'I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any subject.'
That was the founder's motto for Cornell University, and it seems an apt
characterization of the different university,
also in the USA, where I currently teach philosophy.
A student can prepare for a career in resort management, engineering,
interior design, accounting, music, law enforcement, you name it.
But what would the founders of these two institutions
have thought of a course called 'Arson for Profit'?
I kid you not: we have it on the books. Any undergraduates who
have met the academic requirements can sign up
for the course in our program in 'fire science'.
Naturally, the course is intended for prospective arson investigators,
who can learn all the tricks of the trade for detecting whether a fire
was deliberately set, discovering who did it, and establishing a chain
of evidence for effective prosecution in a court of law. But wouldn't
this also be the perfect course for prospective arsonists to sign up for?
My point is not to criticize academic programs in fire science: they are
highly welcome as part of the increasing professionalization of this and
many other occupations. However, it’s not unknown for a firefighter to
torch a building. This example suggests how dishonest and illegal behavior,
with the help of higher education, can creep into every
aspect of public and business life.
I realized this anew when I was invited to speak before a class in marketing,
which is another of our degree programs. The regular instructor is a colleague
who appreciates the kind of ethical perspective I can bring as a philosopher.
There are endless ways I could have approached this assignment, but I took
my cue from the title of the course: 'Principles of Marketing'. It made me
think co ask the students, 'Is marketing principled?' After all, a subject
matter can have principles in the sense of being codified, having rules,
as with football or chess, without being principled in the sense of being
ethical. Many of the students immediately assumed that the answer co
my question about marketing principles was obvious: no. Just look at
the ways in which everything under the sun has been marketed; obviously
it need not be done in a principled (=ethical) fashion.
Is that obvious? I made the suggestion, which may sound
downright crazy in light of the evidence, that perhaps marketing is
by definition principled. My inspiration for this judgement is the
philosopher Immanuel Kant, who argued that any body of knowledge
consists of an end (or purpose) and a means.
Let us apply both the terms 'means' and 'end' to marketing.
The students have signed up for a course in order to learn how
to market effectively. But to what end? There seem to be two main
attitudes toward that question. One is that the answer is obvious:
the purpose of marketing is to sell things and to make money.
The other attitude is that the purpose of marketing is irrelevant:
Each person comes to the program and course with his or her
own plans, and these need not even concern the acquisition of
marketing expertise as such. My proposal, which I believe would
also be Kants, is that neither of these attitudes captures the
significance of the end to the means for marketing.
A field of knowledge or a professional endeavor is defined
by both the means and the end; hence both deserve scrutiny.
Students need to study both how to achieve X, and also what X is.
It is at this point that 'Arson for Profit' becomes supremely relevant.
That course is presumably all about means: how to detect and prosecute
criminal activity. It is therefore assumed that the end is good in an ethical sense.
When I ask fire science students to articulate the end, or purpose, of their field,
they eventually generalize to something like, 'The safety and welfare of society,'
which seems right. As we have seen, someone could use the very same knowledge
of means to achieve a much less noble end, such as personal profit via destructive,
dangerous, reckless activity. But we would not call that firefighting.
We have a separate word for it: arson. Similarly, if you employed the 'principles
of marketing' in an unprincipled way, you would not be doing marketing.
We have another term for it: fraud. Kant gives the example of a doctor and a poisoner,
who use the identical knowledge to achieve their divergent ends.
We would say that one is practicing medicine, the other, murder.