Stepping down rather than up: the ethical option for business in our troubling times

In an interview with the New York Times in August of 2017, the Chief Executive of Apple Computers, Tim Cook was quoted to have said that because government was becoming ‘less functional’ and ‘less able to work at the speed it once did’, businesses and other areas of society needed to ‘step up’ to fulfil the roles that government once played (Sorkin, 2017). This chapter argues a contrary view: that the truly ethical response for business in our troubling times is to step ‘down’, rather than ‘up’. The idea that corporations need to step up in order to fill a moral gap speaks to the assumption that they are now the prime actors within society whose operational approaches will best serve society at large. Secondly, it assumes that businesses, rather than elected government officials, are best placed to decide how to serve wider societal interests. Furthermore, it intimates that businesses themselves can choose the ways of stepping up that suit them best. This is clearly the case for Apple, who donated $10 million to hurricane relief in 2017 (Mejia, 2017) but simultaneously holds over $252 billion in offshore accounts in order not to pay tax on these profits (Drucker and Bowen, 2017). Stepping down, that is, businesses taking a place as one voice among many rather than assuming the role of central actors in society, offers a direct challenge to the neoliberal ideology of our times. Neoliberalism places market mechanisms and the pursuit of profit as central to human endeavour. As primary players within markets businesses have become dominant actors whose interests trump all others (Klein, 2014). Cook’s statement speaks of the hubris that attends principal and privileged positions. Indeed, corporations’ central position is so unequivocally dominant that Cook’s statement is interpreted as an indication of his intent to take a moral lead, rather than as a practice of applying bandaids to good causes (as well as a step which attracts favourable media attention).