The Business Ethics Blog

Sorry, another Wal-Mart posting.

From Reuters: “Wal-Mart sells ‘Brokeback’ DVDs despite protests”

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer, went ahead with plans this week to sell DVD copies of the gay-themed film “Brokeback Mountain” despite protests from a Christian advocacy group.

The American Family Association, which called for a boycott against Ford Motor Co., for advertising in gay publications, recently began pressing Wal-Mart to refuse to carry the award-winning movie in its 3,700-plus U.S. stores.

The Tupelo, Mississippi-based group accused Wal-Mart of abandoning its “family-friendly” corporate image by selling the film, about two cowboys who carry on a homosexual love affair.

Most people like the idea of consumer activism, and the idea of big companies bowing to public pressure. But for most of us, that ends as soon as we see a company bowing to demands we disagree with.

So, there are a lot of people who would rejoice if Wal-Mart acceded to public demands to stop selling, say, guns, but who would be angered if Wal-Mart acceded to public demands to stop selling Brokeback Mountain.

Of course, guns kill people. (Or, if you like, guns are used by people to kill people. Whatever.) There have been, to the best of my knowledge, no instances of innocent bystanders being killed with a Brokeback Mountain DVD. Groups like the American Family Association, of course, believe (some of them) that the homosexuality portrayed in the film is either evil in and of itself, or will have some kind of corruptive effect on families, social fabric, etc. The former claim (that homosexuality is immoral) is rejected — formally, at least — by all Western nations. The latter claim — that homosexuality, or its portrayal, will have negative social consequences is an empirical claim, one for which no convincing evidence exists.

But deep disagreeement about these two cases is unlikely to go away. So, retailers like Wal-Mart are left with hard decisions about what kinds of public pressure to bow to.

I’ll merely suggest two philosophical touchstones, starting points for those of you interested in thinking more about this problem.
1) John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle.” Mill’s ‘harm principle’ says, roughly, that you shouldn’t have a law against something if it doesn’t harm anyone. Simply finding a behaviour objectionable is not enough to warrant passing a law against it (even if a large majority were to find it objectionable). (For more: see Mill’s “On Liberty”)
2) John Rawls’s notion of “public reasons”. Rawls held that deep disagreement is a central feature of life in a modern, liberal democratic society. He also held that the existence of such disagreement is reasonable. Rather than try to argue away disagreement, Rawls held that we ought to seek good deliberative procedures that would allow us to make pragmatic decisions in spite of ineliminable disagreements. One key principle that Rawls suggests ought to guide such deliberations is that the reasons brought to bear should be “public” ones. That is, they ought to be reasons that are consistent with the shared values of a democratic people. (My apologies to Rawls scholars for the roughness of this explanation.) (For more: see Rawls’s “Justice as Fairness”)

Of course, both Mill and Rawls were talking about public decision-making, rather than decision-making by private institutions like Wal-Mart. But in a sense, a mega-retailer like Wal-Mart plays a role akin to that played by public institutions. Given both its size, and the fact that corporations are made possible by various pieces of public law, a case might be made that corporate decision-making on contentious issues ought to be guided by the best available philosophical principles designed for public deliberation. So (and here’s a good thesis project), are there corporate analogies to Mill’s harm principle and Rawls’s notion of public reasons? Are they defensible?