"Your needs don't automatically become claims on somebody else's effort"

"Capitalism says inequality can exist, but your needs don't automatically become claims on somebody else's effort. You produce, trade, improve yourself, or persuade others to help voluntarily. 

"Socialism teaches the opposite moral lesson: need itself creates an entitlement and someone else's success creates the corresponding obligation. Follow that premise far enough and failure never teaches self-reliance, it merely produces another person to blame and another demand to make."

~ Rock Chartrand

'How to Lose $35 Billion with Philosophy'

"What are the odds that the clueless young bro who created the
biggest financial fiasco of the year is connected to the clueless
young bro who created the biggest financial fiasco of the decade?"

"In the last few days, you may have heard about Leopold Aschenbrenner—the wonder kid hedge fund manager who lost tens of billions over the course of a few days. It’s the biggest financial fiasco of the year.

"If you didn’t read about it in the news, don’t worry. Hollywood will certainly make it into a movie. This 25-year-old hot shot’s financial empire was literally collapsing while guests were showing up for his blowout wedding at a fake Tuscan villa in Carmel, California. The screenplay practically writes itself....

"This tyro’s investing strategy looks more like gambling addiction than high finance. Aschenbrenner borrowed to the hilt, using four time leverage to buy AI stocks by the truckload. Then he added to his risk by shorting companies he was sure AI would replace. In other words, instead of hedging his AI position—which is standard practice (and why they call them hedge funds), he doubled down, setting himself up for a failure of Biblical proportions.

"When you take chances like this, even a small downturn in AI stocks will wipe out your entire capital. That’s pretty much what happened last week.

"I wanted to learn more about the young man behind this collapse—so I went to his Wikipedia page. There I discovered his connection to fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried and the latter’s Effective Altruism philosophy.

"What are the odds that the clueless young bro who created the biggest financial fiasco of the year is connected to the clueless young bro who created the biggest financial fiasco of the decade?

"But there it is.

And—another coincidence!—the woman who assisted Bankman-Fried, and served 14 months in prison for fraud and money laundering, also helped run her college’s Effective Altruism club.

This is getting to be a trend.

"But, of course, none of this is coincidence...."

~ Ted Gioia from his post 'How to Lose $35 Billion with Philosophy'

"If Effective Altruism was a movement that simply called on charities to more rigorously measure their impact, they would be an unequivocal force for good in the world. But that is not all that it argues for. Effective Altruism is a crusading movement that argues you have a moral obligation to 'do the most good' in the world, and it defines 'the most good' in strictly utilitarian terms.

"'The most good' means promoting humanity’s well-being. Morally, you are to be indifferent between your own life and the lives of others. Since those others vastly outnumber you, this means in practice a demand for radical self-sacrifice.

"No, Effective Altruists don’t take this to its ultimate, consistent conclusion. You don’t have to literally turn yourself into a meal for others to feast on. But the closer you can strive to lower your own standard of living in order to raise the standard of living of those worse off than you, the better. (See “Peter Singer is Truly Awful.”)

"And it’s not just your wealth that you’re supposed to sacrifice. You’re supposed to sacrifice the irreplaceable moments of your life: instead of choosing a career that you love, Effective Altruists urge you to choose a career that will maximize your earnings so you’ll have more wealth to give away. You’re even supposed to give away your internal organs to strangers. (See “How Many Kidneys Does Sam Harris Have?”)

"In short, the basic moral premise Effective Altruists crusades for is that you don’t have a right to exist for the sake of your own happiness—you exist as a tool to serve others.

"But that raises a troubling question: why bother saving lives in the first place? So that there are more servants to serve servants to serve servants? If more people exist, but exist in the soul-crushing state of living death Rand describes in [her early novel] 'We the Living,' is that really a victory? If the happiness of a single individual is not sacrosanct, if we are all to throw away our lives to maximise some 'general good' that is good for no one in particular, then what the hell is the point?

"Effective Altruists may be reducing deaths—but they are enemies of life. And, actually, it’s not even clear they are reducing deaths...."

~ Don Watkins from his 2023 post 'Has Effective Altruism done anything good for the world?' [emphases in the original]

Crypto scammer Sam Bankman-Fried in his proper place

"Sam Bankman-Fried [CEO of the fraudulent FTX cryptocurrency exchange], was a leading advocate for and financial sponsor of the 'effective altruist' movement. ...

"Whatever the role of Bankman-Fried’s philosophy in FTX’s collapse, effective altruism is increasingly influential and warrants scrutiny. In essence, effective altruism stresses the importance of using a [long-term] rational, scientific approach to calculate the most efficient way to help the most people, especially through charitable giving, as opposed to giving your money away for sentimental reasons. It attracts an audience of highly intelligent, scientifically oriented, secular people.

"But the more we learn about the causes the effective altruist leadership has embraced, the more we should question the moral foundation of the movement. As we’ll see, this is something that even the movement’s fiercest critics have been unwilling to do. ...

"[Some] critics of longtermist altruism claim that its obsession with sci-fi hypotheticals is inexcusable when there are real people suffering and dying in our world today. ... Still others claim the problem isn’t amoralism, but excessive idealism ... None of these critics seriously consider the intellectual content of the ideal of altruism itself ... [especially] longtermism’s call for all of us to sacrifice to the distant future. ...

"Remember, 'the future is big.' If altruism is to be understood in the popular utilitarian way, by looking to consequences of one’s actions for the largest number of people, why wouldn’t one look to the very long-term future where most of the other people will be? ... [after all] a utilitarian concerned with the impersonal consequences of our actions should regard distance in time as no more morally significant than distance in space.

"Although they’re criticised for reaching absurd conclusions, longtermists like MacAskill and Bankman-Fried are just following the logic of the path that’s been laid down by eminent moral philosophers. To simplify that path: morality is really about caring more about others than about yourself, since there are so many more others than you who need your equal attention. And the best way to be concerned with the most others who are far away from your rather insignificant, fragmented self is to concern yourself with the vast future beyond your interests.

"If longtermism is absurd, but the longtermists are just following the logic of the altruist moral ideal, we should take seriously that this ideal is the real source of longtermist absurdities. ...

"In the wake of the FTX scandal, [Bankman-Fried's teacher] William MacAskill himself weighed in on Twitter to condemn Bankman-Fried, arguing that serious effective altruists do not use naked 'end justifies the means' reasoning, and instead value integrity and honesty. Yet, as one philosopher responding to MacAskill noted, utilitarians who see some utility in “common sense morality” can be reliably counted on to say we can suspend it when there are big enough stakes.

"Any philosophy is subject to cynical use and manipulation by insincere advocates. But a philosophy that gives a pass to anyone who is not acting for his own sake but only for the sake of others is uniquely subject to abuse. A philosophy that says give up what you love and work for others is a tool in the hands of anyone who is willing to speak on behalf of others to gain power over those willing to give up what they love. It’s an especially dangerous tool when those who gain the power convince themselves that it is noble to use it, not for their own sake, but for the sake of a nameless, faceless future [for which they claim to speak].

"How, indeed, would one apply such a philosophy without abusing the lives of the people who practice it? Ayn Rand put her finger on the essence of the altruist morality long before advocates of altruism began to make their meaning as explicit as the effective altruists now have. In her novel 'Atlas Shrugged,' she puts these words in the mouth of one character whose workplace has adopted a similar philosophy: 'Do you care to imagine what it would be like, if you had to live and to work, when you’re tied to all the disasters and all the malingering of the globe? . . . To work — on a blank check held by every creature born, by men whom you’ll never see, whose needs you’ll never know, whose ability or laziness or sloppiness or fraud you have no way to learn and no right to question — just to work and work and work — and leave it up to the [altruists] of the world to decide whose stomach will consume the effort, the dreams and the days of your life. And this is the moral law to accept? This — a moral ideal?'"

~ Ben Bayer in his 2023 explanatory post 'Effective Altruism’s Faith-Based Sacrifice for the Future'

"It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master."

~ Ayn Rand from her chapter '"The Soul of a Collectivist,' in her 1963 book For the New Intellectual

She makes a good point

Comic strip, of course, by the late Charles Schulz

There is Nothing Noble About Sacrifice

With the conjunction of Easter and ANZAC in the same week, the word "sacrifice" is being sickeningly over-used.

"Sickeningly" because so few users of the work are fully aware of just how barbaric the ethic of sacrifice is. As I say in this repost of a blog from 2019:

There is Nothing Noble About Sacrifice.

Since so many have used the word so often, let's define it:

"Slaughter." "Surrendering..." "Immolation." Nothing noble about any of that. 

Let's examine it further:

“Sacrifice” is the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one or of a nonvalue. Thus, [the ethic of] altruism gauges a man’s virtue by the degree to which he surrenders, renounces or betrays his values (since help to a stranger or an enemy is regarded as more virtuous, less 'selfish,' than help to those one loves). The rational principle of conduct is the exact opposite: always act in accordance with the hierarchy of your values, and never sacrifice a greater value to a lesser one. [Emphasis added.]

And further:

“Sacrifice” does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious.
“Sacrifice” does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. “Sacrifice” is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t.
    If you exchange a penny for a dollar, it is not a sacrifice; if you exchange a dollar for a penny, it is. If you achieve the career you wanted, after years of struggle, it is not a sacrifice; if you then renounce it for the sake of a rival, it is. If you own a bottle of milk and give it to your starving child, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to your neighbour’s child and let your own die, it is.
    If you give money to help a friend, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to a worthless stranger, it is. If you give your friend a sum you can afford, it is not a sacrifice; if you give him money at the cost of your own discomfort, it is only a partial virtue, according to this sort of moral standard; if you give him money at the cost of disaster to yourself—that is the virtue of sacrifice in full.
    If you renounce all personal desires and dedicate your life to those you love, you do not achieve full virtue [by this moral standard]: you still retain a value of your own, which is your love. If you devote your life to random strangers, it is an act of greater virtue. If you devote your life to serving men you hate—[by this depraved moral standard] that is the greatest of the virtues you can practice.
    A sacrifice is the surrender of a value. Full sacrifice is full surrender of all values.

"The surrender of all values." There is nothing, nothing at all, that is noble about that.

'Sacrifice,' by sculptor Rayner Hoff, inside the Australian War Memorial in Sydney's Hyde Park

Does that mean you should never fight at all? Never fight for those you love? No:

Concern for the welfare of those one loves is a rational part of one’s selfish interests. If a man who is passionately in love with his wife spends a fortune to cure her of a dangerous illness, it would be absurd to claim that he does it as a “sacrifice” for her sake, not his own, and that it makes no difference to him, personally and selfishly, whether she lives or dies.
    Any action that a man undertakes for the benefit of those he loves is not a sacrifice if, in the hierarchy of his values, in the total context of the choices open to him, it achieves that which is of greatest personal (and rational) importance to him. In the above example, his wife’s survival is of greater value to the husband than anything else that his money could buy, it is of greatest importance to his own happiness and, therefore, his action is not a sacrifice.
    But suppose he let her die in order to spend his money on saving the lives of ten other women, none of whom meant anything to him—as the ethics of altruism would require. That would be a sacrifice. Here the difference between Objectivism and altruism can be seen most clearly: if sacrifice is the moral principle of action, then that husband shouldsacrifice his wife for the sake of ten other women. What distinguishes the wife from the ten others? Nothing but her value to the husband who has to make the choice—nothing but the fact that his happiness requires her survival.
    The Objectivist ethics would tell him: your highest moral purpose is the achievement of your own happiness, your money is yours, use it to save your wife, that is your moral right and your rational, moral choice.

Fighting for your values, fighting for those you love, these are acts of integrity. Not of sacrifice.

We may honour a man acting in support of his values, even at the risk of his life. We should neither honour, nor call it, a sacrifice.

Why?

First, because honouring their memory demands it. That's a question of our integrity.

Second, there is a very practical reason; one of self-defence:

It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there’s someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.

Such people exist in every age. 

They called men to war in 1914 in the name of, says one historian, "an altruistic willingness to sacrifice oneself for the cause of righteousness." They call people now, Great Leaders of every description seeking sacrifice to a "higher cause" -- to the State, to the Climate, to any Great Cause selected by the Great Leaders, expunging the sin of selfishness in their answer to the call of "Duty."

But as a great writer once observed: "Under a morality of sacrifice, the first value you sacrifice is morality itself."

There is nothing noble about sacrifice. 

"Logical fallacies are not the only errors that retard thinking. Conceptual fallacies do, too, and often in subtler, more destructive ways."

"Logical fallacies are not the only errors that retard thinking. Conceptual fallacies do, too, and often in subtler, more destructive ways. ..."[These f]allacies ... include package-deals, anti-concepts, frozen abstractions, floating abstractions, and stolen concepts. Below are definitions and examples of each, along with brief indications of the principles they violate. ...

"The fallacy of package-dealing consists in conceptually combining things that are superficially similar but essentially different and, thus, logically do not belong under the same concept. If and when we commit this fallacy, we muddle our thinking about the subject in question and make clear communication impossible. ... 

    "An extremely common instance of package-dealing is the mental blending of 'majority rule' and 'rights-protecting social system' under the term 'democracy.' ... 'Power' is a[nother] package-deal when used to equate 'economic power' with 'political power.' ...

"An anti-concept is a kind of package-deal, in that it combines ideas that logically don’t belong together. But an anti-concept is different from a regular package-deal, in that it is intended to cause conceptual confusion and harm. As [Ayn] Rand defines it, an anti-concept is an unnecessary and rationally unusable term intended to replace and obliterate some legitimate concept(s) in people’s minds. ...

    "The alleged meaning of 'social justice' [for example] is 'the moral imperative of treating people fairly with respect to various social matters.' Its actual meaning is 'the moral imperative of coercively redistributing wealth and forcing individuals and institutions to act against their judgment for the sake of various groups whose individual members allegedly can’t think or live on their own.' In other words, 'social justice' is the soft bigotry of low expectations—fused with the hard coercion of a government gun.
    "The purpose of the anti-concept of 'social justice' is to obliterate the concept of actual justice in people’s minds. And, when people accept the phrase as legitimate and try to use it, that is what it does. ...

"The fallacy of freezing an abstraction consists in making a false equation by substituting a particular conceptual concrete for the wider abstract class to which it belongs. Like a package-deal, it involves integrating concepts in disregard of the need for crucial distinctions.
    "[Ayn] Rand’s seminal example of this fallacy is the equating of 'morality' with 'altruism' by substituting a particular morality (the morality of self-sacrifice) for the whole, general class 'morality.' ...

"Conceptual knowledge is hierarchical. Higher-level concepts, such as mammal, animal, mile, and tyranny, presuppose and depend on lower-level concepts, all the way down to first-level concepts, whose referents are at the perceptual level, such as dog, bird, inch, and force (e.g., a punch in the face). In order to know what a mammal is, you must first understand a chain of more basic concepts, including fertilization, reproduction, animal, and various kinds of animals (e.g., cats, dogs, birds, fish). Without this more basic knowledge, the concept of mammal wouldn’t and couldn’t have meaning in your mind.
    "This principle of hierarchy applies to all conceptual knowledge. Higher-level (more abstract) concepts can be understood and have meaning in someone’s mind only to the extent that he grasps the lower-level (more basic) concepts that give rise to them. And there are essentially two ways people can violate this principle: via floating abstractions and via stolen concepts. 

    "When someone uses a word or phrase that is not supported in his mind by a structure of more basic ideas that are ultimately grounded in perceptual facts, he is using a floating abstraction—an abstraction disconnected from reality in his mind, disconnected from the things the idea refers to, disconnected from the facts that give 't meaning.
    "For example: 'Everyone has a right to a living wage.' If someone uses the word 'right' this way, he doesn’t know what a right is. He doesn’t know what the concept means, what it refers to in reality. He doesn’t know the facts that give rise to our need for the concept. (Or, if he does, he is committing a more grievous fallacy; see concept-stealing below.) ... 'America is a democracy.' If someone thinks or says such a thing, he doesn’t know what “democracy” means (see “democracy” as a package-deal above). The term is a floating abstraction in his mind. 'From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.' If someone chants such nonsense, he has no idea what 'free' means. The term is a floating abstraction in his mind.
    "Floating abstractions abound. Be on the lookout for them in your own mind and in the claims of others. ...

"Now, if someone goes beyond merely using a concept that is disconnected from reality and uses a concept while denying or ignoring more basic, lower-level concepts on which it logically depends, he is committing the fallacy of concept-stealing.
    "Here, as with floating abstractions, the operative principle is the hierarchical nature of conceptual knowledge. Higher-level, more abstract knowledge is built on lower-level, more basic knowledge, all the way down to sensory perception, our direct cognitive contact with reality. Concept-stealing consists in using a higher-level concept while denying or ignoring a lower-level concept(s) on which it depends for its meaning.

    "Examples: ... When someone claims that an experiment has shown that determinism is true—that all human action is antecedently necessitated by forces beyond our control—he steals the concepts of 'experiment' and 'true.' ... When someone claims the senses are invalid, he steals the concept of 'invalid.' (Invalid, in this context, means 'incapable of delivering knowledge of reality.') ....

    "Stolen concepts are rampant in philosophic discussions. And they not only cause confusion; they also make way for much mischief and lead people to waste ungodly amounts of time pondering and debating things that don’t exist, don’t make sense, or don’t matter. Be on the lookout for them. ...

"Keeping your thinking connected to reality is essential to success in reality. And that’s the only kind of success there can be."

~ Craig Biddle from his post 'Conceptual Fallacies and How to Avoid Them'

"The success of our civilisation rests on the pillars of Enlightenment thought—not on belief in the supernatural or in any specific set of ancient myths"

"Many liberals are strangely eager to concede that liberal societies are morally and spiritually bankrupt without religion to give life meaning. ... liberalism [they say] has proven incapable of filling the 'hole in people’s souls.' ... Liberalism 'nurtures the gentle bourgeois virtues like kindness and decency,' but not the 'loftier virtues, like bravery, loyalty, piety and self-sacrificial love.' Although he considers himself a liberal, [the NY Times's David] Brooks thinks liberal societies are lonely, atomised, and even selfish.
    "Brooks joins a growing list of public intellectuals who maintain that the principles and institutions of liberalism—democracy, freedom of speech and conscience, individual rights, and the rule of law—aren’t sufficient for societies to flourish. They believe society needs an anchor that goes deeper than liberalism—what Brooks describes as 'faith, family, soil and flag.
    "There are different expressions of this belief. In an article for the 'Spectator,' journalist Ed West discusses a phenomenon he describes as 'New Theism'—an intellectual movement pushing back against the rising secularism in Western liberal societies. In a recent essay for 'Quillette,' the historian and author Adam Wakeling describes this phenomenon as 'political Christianity,' which he defines as the belief that 'Western civilisation has Christian foundations, and returning to those Christian roots can help protect Western values today.' Wakeling challenges both of these beliefs and argues that the 'success of our civilisation rests on the pillars of Enlightenment thought: constitutional government, secularism, science, the rule of law, and human rights—not on belief in the supernatural or in any specific set of ancient myths' ...
    "Liberalism has lasted for centuries because it is the only set of principles and practices that enables diverse societies to thrive. But liberalism is under threat today. From the emergence of an illiberal and zero-sum form of identity politics on the Left to the resurrection of blood-and-soil nationalism on the Right, the consensus on liberalism in many Western democracies is breaking down. ... Many liberals are strangely eager to concede that liberal societies are morally and spiritually bankrupt without religion or some other 'comprehensive doctrine' to give life meaning. ...
    "The idea that we’re responsible for making our own meaning can be daunting. While religious believers have established doctrines, traditions, and communities, millions of their fellow citizens must find their way to lives of purpose without this scaffolding. Those who call for a religious revival in the West never explain what this looks like in practice. Does it merely mean refilling pews? Or some version of integralism, in which the state and religion are fused? What about the millions of people who simply can’t believe? Thomas Jefferson opens the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom by observing that the 'opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds.' There’s a large and growing population of people in liberal societies who have followed the evidence away from religious faith, and they don’t need a surrogate faith to replace it.
    "The citizens of liberal democracies are fortunate to live in societies that afford them the luxury to have crises of meaning. In many other societies, and at many points in history, people faced more immediate crises: a king or a dictator who would kill them for believing the wrong thing; rival clans that would regularly raid their villages and destroy their homes; life at the mercy of nature, disease, poverty, and starvation. Liberal ideas and institutions like the rule of law, property rights and contract enforcement, and freedom of expression and conscience deserve much of the credit for the health, prosperity, and autonomy we enjoy today. The one thing liberalism can’t provide, however, is a sense of meaning and purpose—that’s up to us, and the responsibility of making our own meaning is a small price to pay. For many, it isn’t a price at all."

~ Matt Johnson from his article 'Liberalism and the West’s ‘Crisis of Meaning’'

There are two ways to throttle business. One is a noose thrown over them involuntarily by government — the other is the noose they put on themselves voluntarily.  One contemporary self-chosen noose is known as 'corporate self-responsibility', aka collectivism applied to corporations, explained in this guest post by Kimberlee Josephson. Corporations, she notes, have come to view themselves as social stewards for moral and social change, and are increasingly declaring that they have to "give back." But is that a good thing?

A Brief History of Corporate Social Responsibility

by Kimberlee Josephson

The phenomenon of so-called CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) gained notoriety with Howard R. Bowen’s 1953 publication Social Responsibilities of the Businessman, and although times have since changed and CSR has taken on various forms since, a constant question remains unchanged.

What is the role of business in society?

Some claim that a greater focus on corporate social performance over corporate financial performance is now warranted, while others adhere to a more classical viewpoint, siding with Theodore Levitt’s assertion that business should simply aim to achieve material gain while operating in good faith. Levitt, a German-American economist and professor at the Harvard Business School, spoke of “The Dangers of Social Responsibility” in a 1958 Harvard Business Review article. He posited that profit maximisation over the long term should be the primary goal of business as this would have a 'spillover effect' improving the wellbeing of society. [As if business's primary goal itself is unimportant! - Ed.]

The propensity to exchange to benefit oneself as a means for societal advancement was most notably espoused in Adam Smith’s 1776 magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations. ("It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner," he declared, "but from their regard to their own interest."), but Milton Friedman later drove this message home in his seminal essay in the New York Times Magazine about how the “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits.”

Yet, the prioritisation of self-gain has proven to be a hard pill to swallow for a culture that seeks emotional fulfillment via altruism. As such, businesses have not only been encouraged to engage in CSR, but also to harness it and pursue a 'higher' calling.

A prominent depiction of the evolution of business interest in CSR, along with society’s expectations for business behavior, is Archie Carroll’s 'CSR Pyramid,' first published in 1991.

At the base of the pyramid is the economic responsibility for firms to be a productive element of society and contribute to the financial wellbeing of the organisation. The next level concerns the legal responsibility of a firm to abide by the ground rules and regulations within the societies they operate. Further up the pyramid concerns a firm’s ethical responsibility, since laws are not sufficient in and of themselves for maintaining order. Indeed, societies establish mores and conventions which influence culture and communal interactions. For instance, it is not illegal to cheat on one’s spouse, but it does violate the institution of marriage; and to the same extent firms are wedded to the societies they are established within and should abide by certain expectations to maintain a healthy relationship.

The top of the pyramid is designated as the discretionary responsibility of philanthropy, wherein the company “gives back,” and this responsibility was posited to be “desired” by society rather than required.

The CSR Pyramid is still widely referenced and Dr. Wayne Visser, CSR professional [sic], who attests it to be a useful framework for managerial decision making. However, over time, the expectations for the top two tiers of the pyramid have expanded, and even what constitutes ethical behaviour has evolved since Carroll’s publication.

In today’s competitive landscape, CSR constitutes a management strategy that goes beyond corporate giving and charitable networks. In fact, as defined by the United Nations, CSR is quite distinct from philanthropy given that in addition to an economic impact it takes into consideration a firm's social and environmental impact.

An emphasis on the people, planet, and profit has become par for the course, and a variety of methods and forms of assessment regarding "sustainability" have come about for companies to prove their “good” work. John Elkington, who coined the term triple bottom line (TBL) for determining the social, environmental, and economic impact of a firm, claims TBL doesn’t go far enough and the business view of CSR is too narrow. Elkington claims that firms should go beyond aiming to be the “best in the world” and instead aspire to be the “best for the world.”

What is “best,” and for whom it is best, though, is largely subjective and open to interpretation. For instance, some social issues are undebatable, such as the desire to end world hunger, but the means for addressing them are usually complex and contestable. [And corporations by their own productivity — and by focussing on their day jobs — have been doing that dramatically in recent decades with barely any applause whatsoever. — Ed.]

Nevertheless, corporations now view themselves as social stewards with a moral charge, and this is an important shift to note, particularly since it is being driven by public opinion.

A 2018 study reported that 78 percent of Americans believe companies must have a positive societal impact beyond their productive purpose, and 77 percent of Americans “feel a stronger emotional connection” to purpose-driven corporations. Companies are responding to public sentiments and reinforcing such expectations through cause-related marketing campaigns and social labelling schemes, and this is a worrisome matter given the potential to compound the issues at hand.

Unlike the stages of the CSR Pyramid, which tended to be industry oriented, firms stretching beyond their domain of competence to prove themselves as worthy contributors to society at large (rather than streamlining efforts toward core stakeholders) is disconcerting for shareholders and distracting for budding entrepreneurs.

The spearheading of virtuous ventures and advocacy advertising show no sign of slowing down—and it won’t, until social pressure shifts back to value rather than virtue.

[Kimberlee's post first appeared at FEE.Org. Hat tip Loiuse Lamontagne and Thomas Miovas Jr]

"National 'service'"

"Translation: your life isn’t really yours. You have to buy it off from some higher entity. To be left alone, you have to pay ransom, in the form of some service to the group. Both the draft, or ‘volunteer weekends’ are this ransom. Despicable. The Tories are a disgusting Party. I wish them a historic annihilation in the elections."

~ Nikos Sotirakopoulos, from his tweet in response to Rishi Sunak's pledge to "bring back National Service" iff the Tories win the UK election

RELATED: 

"Of all the statist violations of individual rights in a mixed economy, the military draft is the worst. It is an abrogation of rights. It negates man’s fundamental right—the right to life—and establishes the fundamental principle of statism: that a man’s life belongs to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it in battle. Once that principle is accepted, the rest is only a matter of time.
    "If the state may force a man to risk death or hideous maiming and crippling, in a war declared at the state’s discretion, for a cause he may neither approve of nor even understand, if his consent is not required to send him into unspeakable martyrdom—then, in principle, all rights are negated in that state, and its government is not man’s protector any longer. What else is there left to protect? ...

"The years from about fifteen to twenty-five are the crucial formative years of a man’s life. This is the time when he confirms his impressions of the world, of other men, of the society in which he is to live, when he acquires conscious convictions, defines his moral values, chooses his goals, and plans his future, developing or renouncing ambition. These are the years that mark him for life. And it is these years that an allegedly humanitarian society [would force] him to spend in terror—the terror of knowing that he can plan nothing and count on nothing, that any road he takes can be blocked at any moment by an unpredictable power, that, barring his vision of the future, there stands the gray shape of the barracks, and, perhaps, beyond it, death for some unknown reason in some alien jungle."

~ Ayn Rand from her 1967 lecture 'The Wreckage of the Consensus' [excerpt here]

"Most people have a superficial conception of happiness...."

"I often tease my cat Harley for her lack of ambition. 

As far as I can tell, she’s content to eat, sleep, and 

collect belly scratches. 'Damnit, Harley. 

You’re sixteen and what have you achieved?' ”

"Most people [have a] superficial conception of happiness. But happiness is deep. It is a reverential attitude toward your life. It is a hard-won, enduring form of joy that can only be achieved through the realisation of your values, including very abstract values like reason, purpose, and self-esteem.
    "Given how superficial the conventional understanding of happiness is, it’s no surprise that the conventional understanding of how to achieve happiness is equally superficial. Tony Robbins’ website lists 17 ways to feel happier, and while much of the advice isn’t awful, claiming that happiness is primarily a matter of spending more time outdoors, listening to upbeat music, and journaling is like saying that a successful marriage is made by buying your partner flowers.
    "What Robbins and almost everyone else ignores is the role of morality in achieving happiness. And to the extent they don’t ignore it, they promote the anti-happiness morality of altruism. 'Remember,' Robbins tells us, 'the secret to living is giving.' I get it. It rhymes. But just because the words fit, don’t make ‘em legit.
    "Even many Effective Egoists, however, don’t appreciate the full implications of a pro-self morality for happiness. There is what I call a hidden art of happiness, which is easy to miss yet indispensable to understand and practice if you want to live a life that you love. ...
    "Your life is a sacred value, but you have to work to make it sacred by living up to a pro-life morality—and you have to work to experience it as sacred by practicing the hidden art of happiness: the art of making your abstract values concrete and real—and of bringing out out the abstract meaning of the concrete.
    "I have explained again and again how the biggest barrier to people adopting the morality of Effective Egoism is their embarrassingly primitive notion of self-interest—a notion nurtured so successfully by altruism’s propagandists. They equate self-interest with empty narcissism and equate the pursuit of happiness with accumulating meaningless pleasures.
    "Few people have the first clue what self-interest means. And who would tell them, when even the motivational speakers and licensed psychologists who make careers out telling you how to be happy are unable to conceive of the heart and soul of seeking joy?
    "The core of self-interest, its actual heart and soul, is conceiving of a vision of who you want to be and the world you want live in, and bringing that into reality. ...
    "That is the hidden art of happiness. It is the art of devoting your days and your thoughts to your highest values and aspirations—to your vision of the life you want to create, and do create with each day that you author."

~ Don Watkins, from his post 'The Hidden Art of Happiness'

"The only way forward is to go back to the concept of 'deserving' and 'undeserving' "

"It has been clear for decades that NZ's approach to welfare has gone awry. The late Roger Kerr, of the NZ Business Roundtable, once said to me, 'The only way forward is to go back to the concept of 'deserving' and 'undeserving'.' ...
    "Between the passage of the Social Security Act in 1938 and the early 1970s the percentage of working-age people on a benefit never exceeded two. Today it stands at almost twelve, with the time people stay dependent growing every year.
    "As a society we have created this level of reliance by believing and acting on a bad idea. That we must not judge others. We must not mention their faults and shortcomings. We must bend over backwards to not blame the person responsible for their own troubles. That's the kindness and compassion we are taught to aspire to. ...
    "I would vouch that the majority of New Zealanders want to help people who, through no fault of their own, need a benefit and public housing. But that willingness does not extend to people who chronically cause their own misfortune."

~ Lindsay Mitchell, from her post 'Is real change on the cards?'

 

How altruism helped (re)create an aristocracy

The humanitarian impulse of the Aborigines' Protection Society helped embed privilege
across Britain's colonies, says the book's author, "whatever the colour of its skin"

"From 1836 to 1909 the Aborigines' Protection Society lobbied the British Colonial Office to defend the rights of aboriginal people. ... The background of the Aborigines' Protection Society's work was the growth of the British Empire in the nineteenth century. ... [Their generosity, though, fell short of respect, seeing native peoples as something like children, in need of protection rather than rights.]
    "The Aborigines' Protection Society was tied up in the New Zealand colony from the outset. ... Wakefield's early interesting in controlling emigration gave him common outlook with the Aborigines' Protection Society ... To get a clearer idea of what Wakefield was thinking, following his talks with [Aborigines' Protection Society head Thomas] Hodgkin, we can read his evidence to the [UK] parliamentary Select Committee around the same time (1840): 'if the inferior race of New Zealand can be preserved at all in contact with civilised men it can only be by creating ... a Native aristocracy, a Native gentry ...'
    "The Society's ... Reverend Montague Hawtrey ... persuaded the Colonial Undersecretary James Stephen that the Māori people ought to be 'looked after' in the new colony and 'saved from the impact of commerce.' ... Hawtrey, like Hodgkin, tried to get Wakefield to work the protection of the native Māori into his scheme of Systematic Colonisation. ...
    "Hawtrey thought New Zealanders ought to pay homage to the native chiefs. 'Even if there were no chiefs in New Zealand it would be,' he wrote, 'judicious to select certain personages from among them and place them in a position of honour.' The reason was that there had to to be 'a class of persons in the island who, by common consent and prescriptive right hold a position onf eminence above the others.' That was true of the Europeans too ... Hawtrey thought ...
    "In the end, Hawtrey's loyalty was to privilege, whatever the colour of its skin. ...
    "As David Cannadine explains, 'It was these people--the chiefs, landowners, sultans or sheikhs--on whom the British felt they could rely, and with whom ... they were most comfortable'. ...
    "The Aborigines' Protection Society helped make the case for the Treaty, and for the colonisation that it licensed."

~ James Heartfield, from his book The Aborigines' Protection Society: Humanitarian Imperialism in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, South Africa, and the Congo, 1836-1909 [pp. vii, 67, 126-9]. As we've said before about the Treaty, it's the "chieftainship" that's the problem...

"Arguing against the views of Edward Said and others, Cannadine suggests that the
British were motivated not only by race, but also by class. The British wanted to
domesticate the exotic world of their colonies and to reorder the societies they

ruled according to an idealised image of their own class hierarchies."

"Since only an individual can possess rights, the expression 'individual rights' is a redundancy. But the expression 'collective rights' is a contradiction in terms. "

"Rights are a moral principle defining proper social relationships. Just as a man needs a moral code in order to survive (in order to act, to choose the right goals and to achieve them), so a society (a group of [individuals]) needs moral principles in order to organise a social system consonant with man’s nature and with the requirements of his survival....
    "What subjectivism is in the realm of ethics, collectivism is in the realm of politics. Just as the notion that 'Anything I do is right because I chose to do it,' is not a moral principle, but a negation of morality—so the notion that 'Anything society does is right because society chose to do it,' is not a moral principle, but a negation of moral principles and the banishment of morality from social issues. ...
    "Yet that is the goal of most of today’s intellectuals. At the root of all their conceptual switches, there lies another, more fundamental one: the switch of the concept of rights from the individual to the collective—which means: the replacement of 'The Rights of Man' by 'The Rights of Mob.'
    "Since only an individual man can possess rights, the expression 'individual rights' is a redundancy (which one has to use for purposes of clarification in today’s intellectual chaos). But the expression 'collective rights' is a contradiction in terms. [Emphasis mine.]
    "Any group or 'collective,' large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members. In a free society, the 'rights' of any group are derived from the rights of its members through their voluntary, individual choice and contractual agreement, and are merely the application of these individual rights to a specific undertaking. Every legitimate group undertaking is based on the participants’ right of free association and free trade. (By 'legitimate,' I mean: noncriminal and freely formed, that is, a group which no one was forced to join.)
    "For instance, the right of an industrial concern to engage in business is derived from the right of its owners to invest their money in a productive venture—from their right to hire employees—from the right of the employees to sell their services—from the right of all those involved to produce and to sell their products—from the right of the customers to buy (or not to buy) those products. Every link of this complex chain of contractual relationships rests on individual rights, individual choices, individual agreements. Every agreement is delimited, specified and subject to certain conditions, that is, dependent upon a mutual trade to mutual benefit.
    "This is true of all legitimate groups or associations in a free society: partnerships, business concerns, professional associations, labour unions (voluntary ones), political parties, etc. It applies also to all agency agreements: the right of one man to act for or represent another or others is derived from the rights of those he represents and is delegated to him by their voluntary choice, for a specific, delimited purpose—as in the case of a lawyer, a business representative, a labour union delegate, etc.
    "A group, as such, has no rights. A man can neither acquire new rights by joining a group nor lose the rights which he does possess. The principle of individual rights is the only moral base of all groups or associations. [Emphasis mine.]
    "Any group that does not recognise this principle is not an association, but a gang or a mob.
    "Any doctrine of group activities that does not recognise individual rights is a doctrine of mob rule or legalised lynching.
    "The notion of 'collective rights' (the notion that rights belong to groups, not to individuals) means that 'rights' belong to some men, but not to others—that some men have the 'right' to dispose of others in any manner they please—and that the criterion of such privileged position consists of numerical superiority. [Emphasis mine.]

    "Nothing can ever justify or validate such a doctrine—and no one ever has. Like the altruist morality from which it is derived, this doctrine rests on mysticism: either on the old-fashioned mysticism of faith in supernatural edicts, like 'The Divine Right of Kings'—or on the social mystique of modern collectivists who see society as a super-organism, as some supernatural entity apart from and superior to the sum of its individual members.
    "The amorality of that collectivist mystique is particularly obvious today ..."

~ Ayn Rand, from her article 'Collectivised Rights' [emphases in the original, except where noted]

Lest we forget what?

It's gratifying, in a way, to start Anzac Day every year with a commemoration of a shambolic dawn landing that kicked off a pointless and wholly tragic military campaign that snuffed out some of the best young men of two young nations. It's not a victory march, but a sobering commemoration of the destruction of war.

This is healthy. This much is good.

"Lest we Forget!"

It's said every year. And yet year after year, the numbers grow fewer who remember what it was we're not forgetting.

In my own lifetime, the commemoration seems to have morphed from remembering the birth of a nation and the bungling of generals -- and all those who are gone -- to one in which the twin themes of nationalistic duty and blood sacrifice have come to thoroughly permeate the day.

Is it just the proximity to Easter that allows that commemoration's central theme to bleed so strongly into this one, I wonder? Or the co-opting of Anzac Day by so many Australian sporting franchises to sell tickets? Maybe. I fear instead that it's the increasing growth of the gruesome ethics of duty and altruism, and the demands of the State in collecting both.

Yes, war can be the ultimate antidote to tyranny. But what's increasingly praised each Anzac Day is not the price of victory over tyranny, but the alleged virtues of sacrifice itself.

But there is nothing -- nothing -- virtuous about sacrifice.

“Sacrifice” is the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one or of a nonvalue... “Sacrifice” does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious.

“Sacrifice” does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. “Sacrifice” is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t... 

A sacrifice is the surrender of a value. Full sacrifice is full surrender of all values. 

There is nothing, nothing at all, that is noble about that.

.

The sculpture above and below is by Australian artist Rayner Hoff, inside the Australian War Memorial in Sydney’s Hyde Park.

It is called, appropriately, ‘Sacrifice.’

At the very focal point of what is virtually a temple to the slain, a stylised man-machine lies prostrate on his shield. Embossed upon it are the words “come home on either with your shield or on it,” the words said by wives whose husbands answered the call to war. His corpse is offered up across a sword too weighty to wield, atop a stylised column lauding the ultimate sacrifice of an individual life. "It tells," says the official description, "not only of the brutality of war and of the suffering it engenders, but of the noblest of all human qualities – self-sacrifice for duty." 

!

It is a brilliant union of art and architecture. Which makes it all the more horrifying. Few twentieth-century sculptures celebrate the morality of sacrifice in war more nobly. More starkly. More ... appropriately.

For never is the widespread acceptance of the morality of sacrifice exploited so thoroughly but in times of war. In World War One, that mis-named 'Great War,' the exploitation was explicit -- sacrifice exploited for recruitment, for economic savings, to diminish liberty, to justify and transmogrify the mass slaughter into something akin to a mass crusade.

Honour, Duty, Patriotism and -- clad in glittering white -- the great pinnacle of Sacrifice, pointing like a rugged finger to Heaven. [1]

This disgusting cant was how Lloyd George combined the themes in a 1914 recruiting speech, the "great pinnacle" uniting the reasons to die on the State's chosen altar in history's most pointless war. To no-one's surprise, hymns were written in this vein, ringing to the drumbeat of sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice ...

Proudly you gathered, rank on rank, to war
As who had heard God’s message from afar;
All you had hoped for, all you had, you gave,
To save mankind—yourselves you scorned to save [2]

... the sacrifice of self to others praised as the primary virtue, the hoped-for result of that sacrifice (final victory?) moving quietly into second place.

In the final days of that pointless war, and desperate to give meaning to the slaughter, the literal blood sacrifice of millions was being called up by the religious as constituting some form of great moral atonement akin to that called up by the Easter crucifixion. Said the Evangelical Alliance in 1918:

The men who, in days gone by, have recoiled from the plan statement of God's Word that 'without shedding blood there is no remission of sin' should find this doctrine easy of acceptance in these days when our lives in this Nation, as the lives of those in the Nations allied to us, are being redeemed by the blood of our sons. [3]

What grotesquerie is this: "Redeemed by the blood of our sons"! And this is said as words of praise! Thus are the transgressions of those who seek moral meaning in mass slaughter. Could anything be more foul? "At the centre of this," writes historian Adrian Gregory,

was an interpretation of war as in some sense 'a sign of grace' in the English people. Before the war all the indications were supposedly of some kind of a disaster; a disaster caused by materialism, selfishness and social division. The war had called forth a better nature. An altruistic willingness to sacrifice oneself for the cause of righteousness ... [4]

"We have been too comfortable and too indulgent," cried the goat-footed Lloyd George, "many, perhaps, too selfish." This by a man who conscripted men by the million to die in sheer blind terror. Thus is selfishness made the sin and the morality of altruism made explicit as a call to mass sacrifice -- that collective bloodshed 'atoning' in atavistic fashion for the pre-war "sin" of producing (all-too briefly) a peace-loving world.For having produced and enjoyed, in those years before the 1914-18 war, what was described as “the last afterglow of the most radiant cultural atmosphere in human history” -- or as Austrian author Stefan Zweig called it “individual freedom at its zenith, after [which, after that war,] I saw liberty at its lowest point in hundreds of years.” [5, 6] That was what mass slaughter had bought. A world war that brought about a Second World War. And, by the ethic of altruism, the soldier's sacrifice became a "'blood tax' against which everyone else had to measure themselves." [7]

We are still being asked to, every April 25.

What is it then we should least forget, every year? For these are among the things that I cannot. As Ayn Rand observed, when there is widespread call of sacrifice, there is always someone ready and willing to pick up the sacrifices. Not in military duty necessarily, today, but undoubtedly in calls for duty, for selflessness, for service to a higher cause -- either State, or Climate, or Great Cause -- that Great Cause to be selected for us by Great Leaders. Selfishness, still, the sin to be expunged. Following along -- in "kindness," in sacrifice, in forelock-tugging obedience -- the virtue to be encouraged.

For under a morality of sacrifice, the standard of value is never your own happiness, but that of others. Not your own prosperity, but that of others. Not even your own life, but those of others. (As W.H Auden sarcastically summarises, “We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I can’t imagine.” [8])

The result of all this sacrifice amounts to nothing more than an often blood-soaked row of zeroes. And no wonder, for as this excerpt from Galt’s Speech points out: "Under a morality of sacrifice, the first value you sacrifice is morality…" [9]

Think about it.

In the meantime, and as a much healthier antidote, let’s talk about what morality is for: not to teach us how to suffer and die, but to enjoy ourselves and live!

About happiness and its pursuit. Not war. Not sacrifice. But the thing -- and, flowing from freedom, perhaps the only thing -- that is ever worth fighting for. “What else could be more selfishly important?”

Let's not forget what we are here for: to pursue our own happiness in our own productive way, asking neither that others sacrifice for us, nor that we need to sacrifice ourselves to others.

Lest we forget that!

NOTES:

1. David Lloyd George, speech at Queen's Hall, September, 1914, quoted in Adrian Gregory's book The Last Great War,  2008, "an entirely new account of how British society understood and endured the war." (You might also say: of the moral means by which they were exploited.)
2. From the hymn 'O Valiant Heart,' taken from a poem by John Stanhope Arkwright, published in The Supreme Sacrifice, and other Poems in Time of War (1919)
3. The War and Sacrificial Death: A Warning, The Evangelical Alliance, 1918, quoted in Gregory

4. Gregory, 157

5. From Ayn Rand’s introduction to her essay collection The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature.
6. From Stefan Zweig’s 1942 autobiography, which is also a biography of the collapse of Europe into barbarism, The World of Yesterday

7. Gregory, 150
8. Auden, Prose, vol. 2, p. 347
9. Rand, Atlas Shrugged