JASON WALKER
Steve Jobs was dead to begin with. There’s no doubt whatsoever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner.
However, unlike Jacob Marley, Jobs had more than one mourner. His untimely death in 2011 brought out remembrances and accolades that may have been expected for a Nobel Peace Prize winner, but were strikingly rare for a corporate tycoon and billionaire. Jobs was praised as a visionary who improved the quality of lives worldwide. Yet one fact about Jobs, and the way that he ran Apple Computer, Inc., was hardly mentioned at that time, though it has occasionally attracted critical comment: in striking contrast to his friendly rival, Bill Gates, Jobs gave relatively little to charitable causes.
In the early twenty-first century, large corporations are expected, as a matter of course, to feature charitable giving as one essential item in their budget. And even more, upon obtaining billionaire status, corporate tycoons are expected to have pet charities. Jobs did not, and Apple abandoned efforts at charity in 1997, when Jobs resumed leadership of the company, largely as a cost-cutting measure. In further contrast with Gates, Jobs did not sign on to Warren Buffett’s “Giving Pledge,” in which billionaires promise to devote at least half of their wealth to charitable giving.
As Daniel Dilger reported, the perception that Jobs and Apple abandoned all charitable endeavors is mistaken. Jobs did approve Apple’s participation in Bono’s “Product RED” program, in which “Red” branded versions of various products would have a percentage of their profits donated toward various charities. And it was reported shortly after Jobs’s death that he had been involved in a joint effort, with several other tech firms, to build a new two-billion-dollar hospital for the Stanford Medical Center.
Still, Jobs was somewhat averse to philanthropic spending, and did allocate far less of his income to charity than most of his fellow billionaires. So was the much-beloved Jobs truly worthy of his posthumous accolades, when, with respect to charity, he more resembled Jacob Marley and Ebenezer Scrooge than he did the much-less-beloved Bill Gates?
Obliged to Give?
Moral philosophers will offer very different answers to this question. For many, charity represents a moral good they call “supererogatory.” Supererogatory acts or virtues are those which are to be morally praised for having been performed, but their absence is not morally blameworthy. For example, you might be morally praised for saving a kitten from a tree, but not morally blamed for not doing so. A supererogatory act like charity is often thought to be acting beyond the call of duty.
Others have argued that we have stronger obligations, that charity isn’t only morally praiseworthy, but that it is a duty in itself. Peter Singer famously offers the thought experiment of a small child drowning in a fountain. If you walk by the drowning child, and refuse to stop and help, so that you can be on time for an appointment and avoid getting your new clothes wet, you would have to be truly monstrous. Failing to provide aid, in this case, would be morally blameworthy. This implies that there are cases in which a failure to help can be morally similar to the active committing of a harm. And thus, charity aimed at saving lives could be understood as obligatory, part of the moral minimum, and therefore not merely supererogatory.
Is Jobs a hero for his innovations and achievements, guilty of no more than failing to do something not morally obligatory in the first place? Or, if the failure to contribute to charity is morally blameworthy, is the American public’s hero-worship for Jobs misplaced, or even perverse? Assuming what Jobs’s critics have alleged is true, that despite his wealth, Jobs neglected the pursuit of charitable efforts, would this fact prevent Steve Jobs from being appropriately regarded as a morally exemplary individual, or would it mean he was guilty of a grievous moral failing?
Three Approaches to Ethics
Approaches to ethics in the western tradition can be broken down into three basic frameworks. First, there are the happiness-based ethics of Utilitarianism, most prominently articulated by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Under this approach, the good is defined with reference to that which best promotes the “greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.” There are different ways of understanding what this means in practice: for example, Bentham emphasizes pleasure, whatever its source, whereas Mill emphasizes happiness, distinguishing the “higher pleasures” of even a dissatisfied Socrates as superior to the physical pleasures of satisfied pigs.
Mill further takes utilitarianism to be best understood as applied to general rules, whereas Bentham applies his utilitarianism as a means of evaluating the morality of particular acts. Nevertheless, the important point upon which all utilitarians agree is that moral judgments must be made based on actual results. Outcomes of human action provide the basis for evaluating the morality of that action; those promoting the most net happiness or pleasure are best, those resulting in the most pain or misery are worst.
In contrast, duty-based ethics, particularly those most associated with the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, eschews judgments about outcomes for the question of motivation. The only unconditionally good thing, Kant proposes, is a good will. By “good will,” Kant doesn’t mean mere benevolence or good intentions, but rather a motivation tied up in the pursuit of, and obedience to, the moral law for its own sake. Two people may, of course, perform the same action, with the same results, but we would likely judge them differently if one acted for illicit motives and the other merely because it was her belief that it was the morally correct thing to do.
Kant’s ethics thus prominently turns to duty as the basis of all moral judgment, distinguished as between primary (perfect) duties and secondary (imperfect) duties. As the names imply, the former are more pressing when in conflict. Imperfect duties provide the moral agent with some legroom to apply according to circumstances, but it would be a mistake to confuse these with supererogatory moral goods. Imperfect duties are still duties.
Finally, virtue-based ethics may have a claim to be the oldest of these approaches, as this approach counts Aristotle as its founder, but their revival among philosophers in the Western tradition is merely a few decades old. Here, the idea is that we should look at character as the basis of moral judgment. Virtues are a kind of moral habit, traits of character that persist over time and through adversity, and for that matter, often most acutely observed during moments of adversity. After all, it is not just one single act that determines whether a person is morally good, or the fact that someone happens by chance to maximize happiness through otherwise trivial behavior, but rather how people live their lives as a whole that determine whether we ought, for example, to trust or befriend a person.
So how should we understand charity, as a moral act or habit, under these three approaches? In reverse order, I’ll start with virtue ethics. There might at first be a question about whether the notion of supererogatory moral goods can exist in virtue ethics—particularly as virtue ethicists often accept the notion of the Golden Mean: that the right path is the middle between two extremes. A virtuous life is one of balance, not one where listed duties are checked off, with supererogatory goods merely being those things attended to after all the basics are satisfied. Indeed, if we think of supererogatory actions as those which go beyond the call of duty, it seems that the idea may be more fit for a Kantian ethic than for a virtue account.
However, Aristotle assigns an important role to judgment. Judgment is necessary because the contexts in which moral decisions are made can be very different from each other, and because sound decision-making often requires practical knowledge about your own unique dispositions or tendencies. Virtuous people may, owing to these differences, strike slightly different balances, emphasizing those strengths of character where they can more easily excel. So something like supererogatory moral goods may be possible here, if we think of them as extraordinarily virtuous acts (or better still, character traits) for individuals within specific contextual constraints.
Consider courage. If an agent generally behaves with moral distinction, but shies away from situations of danger, she might be said to lack courage. She may not be a coward, necessarily; she simply never behaves in any way that would suggest extraordinary bravery. (For example, she might be brave with respect to her career choices, but be the sort of person who would never dive into a river to save a puppy from drowning, even if the danger was minimal.) While acting with a fully expressed courage would be morally praiseworthy, failing to display it wouldn’t necessarily make her blameworthy either, particularly if she developed other virtues in its place to achieve something closer to a holistic balance.
Charity, for many virtue theorists, may be like this. Aiding in the charitable efforts toward the less fortunate would be praiseworthy as an instance of the virtue of benevolence, but failing to do so would likewise not make that person guilty of any blameworthy moral infraction. At the very least, moral judgments of individuals are based on their characters taken holistically. It might not exactly be to your credit that you exerted no great effort for charity, but this may be negligible as failings go if your overall character displayed great virtue in other areas, particularly if you demonstrated the virtue of generosity in some respects other than aid to non-profit organizations.
The duty-based ethics of Immanuel Kant, however, paints a different picture. Under this framework, we are to apply a test he calls the “Categorical Imperative,” a decision procedure of sorts that might very roughly be compared to the Golden Rule—the rule that you should behave toward others the way you would like them to behave toward you. Here we ask the question, would failing to provide charity to someone who needed it be even conceivable if this were the known rule, followed by everyone? Kant’s answer is that it is, of course, perfectly conceivable for a world to lack anyone who displayed charity. However, he claims that it is, in a sense, a world we could not “will,” at least not universally. For if we were to be, ourselves, facing destitution, and our only salvation was from the charitable act of another, we would not want the charity-avoidance rule followed. (Unless, that is, we were suicidal, but Kant has a separate argument as to why suicide would be in the highest class of immoral acts.) Because the failure here is not one of logical possibility, but rather of will, Kant concludes that charity is an imperfect duty. It thus provides a basis for moral motivation, one we are all obligated to heed, but one that can be conditioned or limited based on other potentially morally relevant factors. For example, we need not donate to every panhandler we encounter, as long as we find some way of contributing charitably to the needs of others.
Utilitarians differ among themselves, and here it’s worth considering the divergent approaches favored by John Stuart Mill and Peter Singer. Mill looks to the satisfaction of higher pleasures, usually intellectual in nature, over merely physical pleasure. And as a utilitarian, he certainly believes that our actions ought in some way to contribute to the well-being of others. Nevertheless, as a philosopher influenced both by the liberal tradition and the early nineteenth-century romantics, he also favors individual “experiments in living,” in which people are to be encouraged to pursue their own understandings of the good life. The limitation here is a principle that can be understood politically as well as morally: the Harm Principle. We should be free to pursue our own notion of the good, provided that we don’t harm other people in the process. The Harm Principle, thus, for Mill, may provide the moral minimum for his ethics. If this is right, then failing to provide charity cannot be seen as morally blameworthy, for it represents only a failure to provide aid, not an active commission of harm.
Peter Singer, however, disagrees. His argument is simple. Consider again the analogy to the drowning child (discussed by Singer in “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”). Singer observes that few would disagree with the basic principle that, as long as providing aid, in such cases, sacrifices no morally comparable goods (or even any morally significant goods), we ought to provide aid. In this case, few would argue that the value of clean, new clothes and shoes is a moral good comparable to the life of a child. So, we morally ought to provide aid.
However, in case we might assume that we must intervene only in cases where children are at risk of drowning in front of us and we’re able to save them with little risk to ourselves, Singer argues that mere distance should not be a morally relevant factor. If we know that someone is dying half a world away, this doesn’t make that person’s life morally less important than a person close by, certainly not in an age of instant communications and charitable organizations who specialize in providing aid to people dying of starvation and preventable diseases in these faraway places. Are their lives worth less than a pair of designer shoes, or a night at the movies?
From this, Singer concludes that choosing to purchase luxuries, beyond the bare minimum necessary to keep us productive, is morally decadent. The failure to provide charity, especially in the case of a billionaire like Steve Jobs, can only be regarded as a moral crime of the highest order.
So with this variety of perspectives established, let’s turn to the case of Mr. Jobs. Without resolving the question of which moral approach is the correct one, we can see what each of them has to say about the behavior of Steve Jobs. We’ll see that Steve Jobs’s lack of charitable giving is not morally blameworthy. Although it could be argued that Jobs was guilty of missing some opportunities for beneficence, this, in itself, does not make him immoral, and does not detract from other virtues he displayed throughout his life.
The Three Approaches Applied to Steve Jobs
In Steve Jobs we find that a man has devoted his life to his career, earning the admiration of millions of satisfied users of Apple products. His hard work did not go unrewarded, as at the time of his death, he was a billionaire many times over. However, both in his professional life, as the CEO of Apple, and in his personal life, he devoted relatively little to charitable causes, certainly not on the order that his counterpart at Microsoft has. Is he morally blameworthy for failing to be charitable?
It seems that under Aristotle’s virtue-based account, Jobs can still be regarded as a virtuous man. Had Jobs devoted more to charity, he might be morally praised for that. But this is only one of many ways that we can demonstrate morally exemplary virtues. Certainly Jobs’s practical wisdom, work ethic, and intellectual accomplishments would count as morally praiseworthy too on a modern account of the virtues. (These don’t make major appearances in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, in part because Aristotle had the educated sons of the aristocracy of Athens in mind as an audience. Productiveness, as a virtue, was something that might be good for a slave, but not for an aristocrat.) There is, in Aristotle, a virtue of “open-handedness,” standing as a golden mean between miserliness and profligacy, but this refers to a willingness to spend in general, not specifically for charity. As a person of immense wealth, Jobs had the opportunity to develop the virtue of “magnificence,” demonstrated in ancient Greece by spending for great public works projects, but Aristotle seems to have blameworthiness in mind for people who attend to that obligation in either a shabby or vulgar way, not for one pursuing other virtues.
Under the utilitarian account of John Stuart Mill, Steve Jobs is likewise in the clear. It could be argued that by failing to attend to charity, he missed opportunities to improve the greater good for the greatest possible number of people. But certainly through his career, Jobs produced innovations that accomplished that end many times over. At least with his professional life, Steve Jobs didn’t violate the Harm Principle. Jobs’s status as a man who provided profound net benefits to humanity would be more than morally sufficient.
There are two possible exceptions. Jobs had a reputation for being a very difficult boss to work for, so former employees may take exception to the claim that he never harmed them. An even more compelling case could be made for his first daughter, for whom he originally refused to take responsibility. This failure certainly counts as a harm if anything does, though apparently he did put it right later.
However, the moral outlook becomes more dire for Jobs if we consider the utilitarianism of Peter Singer. Singer’s argument requires that all persons living an affluent lifestyle donate to charity to the point of marginal utility, that is, until the point at which benefits decrease because we give too much money or time, reducing the net benefits we are capable of producing for others. In other words, Singer takes the view that living at any level of relative affluence while people who could be saved starve to death is immoral. Whatever personal luxuries Jobs’s billions could have purchased for him, they could never be as morally significant as the lives of starving children in the developing world.
Even Bill Gates, for all the billions he has donated to AIDS treatment and various development projects, falls short of basic moral decency, according to Singer’s standard. Gates, like Jobs, has enjoyed the lifestyle of a billionaire rather than prioritizing the feeding of starving people. For Singer, personal luxuries and the products of affluence are not of moral significance, and even if they were, they are not of a moral importance comparable to the importance of saving lives.
But whereas Gates at least made an effort, Jobs did no such thing. Indeed, he might be regarded as especially morally bankrupt, in that his work was dedicated to producing luxury goods like iPhones and iPads, and making them aesthetically attractive in ways to incentivize people to spend their surplus funds on such gadgets, rather than on charitable goods. Considering how far a donation of $400 could go toward saving the lives of children, what kind of monster must Jobs have been to persuade people to spend their money on toys and gadgets, instead of saving countless lives? How could such devices be of moral value at all, much less of comparable moral value with those lives?
It turns out that Kant may have an answer to this question, though he may also have some criticisms of Jobs. With Kant, there would be a question of why Jobs acted in the ways that he did. Did he act from a sense of moral duty when he created his innovations? Or did his work solely serve the end of making him wealthier? These need not be conflicting motives, but there would be a question of which was decisive, as only an action done from a moral duty can achieve moral import, and thereby be counted as a moral action.
Even if Jobs never lied, cheated, or stole, and generally acted consistently with the moral law, this may not be good enough to regard him as morally good, if his motives were a product of something other than his sense of duty to a good will, such as mere inclination or something more illicit. So a full Kantian treatment of Jobs would involve some questions of his internal psychology. However, Kantian notions of moral value may offer Jobs a saving grace against Singer’s argument.
Let’s consider here Singer’s premise regarding potential sacrifices of things of moral significance. Singer phrases the claim this way: “If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, then we ought, morally, to do it” (p. 231). Singer even suggests that a weaker version of this premise would still work for his argument, so we could substitute “anything of moral importance” for “anything of comparable moral importance.”
Either way, however, Kant could suggest something that would be of moral importance, if not comparable moral importance: the individual agent as an end-in-himself. Kant holds that we must treat all individuals not merely as means to the ends of others, but also always as ends-in-themselves. This rule includes how a person treats himself, which is part of the reason why Kant argues that suicide is immoral. If the individual is a moral end in himself, then he has to count at least as much as a deserving moral end as the individuals that Singer would wish to help. Kant would argue that Singer’s conclusion, that affluent individuals who attend to those things which make them happy rather than provide their entire surplus to the point of marginal utility, are acting immorally, does not follow from Singer’s own assumptions. For following Singer’s demands would, indeed, sacrifice something of moral importance: the individual as an end-in-himself. From Kant’s point of view, Singer treats all individuals who are not “suffering” and dying from “lack of food, shelter and medical care” as mere means to the ends of those who are.
Of course, Kant does insist that assistance to the poor and needy is an imperfect duty. But self-care—attending to your own happiness—is likewise also an imperfect duty. Attending to the former at the expense of the latter would thus be, at best, morally imbalanced. We, as moral agents, are expected to use sound moral judgment to determine the best ways that we can strike this balance, and as long as we attend to these duties as such, rather than merely as products of our inclinations, then we can be morally in the clear. Naturally, this still means that Jobs may be guilty of the opposite kind of imbalance, of attending to self-care and his own happiness, while neglecting the imperfect duty to assist people in need. So while Kant certainly doesn’t regard charity merely as supererogatory, and one could be blameworthy for having failed to live up to that duty, this does seem to result in a far milder assessment of Steve Jobs’s moral character than he’d receive from Singer.
Doing More Good
Charity, as a supererogatory moral good, seems defensible at least on two of these accounts, Mill’s and Aristotle’s. Only under Kant do we find grounds for arguing that Jobs may be guilty of a serious moral flaw by failing to engage in charity in a serious way, though Kant also provides a basis to argue against the more radical conclusions of Peter Singer. But independent of whether charity should be regarded as morally obligatory or merely supererogatory for businesspeople as successful as Jobs, one other possibility should be considered. According to Elizabeth Stuart, friends of Jobs reported that he “felt he could do more good expanding Apple than giving money to charity.”
What kind of good could this entail? One suggestion implied here is that benevolence need not necessarily take the form of direct payments to charitable organizations or individuals in need. When we consider people who might be regarded as benefactors of humanity over the last century or two, we might come up with a list that would include people such as Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Norman Borlaug, Henry Ford, Marie Curie, and Louis Pasteur, among others. As scientists and entrepreneurs, it seems that in most cases, the ways in which people contributed to humanity, the way in which they “did good,” was not through donating large sums of their earnings to charitable causes. Many of these individuals may have also done that, but they are remembered and celebrated for their accomplishments in scientific research and in innovations that improved the lives of people as consumers.
We sometimes lack sufficient perspective to recognize the value of such accomplishments until many years later. Although the temptation here might be to write off Jobs’s remark about “doing more good” by focusing on his work with Apple rather than with charitable pursuits as a post-hoc rationalization, it’s worth remembering that even in the pursuit of aesthetic pleasures, personal excellence, scientific curiosity, and yes, even in just making more profits by building a better mousetrap, you also benefit humanity. After all, whatever else he did, Jobs created products that brought joy to his customers, and innovated in areas of personal technology that improved the lives of countless millions. Customers, far from feeling exploited, were often happy to pay a premium for them and spend hours in line to get their hands on the latest releases. Through his career, Jobs could thus be said to have a “value-added” kind of life vis-à-vis the rest of humanity. Being a benefactor in this way may not satisfy the moral standards of all ethicists, as we have seen, but it nonetheless may be at least as robust a means of “doing good” as charity, if we consider real world cases of such benefits. In that spirit, I suggest that the accolades received by Steve Jobs for his innovations and creativity upon his passing are well deserved, regardless of whether he remembered to set money aside for charity.1
1 Thanks are due to feedback from Carrie-Ann Biondi, Will Thomas, and Shawn Klein, which inspired my observations about different virtuous people striking different balances. My remark about Singer viewing individuals as mere means to the end of helping others is based somewhat on an observation that I recall from a conversation with Lester Hunt. He deserves the credit for this insight, though I deserve the blame if I’ve misunderstood his argument.