Dr. Seuss and Philosophy - Jacob M. Held [130]
To be fair, though, there are larger and more complicated political, economic, and social issues at play, and perhaps the followers of Friedman are right to restrict the role responsibility of a businessperson to making profits. My worry is that defining one’s role in business narrowly will externalize these moral concerns to be dealt with on a societal and global political level (perhaps meaning they will not be attended to properly). To be sure, defining one’s role broadly results in having to make even more complicated business decisions, perhaps making one more vulnerable to less scrupulous competitors. Yet, even though attending to profit and competitive advantage is crucial, commerce is a human activity. It emerges among human beings and affects human beings, as well as the environment we all live in. The myth that business is impersonal does ideological work, making immorality seem acceptable and moral deliberation inappropriate. Abolishing that myth opens up the requirement for decision makers within a company to retain their sense of personal moral responsibility in their roles and to recognize the many stakeholders as persons as well. Acknowledging as much makes managing a company a morally weighty activity. The morally responsible manager admirably pursues profit in the most beneficial and least harmful way, gathering her creative resources and leadership skills to navigate the challenges. By comparison, it reveals profit-maximizing managers to be merely the adolescent McGurks, devious McBeans, and self-destructive Once-lers that we could all do without.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Speaking for Business, Speaking for Trees: Business and Environment
in The Lorax
Johann A. Klaassen and Mari-Gretta G. Klaassen
Questions about the role and responsibilities of business in adult society are not, generally speaking, addressed in the stories of Dr. Seuss. Perhaps, if we stretch the topic a bit, If I Ran the Zoo and If I Ran the Circus could be read as a child’s understanding of how adults can and should act in the world—but both are obviously written from the child’s perspective and show the limits of even a child’s imagination when applied to the problems of adult life. This means that The Lorax is unusual among Dr. Seuss’s works in two respects: first, it is a story told by an adult to a child, from the adult’s point of view; and second, it is one of a very few stories that Dr. Seuss admitted having begun with a clear moral in mind.1 In The Lorax, the main character, the Once-ler, tells his story to an unnamed child: a story of how he built a business and destroyed an ecosystem in the process, despite the interventions of the Lorax, who “speaks for the trees.” The book ends hopefully, with the Once-ler asking for the child’s help to restore that environment—almost hopefully, we should say, as it is not entirely clear that the child is actually willing to participate or that any amount of effort will restore the land, water, and air.
In this chapter, we will examine the three questions we think drive this book—questions that ride a fine line between business ethics and environmental ethics. First, what IS a “Thneed”? It’s the product that the Once-ler produces in his factory, “a Fine-Something-That-All-People-Need!”—an object that has so many uses that it is really, to all extents and purposes, useless. However, people still buy it, perhaps due to a sudden fad. Or, in other words, when we buy things like Thneeds, do we consume too much? Second, is the Once-ler really so focused on the growth of his business that he cannot see the destruction he is causing? The Lorax warns the Once-ler, pointing out