Friedman fallacies

✍ Scribed by Colin Grant

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 1991
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 763 KB
• Volume: 10
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0167-4544
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00383796

✦ Synopsis

Milton Friedman's article, 'The Social Responsibility of Business Is To Increase Its Profits,' owes its appeal to the rhetorical devices of simplicity, authority, and finality. More careful consideration reveals oversimplification and ambiguity that conceals empirical errors and logical fallacies. It is false that business does, or would, operate exclusively in economic terms, that managers concentrate obsessively on protqtability, and that ethics can be marginalized. These errors reflect basic contradictions: an apolitical political base, altruistic agents of selfishness, and good deriving from greed.

No other piece of writing can begin to compete with Milton Friedman's 1970 New York Times Magazine article, 'The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, '1 for status in the canon of business ethics classics. It does not matter that one of the central messages of the article would seem to be that there is no place for anything like business ethics in any significant sense. That only provides a useful foil for considering the possibilities and prospects for business ethics. The appeal of the article, however, probably has more to do with its own intrinsic qualities than with this utilitarian function. It possesses the winning characteristics of great rhetoric: simplicity, certainty, and finality. It describes the purpose and procedures of business with the absolute assurance of the authoritative expert.