “uses” than could ever be realistically useful.
It’s a shirt. It’s a sock. It’s a glove. It’s a hat.
But it has other uses. Yes far beyond that.
You can use it for carpets. For pillows! For sheets!
Or curtains! Or covers for bicycle seats! (Lorax)
From the production of the very first Thneed it seems fairly clear that the Thneed has no real use or value. It’s important to keep an open mind when reading a Dr. Seuss book, but we find it hard to imagine an object that could fulfill all these tasks and still be comfortable or practical while being used for any of these functions. The Lorax speaks for all of us, it seems, when he says that the Once-ler won’t sell a single Thneed. But immediately the Lorax is proven wrong. “For, just at that minute, a chap came along, / and he thought that the Thneed I had knitted was great. / He happily bought it for three ninety-eight” (Lorax). And although it seems that Thneeds become incredibly popular, we never do find out what they’re really any good for . . . just that people think that they’re “great.” The popularity of the Thneed, despite its uselessness, prompts us to ask a key question: are there some products that should not be made? Philosophically speaking, this question is usually turned around: Are there moral limits to our freedom to consume? Might there be some things that we should not want to buy? Many of us hope to follow Thoreau’s dictum and “simplify, simplify”—and we have probably all seen bumper stickers urging us to “live simply, that others may simply live” (a maxim attributed to Mahatma Gandhi). But why should we?
Drawing from the 2004 Worldwatch Institute report, Joseph DesJardins puts consumption patterns into stark perspective:
The wealthiest 25% of the world’s population consumes 58% of the energy, 45% of the meat and fish, 84% of the paper, and 87% of the vehicles, and accounts for 86% of the total private consumer expenditures. In contrast, the world’s poorest 25% consumes 24% of the energy, 5% of the meat and fish, 1% of the paper, and less than 1% of the vehicles, and accounts for only 1.3% of the total private consumer expenditures.2
Americans and Western Europeans make up a large part of the wealthiest quarter of the world’s population, and DesJardins argues that this huge disparity shows that we “consume too much” in three fundamental ways.3
First, our consumption patterns—the habits born of our “work and spend cycle”—are not in our best interests, so we consume too much “in a practical sense.” We are more likely to be obese, more likely to labor under a crushing debt load, and less likely to describe ourselves as happy than the rest of the world. Dr. Seuss doesn’t really tel
l us much about the practical impact of Thneed purchases on the chaps who buy them; because we understand something of how fads work, though, we might guess that some people are driven to distraction (at least!) by their lack of a Thneed, especially once all of their friends have them. Second, our consumption patterns drive and are reinforced by an unequal and unjust allocation of scarce natural resources, so we consume too much “in an ethical sense.” Americans spend more on cosmetics every year than it would cost to provide basic education to all the children in the poorest parts of the world; Americans and Europeans, counted together, spend more on pet food every year than it would cost to provide basic health care and food to those same children. Dr. Seuss doesn’t really address this issue either, and we don’t hear anything about the other uses to which the money spent on Thneeds might have been put—but it seems to us that the uselessness of Thneeds would mean that just about any other use would have been better, really. Third, our consumption patterns drive production practices that threaten to destroy the natural environment, so we consume too much “in an environmental sense.” This essay was written during the unfolding of one of the worst environmental disasters the world has ever known, the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. It seems clear to us that our desires to use more and more fossil fuels are doing more harm than good. Once he sells his first Thneed, the Once-ler immediately hires a work force and builds a factory to make Thneeds on an industrial scale in the middle of nowhere, without any apparent thought for the environmental impact of his actions (to which we’ll return below).
Just before his initial description of the Thneed, the Once-ler assured the Lorax of his good—or at least not bad—intentions: “‘Look, Lorax,’ I said. ‘There’s no cause for alarm. / I chopped just one tree. I am doing no harm. / I’m being quite useful. This thing is a Thneed’” (Lorax). And it’s hard to object, really, to the Once-ler’s claim, since Thneeds haven’t yet had a chance to have a practical impact on the society or to have an ethical impact on the distribution of scarce resources, and the environmental impact of cutting down and using up one Truffula Tree probably really is so small as to be “no harm,” or not enough of a harm to be particularly concerned about. But once the Once-ler brought many of his relatives to his factory, where they all knitted Thneeds, the impact of Thneed consumption begins to be felt quickly.
Now, consumption in and of itself is not necessarily morally problematic, and DesJardins admits as much: “What we might call ‘smart consumption’ or ‘good consumption’ recognizes the many good reasons there are to consume and seeks to distinguish good from bad consumption.”4 Bad consumption, clearly, is the “too much” consumption that we have discussed in the previous paragraphs; what could good consumption be? DesJardins has only a brief suggestion: “One does not sacrifice by consuming less if what one consumes is better.”5 Although DesJardins doesn’t refer to it directly, we think that his drawing this distinction is meant to pick up on the work of Mark Sagoff. In “Do We Consume Too Much?” Sagoff argues that at least some of our worries about our rate of consumption are unfounded: various ecologically minded prognosticators have been predicting impending human and ecological disasters (food shortages, energy shortages, and the like) at least since the seventies, none of which have come about. Instead, Sagoff argues, we find ourselves detached and distanced from one another, from our homes and communities, and from the natural world around us by the impacts of our consumption patterns.6
Rather than urge less consumption, Sagoff (like DesJardins) recommends a smarter approach to consumption:
The alternative approach suggests not so much that we consume less but that we invest more. Environmentalists could push for investment in technologies that increase productivity per unit of energy, get more economic output from less material input, recycle waste, provide new sources of power, replace transportation in large part with telecommunication, and move from an industrial to a service economy.7
In short, in this sort of a view, consumption itself isn’t a particular problem: our economic system can continue to produce the things we’d like to consume—but it should be done better, using fewer resources and less energy, as it rolls along. It’s not a problem, really, for us to desire Thneeds, as long as their production processes are (or become) environmentally benign. But, as we discover, the Once-ler’s factory is anything but benign.
Must Business Grow?
Like many business owners before him the Once-ler quickly begins to focus on “biggering” his business. Unfortunately, as it grows the Once-ler’s business requires more and more Truffula Trees.
Now, chopping one tree
at a time
was too slow.
So I quickly invented my Super-Axe-Hacker
which whacked off four Truffula Trees at one smacker.
We were making Thneeds
four times as fast as before! (Lorax)
In cutting down so many Truffula Trees, the Once-ler has incurred the wrath of the Lorax. The Lorax goes on to state the plight of the Brown Bar-ba-loots, who are running low on their native food source, Truffula Fruits. This could be a good first sign to the Once-ler: if there’s a Truffula Fruit shortage, and the Bar-ba-loots have to find somewhere else to live, then there are probably not enough Truffula Trees for the Once-ler to continue production at his present pace. So why does he continue? Does he simply not care?
In fact, we think that this is one of the first questions to occur to a child when reading The Lorax: Why did the Once-ler mess up the place he admired?8 Before the Once-ler begins making Thneeds, there is no doubt that he does admire the Truffula Tree grove. So why does he allow his drive to make his business bigger overwhelm his concern for his local environment? The answer seems to be, simply put, money. The Once-ler isn’t particularly concerned by the plight of the Bar-ba-loots: although he says he feels badly that they must leave, he is able to ignore the Lorax for the time being. Instead, his exclusive focus turns to his business:
I meant no harm. I most truly did not.
But I had to grow bigger. So bigger I got.
I biggered my factory. I biggered my roads.
I biggered my wagons. I biggered the loads
of the Thneeds I shipped out. I was shipping them forth
to the South! To the East! To the West! To the North! . . .
I went right on biggering . . . selling more Thneeds.
And I biggered my money, which everyone needs. (Lorax)
The sudden popularity of Thneeds may have surprised the Once-ler at first, but it seems that he was ready to take advantage of it by rapidly increasing production—and to increase it with unsubtle marketing, since on the side of the wagons, as they depart the factory, we can see the Once-ler’s unsubtle message: “You Need a Thneed!”
As we discussed with consumption, economic growth is not, in itself, morally problematic. In large parts of the world, people are struggling to survive, and economic development would clearly improve their lot. But these last two sentences illustrate a common conceptual confusion, which we think is very important to keep clear: “economic growth” and “economic development” are not the same. Herman Daly has long urged that we make a sharp distinction: “We can simply distinguish growth (quantitative expansion) from development (qualitative improvement), and urge ourselves to develop as much as possible, while ceasing to grow.”9 But what could it mean to have an economy that doesn’t grow?
Economic orthodoxy would have us believe that a company or an economy that does not continually move forward, growing at every moment, will starve and die. To intentionally limit growth, particularly by imposing strict environmental regulation, would on such a view mean a sort of retreat from economic activity—which would itself mean a worldwide and permanent contraction of the sort that would wreck everyone’s standard of living. But this line of thinking has faded in recent years, as mainstream economists looked closely at the actual result of environmental regulation and found that they are “not only be
nign in their impacts on international competitiveness, but actually a net positive force driving private firms and the economy as a whole to become more competitive in international markets.”10 Or it could be that the idea of “limiting growth” could mean holding the total of economic activity in the global economy exactly at current levels. This would imply a strange kind of stagnation, in which the world’s standard of living would gradually converge on a level lower than the developed world currently enjoys but higher than the extreme poverty so prevalent around the world. It seems unlikely that very many people in the developed world would be excited by the prospect of transferring wealth to others, even if it meant that the suffering of others was largely eliminated.
Dr. Seuss and Philosophy Page 29
