Some lines need to be established, and the sooner the better, but boy, I am having trouble drawing them.
Ethics Alarms has consistently taken the position that it is wrong to discriminate against people for their beliefs and opinions. The idea that business establishments would refuse service to customer based on their political affiliations (or because they wear a MAGA hat) is repugnant to the the value of pluralism and individual liberty, both central to the founding principles of the United States. Similarly, EA has taken the position that corporations should be judged solely on the basis of how well they deliver the services they render and the quality of the products they introduce. How those companies or their owners use their profits, as long as what they do is legal, should not be the consumer’s concern. Investors have a different perspective: investing in a company makes the investor a participant in that company’s activities beyond producing products and services.
Starting with these basic principles, Ethics Alarms opposed the efforts in several cities to punish Chic-Fil-A because its owner was a prominent supporter of groups that opposed gay marriage. I regard this as economic extortion to bend an individual (or his/her company) to the majority’s will, and dangerous to democracy.
The key distinction is whether the company itself, in delivering good and services, connects its business to political and social advocacy. Nothing in the Chic-Fil-A restaurants hinted at any position regarding gays or same-sex marriage, and the company’s owners (or its foundation) should be allowed to support whatever groups and political positions they choose, just like anyone else. But what if a company starts using its products and services, marketing and public visibility to promote political positions, public division, and questionable social engineering?
That’s the current line for me. Ethics foul. Disney. Bud Light promoting trans-craziness. Target hyping transsexual propaganda for kids. The mass corporate virtue-signaling during the George Floyd Freakout, with so many companies pimping for Black Lives Matter, charged across that line in my view. What about the the companies that joined with the government’s dictatorial efforts to infringe on personal liberties using the pandemic as justification? That’s a tougher call. I decided to give such companies the benefit of the doubt because everyone was operating in previously uncharted territory and the medical establishment was so obviously confused.
Then came the DEI pandemic. Companies can run their internal operations as they choose, but Best Buy launching a management program that white men were ineligible to enter crossed the ethics line. I won’t patronize racists and sexists, defined as those who indulge in racist practices, not as “companies that support positions, policies and candidates that Woke World calls racist because that just means ‘we don’t like them, and we’re the good people’ in Woke World Speak.” I won’t be using Best Buy again until its management explicitly rejects the philosophy that led to this DEI-rationalized discrimination.
Last week I was asked to move the line in an essay on The Blaze by Michael Seifert, the founder and CEO of PublicSq, an organization that wants to stratify the U.S. into “good” patriotic companies that support conservative positions, policies and candidates, and “bad” companies—you know, the other kind. His target in the essay was Kellogg, which, he explained, “supports open borders, rioting, and radical leftism.” His reasoning:
Each box of Special K that’s sold benefits the W.K. Kellogg Foundation…. The foundation distributes hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of grants every year. Its immense wealth is due to its large ownership stake in the Kellogg company.The W.K. Kellogg Foundation Trust owns 16% of Kellogg’s. That stock is worth $3.2 billion. The trust uses these assets to fund the foundation. For example, in 2022 the trust funded the Kellogg Foundation with $387 million, according to Influence Watch. The Kellogg Foundation has supported “beyond policing” research that advocates defunding the police. The foundation’s grants helped launch the Black Lives Matter movement, and it has supported a fund in Philadelphia that bailed out hundreds of rioters in in 2020. The foundation also funded a $500 monthly income for illegal immigrants, effectively subsidizing law-breaking. It has a long track record of supporting open-borders groups. The foundation gave nearly $900,000 to Tides Advocacy, which helped start the Abolish ICE movement. Finally, like all left-wing organizations, the Kellogg Foundation has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Planned Parenthood. It’s not just that corporate America makes no effort to appeal to conservative customers. Companies actively use our money to oppose our interests.
My response to that is: “So what?” I’m not paying for their political activities and opinions, I’m paying for Pop Tarts and Frosted Mini-Wheats. I may not agree with the Foundation’s grants, but my neighbor might not agree with my charitable donations either. Seifert goes on to say that the Kellogg’s charitable activities are “un-American.” No, telling people and organizations what they can and cannot support is un-American….and unethical. When a company starts making advocacy part of its business, that’s a different story. If this continued (Item #1) for example—so far, it hasn’t—then I would have to consider a personal boycott of Kellogg’s products.
Now there are calls to boycott Burger King. Great Britain is prosecuting comedian, podcaster and performance artist Russell Brand for some serious sex crimes, and Brand had made himself unpopular with the good people of Woke World though a series of politically incorrect statements and barbs over the years. (For the record, I put Brand in the same category as Howard Stern: he’s a blight on civilization.) As noted last week, YouTube (that is, Google) decided to forgo the presumption of innocence in exchange for blatant virtue-signaling by demonetizing Brand’s YouTube posts. That’s content and political censorship, and despicable: Google is engaging in First Amendment breaching-by-proxy; Brand is not friendly to Democrats, progressives and Biden-enablers. Thus Ethics Alarms saluted Rumble when the Brits, reminding us of why we no longer fly the Union Jack, asked the video-hosting platform to follow YouTube’s lead. Rumble’s CEO correctly and properly told the House of Commons to take their request and shove it.
But now Burger King (and some other companies) have pulled their advertising from Rumble to punish it for standing up for fairness, free speech and the Bill of Rights to a foreign government that doesn’t believe in any of those, at least in the case of Russell Brand.
Burger King hasn’t attached its push to brand Brand in its advertising or its burgers (which I never eat anyway). On the other hand, this is un-American conduct by the company.
Is it over the ethics line, or just short of it? I solicit your views.
Ethics Alarms 
I don’t have a clear answer, but I do have another question. To what extent do intentions matter? Or is the decision per se the only consideration? Is the ethical legitimacy different if BK determined that Rumble was now going to be a less frequented platform among the chain’s target audience, and therefore it made business sense to pull their advertising?
This would be the equivalent, perhaps, of someone selling their stock in Anheuser-Busch not because they thought the Dylan Mulvaney campaign was problematic in and of itself, but because they thought the company would lose money as a result of the marketing ploy.
I’m hardly the biggest fan of capitalism among your regular commenters, but it strikes me that companies ought to have the right to make business decisions if those decisions appear to be politically or socially grounded. Is that what is happening here? I doubt it, but I can’t rule it out.
*even if
It’s a great question—I was having enough trouble with my own. I’ll race you: if you can come up with a post on how to mix intentions into the consideration, please do. Generally, my position is that intentions are too mixed an convoluted to use in ethical analysis, in part because they are speculative. Good intentions don’t make an unethical act better; bad intentions don’t pollute a good deed. But in this case, capitalism, the duty to make money for investors, it’s a different calculation.
Damn you!
The United States doesn’t have a capitalist economy. I’ve seen a lot of different attempts to classify what the current state of the government/economic policy is, socialist, communist, fascist, corporatist, cronyism, kleptocracy, feudalism, oligarchy, etc, but I’m not sure any of them quite fit. The current status of the US seems to be a mish mash of several or all of the above. Whatever you want to call it, it isn’t a free market economy.
As a side note…
Why is it wrong to judge someone and “discriminate” based on their beliefs?
Some forms of discrimination are bad, some aren’t. It’s totally acceptable to this “wow this person believes in X, what an asshole, I’m not going to hang out with them again”
We’re not talking about “hanging out with them.”
I find the entire Russell Brand situation preposterous. The guy has created and defined himself as a purportedly real life combination of a Mick Jagger and Keith Richard’s and Jack Sparrow or Johnny Depp version of a bad boy. How can anyone now complain about his having been a bad boy? It is his shtick! And always has been! The condemnation train left the station years ago. Sorry assholes, you’re estopped.
Does this same logic apply to companies who refuse to advertise on Twitter because of the alleged proliferation of hate speech?
It’s silly to believe people would stop buying Pepsi because an ad happened to appear right below or above a tweet using vile racial slurs.
But could Pepsi’s leadership come to the conclusion that the proliferation of hate speech on Twitter would necessarily reduce the size of its target audience there, and as such it would not be profitable to advertise on Twitter (at least until a lower price is offered for ad space)?
If there is evidence showing a substantial likelihood that a company’s target audience on Twitter shrank for whatever reason, it is defensible for them to withdraw advertising from that platform. If that evidence is overwhelming, it becomes an ethical duty.
I have to second what Jordan above wrote. I have no problem allowing a business to use its net profits to advance its interests as it chooses. I would expect that if BK pulled advertising from Rumble because of business interests it did so to achieve whatever goals its stockholders valued. There can be no other reason. There is also no telling where the chips (pardon the British pun) from those decisions may lay. Consumers may see the world differently and withdraw support. I really see no problem in consumers voicing their opinions for or against the patronage of a business concern. We all vote daily with our dollars so it is merely a campaign strategy.
Businesses must not forget that consumer choices are a function of the relative value each puts on the item subject to the transaction. That relative value of the whole is comprised of the values each consumer places on each element in the bundle of attributes to be purchased. If consumers put high values on social engineering by the company as a whole, then they may buy inferior goods and services simply because the alternative superior substitute goods may be not overcome the negativity of not being socially progressive. This is similar to cognitive dissonance because subjective perceptions will influence the choice.
Politics permeates everything and to believe that people will leave their politics out of every transaction is a fool’s errand. Social order comes from the ability of the group to influence the individual. Knowing that business x supported BLM would make me less likely to buy their offering. That does not mean that I won’t it just means that other substitutes will yield relatively higher value in comparison. If that change means that my total satisfaction in buying the substitute is higher, then I will buy the substitute. If not, I will continue with the original offering but not be as happy about it. Rumble’s letter to the House of Commons raised the value of all its offerings to me.
To suggest that consumers should focus their purchase based solely on the attributes associated with the subjective values associated with the product fails to accept that consumer choice is ultimately the best methodology for social governance because it does not force the consumer to do something, it merely persuades others to do what the many want them to do without coercion because the persuaded see it as being beneficial to them.
I think it’s probably unethical to be a blind participant in any boycott. Everything else is just free speech. For me, problems begin when there’s an attempt to “unionize the boycotters” and create barriers to individual personal decisions.
Boycotting Burger King just for pulling ads from Rumble seems unethical. A business should be allowed to advertise or not advertise anywhere the business believes will bring it the most profit. We can’t say for certain why Burger King stopped advertising on Rumble. As others said, perhaps management believed that Rumble wouldn’t get enough eyes to make advertising there financially viable. However, if Burger King made a point about how they think Brand is guilty, then I would be inclined to choose a different junk food. People go to Burger King for a burger, not to hear punditry on current events.
And one wonders why anyone goes there for a burger…