The Business Ethics Blog

I’ve written two blog entries over the last two weeks (here and here) arguing in favour of the business community imposing sanctions on Russia, in response to Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine.

I think the reasons in favour of such sanctions are powerful: Putin is a serious and unique threat both to Eastern Europe and to the world as a whole, and it is essential that every possible step be taken both to denounce him and to hobble him. The international community agrees, and the international business community, in general, agrees too.

But not everyone. Some major brands have resisted pulling out, as have some lesser-known ones. And while I disagree with the conclusions arrived at by the persons responsible for those brands, I have to admit that I think the reasons they put forward in defence of their conclusions merit consideration.

Among those reasons:

“We don’t want to hurt innocent Russians.” Economic sanctions are hurting Russian citizens, including those who hate Putin and who don’t support his war. Myself, I think such collateral damage pales in comparison to the loss of life and limb being suffered by the people of Ukraine. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a good point: innocent people being hurt always matters, even if you think something else matters more.

“We have obligations to our local employees.” For some companies, ceasing to do business in Russia might mean as little as turning off a digital tap, so to speak. For some, it means laying off (permanently?) relatively large numbers of people. Again, we might think that this concern is outweighed, but it’s still a legitimate concern. We generally want corporations to think of themselves as having obligations of this kind to employees.

“Sanctions won’t work.” The point here is that we don’t (do we?) have good historical evidence that sanctions of this kind work. Putin is effectively a dictator, and he really doesn’t have to listen to what the Russian people think, and so squeezing Russians to get them to squeeze Putin is liable to fail. Myself, I’m willing to grasp at options the success of which is unlikely, in the hopes that success is possible. But still, it’s a concern worth listening to.

“Sanctions could backfire.” The worry here is that if we in the West make life difficult for Russian citizens, then they could start to see us as the enemy — certainly Putin will try to make that case. And if that happens, support for Putin and his war could well go up as a result of sanctions.

That’s a few of the reasons. There are others.

On balance, I think the arguments in the other direction are stronger. I think Putin is uniquely dangerous, and we need to use every tool available to us, even those that might not work, and even those that might have unpleasant side-effects.

However — and this is crucial — I don’t think that people who disagree with me are bad, and I don’t think they are foolish, and I refuse automatically to think less of them.

It doesn’t help, of course that the folks making the arguments above are who they are. Some of them are speaking in defence of big companies. The motives of big companies are often thought of as suspect, and so claims of good intentions (“We don’t want to hurt innocent Russians!” or “We must support our employees!”) tend to get written off as self-serving rationalizations. Then there’s the specific case of the Koch brothers, and the companies they own or control. They’ve announced that they’re going to continue doing business in Russia. And the Koch brothers are widely hated by many on the left who think of them as right-wing American plutocrats. (Fewer realize that while the Koch brothers have supported right-wing causes, they’ve also supported prison reform and immigration reform in the US, and are arguably better categorized as libertarians. Anyway…)

My point is this: The fact that you mistrust, or outright dislike, the people making the argument isn’t sufficient grounds for rejecting the argument. That’s called an ad hominem attack. Some people’s track records, of course, are sufficient to ground a certain mistrust, which can be reason to take a careful look at their arguments, but that’s quite different from writing them off out of hand.

We ought, in other words — in this case and in others — to be able to distinguish between points of view we disagree with, on one hand, and points of view that are beyond the pale. Points of view we merely disagree with are ones where we can see and appreciate the other side’s reasoning, and where we can understand how they got to their conclusion, even though that conclusion is not the one we reach ourselves, all things considered. Points of view that are beyond the pale are ones in support of which there could be nothing but self-serving rationalization. Putin’s purported defence of his attack on the Ukraine is one such view. Any excuse he gives for a violent attack on a peaceful neighbour is so incoherent that it can only be thought of as the result either of disordered thinking, or a smokescreen. But not so for companies, or pundits, that think maybe pulling out of Russia isn’t, on balance, the best idea. They have some good reasons on their side, even if, in the end, I think their conclusion is wrong.

Is a corporate boycott of Russia an act of vigilantism?

Some people reading this will assume that “vigilantism” equals “bad,” and so they’ll think that I’m asking whether boycotting Russia is bad or not. Both parts of that are wrong: I don’t presume that that “vigilantism” always equals “bad.” There have always, historically, been situations in which individuals took action, or in which communities rose up, to act in the name of law and order when formal law enforcement mechanisms were either weak or lacking entirely. Surely many such efforts have been misguided, or overzealous, or self-serving, but not all of them. Vigilantism can be morally bad, or morally good.

And make no mistake: I am firmly in favour of just about any and all forms of sanction against Russia in light of its attack on Ukraine. This includes both individuals engaging in boycotts of Russian products by as well as major companies pulling out of the country. The latter is a kind of boycott, too, so let’s just use that one word for both, for present purposes.

So, when I ask whether boycotting Russia a kind of vigilantism, I’m not asking a morally-loaded question. I’m asking whether participating in such a boycott puts a person, or a company, into the sociological category of “vigilante.”

Let’s start with definitions. For present purposes, let’s define vigilantism this way: “Vigilantism is the attempt by those who lack formal authority to impose punishment for violation of social norms.” Breaking it down, that definition includes three key criteria:

• The agents acting must lack formal authority;
• The agents must be imposing punishment;
• The punishment must be in light of some violation of social norms.

Next, let’s apply that definition to the case at hand.

First, do the companies involved in boycotting Russia lack formal authority? Arguably, yes. Companies like Apple and McDonalds – as private organizations, not governmental agencies – have no legal authority to impose punishment on anyone external to their own organizations. Of course, just what counts as “legal authority” in international contexts is somewhat unclear, and I’m not a lawyer. Even were an organization to be deputized, in some sense, by the government of the country in which they are based, it’s not clear that that would constitute legal authority in the relevant sense. And as far as I know, there’s nothing in international law (or “law”) that authorizes private actors to impose penalties. So whatever legal authority would look like, private corporations in this case pretty clearly don’t have it.

Second, are the companies involved imposing punishment? Again, arguably, yes. Of course, some might suggest that they are not inflicting harm in the traditional sense. They aren’t actively imposing harm or damage: they are simply refraining, quite suddenly, from doing business in Russia. But that doesn’t hold water. The companies are a) doing things that they know will do harm, and b) the imposition of such harm is in response to Russia’s actions. It is a form of punishment.

Finally, are the companies pulling out of Russia doing so in reaction to perceived violation of a social rule. Note that this last criterion is important, and is what distinguishes vigilantism from vendettas. Vigilantism occurs in response not (primarily) to a wrong against those taking action, but in response to a violation of some broader rule. Again, clearly the situation at hand fits the bill. The social rule in question, here, is the rule against unilateral military aggression a nation state against a peaceful, non-aggressive neighbour. It is one agreed to across the globe, notwithstanding the opinion of a few dictators and oligarchs.

Taken together, this all seems to suggest that a company pulling out of Russia is indeed engaging in vigilantism.

Now, it’s worth making a brief note about violence. When most people think of vigilantism, they think of the private use of violence to punish wrongdoers. They think of frontier towns and six-shooters; they think of mob violence against child molesters, and so on. And indeed, most traditional scholarly definitions of vigilantism stipulate that violence must be part of the equation. And the classical vigilante, certainly, uses violence, taking the law quite literally into their own hands. But as I’ve argued elsewhere,* insisting that violence be part of the definition of vigilantism makes little sense in the modern context. “Once upon a time,” violent means were the most obvious way of imposing punishment. But today, thinking that way makes little sense. Today, vigilantes have a wider range of options at their disposal, including the imposition of financial harms, harms to privacy, and so on. And such methods can amount to very serious punishments. Many people would consider being fired, for instance, and the resulting loss of ability to support one’s family, as a more grievous punishment than, say, a moderate physical beating by a vigilante crowd. Vigilantes use, and have always used, the tools they found at hand, and today that includes more than violence. So, the fact that companies engaging in the boycott aren’t using violence should not distract us here.

So, the corporate boycott of Russia is a form of vigilantism. But I’ve said that vigilantism isn’t always wrong. So, what’s the point of doing the work to figure out whether the boycott is vigilantism, if that’s not going to tell us about the rightness or wrongness of the boycott?

In some cases, we ask whether a particular behaviour is a case of a particular category of behaviours (“Was that really murder?” or “Did he really steal the car?” or “Was that really a lie?”) as a way of illuminating the morality of the behaviour in question. If the behaviour is in that category, and if that category is immoral, then (other things equal) the behaviour in question is immoral. Now I said above that that’s not quite what I’m doing here – instances of vigilantism may be either immoral or moral, so by asking whether boycotting Russia is an act of vigilantism, I’m not thereby immediately clarifying the moral status of boycotting Russia.

But I am, however, doing something related. Because while I don’t think that vigilantism is by definition immoral, I do think that it’s a morally interesting category of behaviour.

If our intuition says (as mine does) that a particular activity is morally good, then we need to be able to say – if the issue at hand is of any real importance – why we think it is good. As part of that, we need to ask whether our intuitions about this behaviour line up with our best thinking about the behavioural category or categories into which this behaviour fits. So if you tend to think vigilantism is sometimes OK, what is it that makes it OK, and do those reasons fit the present situation? And if you think vigilantism is generally bad, what makes the present situation an exception?

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* MacDonald, Chris. “Corporate leadership versus the Twitter mob.” Ethical Business Leadership in Troubling Times. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019. [Link]

A number of prominent corporations have added their weight to the international effort to impose sanctions on Russia. More and more companies are pulling out of Russia in response to Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression.

The list of companies is growing, and—crucially in the information age—includes tech giants such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, Dell, PayPal, and Netflix, among others. (See the growing Twitter thread being maintained by @NetopiaEU here.) Most recently, perhaps, both KPMG International and PricewaterhouseCoopers have suspended operations in Russia and Belarus (according to a tweet from the Kyiv Independent). Perhaps most significantly, Mastercard and Visa have suspended operations in Russia.

Is this a good thing? On balance, I think the answer is yes. But it’s always worth at least looking at the arguments on both sides.

The most obvious ethical question has to do with collateral damage. Most of the companies pulling out of Russia aren’t pulling their services away from Vladimir Putin, or from the Russian government or the Russian army, but from regular Russians—-some but not all of whom support Putin and his war. (There are some indications that Putin’s popularity is up since the invasion began, but the key polling was done by an organization owned by the Russian government, so perhaps take that with a grain of salt.) If sanctions (corporate or otherwise) make the lives of regular Russians hard, that’s generally a bad thing. It’s not as bad as the civilian deaths currently happening in the Ukraine, but a bad thing non the less. The question is whether, on balance, the good to be achieved by corporate sanctions is worth the cost. I think it clearly is, for reasons I’ll return to below.

Then there’s the question of corporate activism. The backdrop for this issue—the thing that even makes pulling out of Russia a question—is the general question of whether companies should, in brief, be political. Do the companies named above, and others like them, have the moral authority to impose sanctions, on Russia or on anyone else? And what do corporations know, after all, about international affairs? What special competency does Netflix or Microsoft have to assess Putin’s (admittedly nutty) claims about how the Ukraine is, in reality, part of Russia? In days past, the question of corporate moral authority has taken less acute forms: Should companies take sides in domestic political disputes? Should companies be ‘woke?’ Should companies have views on human sexuality? And so on. But then, Putin’s behaviour in this case is truly beyond the pale. It constitutes naked aggression against a sovereign people, and the companies that have taken action are doing so 100% in line with international consensus.

Of course, enthusiasm for corporate sanctions in the present case immediately leads to questions about which other countries, beyond Russia, should be the target of corporate sanctions. After all, as horrific as the suffering in the Ukraine is, it’s arguably no greater than the suffering being experienced by ethnic minorities in China (see for example the forced labour imposed upon the Uighurs), or the violence against Tigrayans in Ethiopia, which some have characterized as genocide. Those are just a couple of examples, picked more or less at random. The list of countries with which respectable companies arguably shouldn’t do business is a long one. But on the other hand, outside of crisis moments, there are good arguments to the effect that maintaining trade is a useful mechanism in building ties and in fostering liberal democratic values.

I think the only real question with regard to the corporate sanctions is how long such sanctions should last. Some think these corporate actions will, as a matter of fact, be relatively limited in duration. But how long should they last? One plausible view is that sanctions should last until aggression against the Ukraine stops. After all, if sanctions are the stick, then eliminating sanctions is the carrot. Likely no one thinks corporate sanctions will matter to Putin directly, but they might matter enough to regular Russians for them to put pressure on Putin, who will be incentivized to find a way out of what is, in the view of some, becoming a quagmire anyway. Another plausible view: they should last until Putin is out of power. After all, Putin isn’t a symptom; he’s the problem. And for most of the big companies involved, the Russian market probably isn’t big enough to matter much to the bottom line, so it’s not an unreasonable request. There is nothing in this story that suggests this is a one-time thing for Putin. He has expansionist impulses, and weird theories about geopolitical history. The world will be safer when—and only when—he is gone. And economic isolation is one piece of a larger strategy to achieving that goal.