Bruno de Brito Serra
In some developed nations—perhaps most famously, in the United States—corporations are today legally regarded as “people.” But if that were literally true of the Weyland‐Yutani Corporation in the Alien franchise, the least it would deserve is a swift left‐hook to the jaw from Ripley and the few unfortunate bastards who survive with her in each of the movies. After all, as far as “the Company” is concerned, employees seem to have a moral status somewhere between slave and a thing in a petri‐dish, useful only as means to an end—and disposed of afterwards without any sort of remorse.
Throughout the franchise, Weyland‐Yutani’s actions have been bad enough to force a change in our reaction to the phrase “the Company” whenever it pops up in dialogue. While its first mention in Alien is innocuous, in later films our reaction is likely, “Holy crap, is the Company involved here? What sort of evil, sadistic plot are they up to this time?” In fact, the Company can even be regarded as the true villain of the stories. They are the ones who always knowingly send people to kick the hornets’ nest, while the hornets are mostly reacting to it with characteristic viciousness. Granted, the “hornets” in this case happen to be body‐snatching Xenomorphs with acid for blood and a flair for dramatic murder, but the analogy still holds. In a sense, the Xenomorphs are just doing what’s in their nasty biological nature, but the Company—comprised of people capable of moral thought—should know better than to systematically doom fellow human beings to a likely horrific demise.
Unless they shouldn’t…because, at the end of the day, what they’re doing might actually just be “good” business.
The question of what constitutes good business practices is, in a nutshell, what business ethics is all about. Beyond this simple definition, however, things get a bit more complicated. First of all, what does “good” even mean in that sentence? Are we talking here about good in a moral sense (as in “I will not send employees to investigate a potentially dangerous alien ship under the assumption that they are expendable, because that is wrong”)? Or is it meant in the economic sense (as in “I will use employees as disposable incubators for a potentially profitable alien species, because money, baby!”)? More often than not, profitable business practices are treated as synonymous with “good” business practices, which sort of makes sense: companies and corporations are, after all, founded assuming that they will produce profits for investors and shareholders. This fact, of course, does not automatically mean that such companies will always behave unethically in the pursuit of profit. It can, however, pose a serious ethical problem if the pursuit of profit comes to be regarded as something that must be done by any means necessary and at any cost. And it is precisely here that the moral sense of “good” factors into the equation.
Ethics, simply put, aims to give us tools to distinguish right from wrong. As any of us should know, this is hard enough to accomplish when you’re trying to make a decision that only affects you or maybe a handful of other people. Business ethics, however, increases the scope of the question and makes it even more complex. The actions of a company as large and influential as Weyland‐Yutani, for instance, will inevitably have an impact on thousands or even millions of people. Now, does that make it proportionally more important to correctly discern between right and wrong in business ethics? Arguably yes: the more lives a decision stands to affect, the more importance should be given to it. (There’s a distinction between how deontological and utilitarian ethics handle this, but we’ll get into that in the final section.) Nevertheless, the fact that the scope of a decision like that is so much harder to grasp (can you really conceive of the consequences your action might have for a million people?) also leaves a door open for more “creative” interpretations of right and wrong.
To really understand these issues, let’s make a quick detour through another iconic movie and one of those great characters everyone loves to hate: Gordon Gekko from 1987’s Wall Street. For those of you not familiar with the movie, Gekko is a Wall Street financier during the 1980s who is (not so shockingly) involved in a lot of shady dealings. What interests us here, however, is a speech he delivers to morally justify his despicable conduct, summed up by one of the most iconic movie lines ever: “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” At this point, I can almost hear those of you who never saw the movie ask, “What’s Gekko getting at there? How the hell can greed be good?”
Gekko’s argument is straightforward. Simply put, greed can be defined as a longing for more and better things. It drives us to get out of bed in the morning and work towards improving our lives. More importantly, from an evolutionary standpoint, greed is what motivated the human species to push forward, to achieve progress, and ultimately become the most advanced species on Earth. If greed provides us with so many advantages, it cannot be bad; and therefore it must be good.
Now, there are a lot of holes in this reasoning, but its significance lies in the fact that it seems to sum up Weyland‐Yutani’s worldview and understanding of business ethics throughout the Alien films. Profit is always the immediate goal. It is often stated that the company wants the Xenomorph so it can be studied by its bioweapons division (in Alien, Aliens, and Alien3), presumably in order to then market a packaged version of it to the highest bidder. But at the end of the day, because there are (luckily) very few people who are totally devoid of any sort of moral conscience, some pseudo‐moral justification always enters the picture—for instance, a flimsy notion that progress in military technology always finds a way to trickle down to civilian applications, and thus will improve humanity’s existence as a whole. (Bishop II’s desperate plea for Ripley not to kill the Xenomorph she is carrying at the end of Alien3, asking her to “think of all we can learn from it,” certainly hints at this sort of rationalization.) All in all, it would seem that “greed is good” is a mantra that can work in outer space as well as on Wall Street.
While we’re on the topic of greed, the character of Carter Burke, skillfully played by Paul Reiser in 1986’s Aliens, fulfills a crucial role beyond his contribution towards the advancement of the plot: he provides a face for our hatred of and disgust for “the Company.” Burke is the quintessential corporate weasel, and in many ways it’s almost as if Gordon Gekko was transported into science fiction. He begins by throwing Ripley to the wolves during the inquiries regarding the events of Alien, only to later blackmail her into accompanying the mission to investigate the fate of the settlers on LV‐426. Constantly bitching about the monetary value of the installation, he even defends the moral duty to not exterminate an alien species that is clearly “important.” And as the cherry on top, not only do we find out that he knowingly sent the settlers to their doom, but also that he released the surviving Facehuggers on Ripley and Newt as they slept. His motivation for all this? On his own admission, the millions that he could make by delivering the alien specimens back to the Company.
Now, don’t get me wrong: Burke is a despicable person, dangerously close to (if not already embodying) the financial division psychopath deprived of a moral conscience that we alluded to earlier. But I can’t help but feel that he, much like the characters of Ash and Mother in Alien, is there to represent Weyland‐Yutani in a broader sense, highlighting another one of the big problems concerning business ethics: accountability. You see, one of the key components of moral judgments is finding out whether or not there is someone who could—and should—be held accountable for the action being judged. It’s a basic moral principle that if you do something that you couldn’t help but do, if your free will and ability to make a decision were not at all involved in the action itself, then you shouldn’t be held accountable for it. That’s why the plea of insanity is used in all those cop shows. If you are insane, then you’re presumably not in complete control of your body or your actions—and therefore shouldn’t be held fully accountable for them.
Why does this matter for business ethics? Well, have you ever taken a call from a telemarketer? Being on the receiving end of a telemarketing call is pretty much a universally hated experience. If you’ve ever been there, you probably did one of two things: either you sat through entirely too much of what felt like a soul‐crushing spiral of boredom, or you lost it, shouted some profanities into the phone, hung up, and then felt guilty about it sometime afterwards. In both those instances, there’s usually a common theme. The reason why you sat through it or felt guilty about behaving like an angry fool tends to be the same: you realized that the person on the other end of the line was just doing their job, that they probably don’t like it anymore than you do, and that they just do it to put food on the table. (If you’re more imaginatively masochistic, you might also imagine a sick granny or three hungry children, but I’ll leave that up to you.)
If that is the case, however, a question still remains: who can you blame and get justifiably angry at for the harrowing experience of a telemarketing call? The supervisor at the call center? No, her job is not to target you specifically, just to make sure that the call‐center operators are as efficient and professional as possible. The guy who writes the script for the operators? Nope, he’s probably just an English major who couldn’t find any other paying jobs. The owner of the call center? For all you know, she could be a hardworking single mother of two, who managed to rise in the competitive world of call centers despite everything she had to overcome—and all while trying to raise her children. Continuing along this line of reasoning, you’ll probably just end up getting angry at an abstract idea and grudgingly muttering under your breath: “damn telemarketing….”
The problem of deferring accountability is unavoidable in any large company, and Weyland‐Yutani is no exception. Of course, companies are made up of people, each of whom should be held accountable for their actions. But when a company is large enough that each employee just performs a very specific role, without having a complete understanding of the whole that their role contributes to, how can any of them be held accountable for the actions of the company itself? This problem can also be exploited by those who recognize it. Say an employee takes the initiative to do something he knows to be immoral—as Burke apparently did in Aliens. It’s still possible to circumvent accountability on similar grounds. It’s a shame that Burke cowered his way into karmic retribution at the hands of a Xenomorph before he had the chance to tell us some sob story about how “the corporate world is dog‐eat‐dog,” how “if he didn’t do it someone else would,” or even “how the company forced his hand by making his job security depend on such projects.” These would have been weak rationalizations, but not necessarily false ones. These rationalizations are clearly shown in Alien. There are several moments when the tragic fate of the crew could have been avoided, but ultimately they follow the orders of the company either because doing so would lead to a sizable bonus in their salary, or because doing the opposite would make the company dock their pay. The crew thus found themselves in a situation where the company held both the carrot and the stick, being herded down a different path than one they would’ve otherwise taken.
In such situations, you could, of course, try to attribute the responsibility to the company itself. But just think about the cases you’re aware of when a big company is found to be at fault. What usually happens? And, in light of that, what do you think would’ve happened if Ripley went back to Earth after her many dealings with the company and proceeded to expose them to the press? In all likelihood, Weyland‐Yutani would have found some scapegoat within its ranks—another Burke, his supervisor, his division—in order to sacrifice it in public, and, at the end of the day, keep the profits. Corporate accountability works both ways: the company can always argue that, due to the extensive dimensions of its operations across space and time, it cannot fully monitor everything that each of its many employees is doing. It can only—and usually does—vow to remove the guilty party and do a better job with supervision in the future.
In a sense, companies like Weyland‐Yutani operate as sentient machines: they are built with the purpose of maximizing profits, their internal logic is one of cost–benefit analysis, and each of their components is geared towards fulfilling that purpose as efficiently as possible. Characters like Ash and Mother, as well as Burke (to a lesser degree), provide the most telling embodiment of the Company in the Alien franchise. What makes them such perfect antagonists is the fact that their thought processes transcend that of our heroes, not only in the qualitative sense—following cost–benefit considerations rather than moral ones—but also in terms of the framing of the problem—what we might call “seeing the bigger picture.” This too is characteristic of a company that understands itself as living on beyond the people who comprise it at any given time, and therefore it must operate under different assumptions than they do.
We’ve just said that Ash and Mother operate a cost–benefit form of reasoning, rather than subjecting their decisions to moral concerns. In Alien, Ash admits a certain admiration for the Xenomorph’s existence free from any “delusions of morality,” a feature that makes it a more “perfect” being than the humans he had been forced to blend in with. Cost–benefit reasoning, however, is not something completely foreign to the field of ethics.
As mentioned earlier, there are two major approaches to ethics that can help us to understand the extent to which cost–benefit reasoning is ethical. The first, defended and popularized by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), is deontology. Deontology tends to deal in moral absolutes, identifying moral principles that are timelessly true—so much so that Kant, for instance, famously argued that it is always morally wrong to lie, even if an axe‐wielding killer turns up at your doorstep asking the location of your loved ones. Lying even in this extreme scenario, he argues, would still be wrong, because if we determine that everyone is allowed to lie whenever circumstances seem to call for it, the world would eventually degenerate into an uninhabitable mess.
This is the sort of moral reasoning we sometimes see coming from people like Ripley and Bishop—who, despite being an android like Ash, had luckily been upgraded to feature something close to Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics.” As he explains to Ripley in Aliens, it is absolutely impossible for him to harm a human being or to allow a human being to be harmed by omission of action (something he clearly shows later in the movie, when he uses the surviving dropship to rescue Ripley, Hicks, and Newt rather than just save his own synthetic skin). In a nutshell, a deontologist would likely criticize Ash’s behavior and Mother’s “Special Order 937” on the grounds that it is always and absolutely wrong to cause the death of a human being, whether for profit, scientific advancement, or even to save another human being. For these reasons, deontologists don’t accept cost–benefit reasoning as ethical.
The second major approach to ethics is utilitarianism, whose most famous early proponent was John Stuart Mill (1806–1873). Utilitarianism shies away from absolutes and demands that each situation be analyzed in terms of its predictable consequences. It deems morally right any decision that maximizes good consequences for the greatest number of people. In light of this, it’s no surprise that utilitarianism lends itself to be interpreted (and often misinterpreted) as a sort of cost–benefit analysis. Let’s not be too quick, though, to dismiss utilitarianism as the hallmark of evil androids (technically, they’re amoral). In fact, our very own Ellen Ripley engages in utilitarian moral reasoning in Alien when Kane is brought back to the ship by Dallas and Lambert. While the latter are desperately trying to get Ripley to open the airlock in order to get Kane to the medbay, Ripley insists that quarantine must be enforced for the safety of the Nostromo and everyone else inside it—this is the greatest good for the greatest number. If Ash hadn’t caught Ripley off‐guard and opened the hatch himself, we would’ve been robbed of a great movie (and the remaining crew would’ve been spared horrible deaths).
Even though the central idea of utilitarianism can certainly be subverted to fit our own agenda—as was the case with the Gordon Gekko speech—it seems that it’s not without merit after all. Ripley would be willing to sacrifice one to save six. Most of us would probably agree that is a sound decision to make (under the circumstances, at least). But what about later in the movie, when Parker has a choice to fire the flamethrower at the Xenomorph as it’s holding Lambert? Ultimately, he decides not to, presumably because he’s not willing to also kill a fellow crewmember in the process. But how would you choose in that situation? Would you see Lambert as acceptable collateral damage to save the rest of the crew? And, when it comes down to it, is your life more important than anyone else’s because it’s your own?
Regardless of your answer to these questions, one thing is certain: Weyland‐Yutani regarded their employees as expendable, given the possibility of securing a Xenomorph specimen. Was the reasoning behind that utilitarian, and maybe even morally right at a level that Ripley could not comprehend at the time? Let’s be honest: probably not. But it could be presented as such: we could, for instance, argue that study of the Xenomorph would lead to breakthroughs in medicine and civilian applications that stood to benefit the lives of millions or billions of people. Would the mere possibility of that be worth the lives of Ripley and the people who met an untimely end throughout the Alien franchise? What if the benefits were, in fact, a certainty? Don’t worry if you can’t answer with absolute confidence; most philosophers can’t either.
At the end of the day, what the story of Alien should teach us about business ethics is that the latter must be a concern of ours. The point of large companies like Weyland‐Yutani is not to be morally good and spread kindness; it’s to make money and maximize profits. If they operated in a vacuum without pressure from their employees or consumers, there would be absolutely no incentive, from a strictly business‐only standpoint, to harbor any kind of ethical concerns. As such, it is also up to us, as citizens of a world in which such companies exist and operate, to at the very least demand accountability and business practices that conform to our sense of morality. Granted, that provides no guarantee that businesses will be ethical. But it’s definitely better than doing nothing at all. And, who knows, if companies that behave unethically find their profit margins diminished by a popular reaction against them, there might actually be a chance to persuade them to at least try to care.
Alien is set in a science fiction universe, in which Weyland‐Yutani’s far‐reaching tentacles and evil agendas are obviously exaggerated for dramatic effect. But considering that we already live in a world in which corporate lobbies increasingly determine the nature of political agendas, the lessons taught to us by “the Company” should ultimately boil down to a simple fact: if we don’t take business ethics seriously, we may find ourselves living in an economic and social reality not unlike the one portrayed in Alien movies. And in that reality, even if we don’t come across any particularly nasty Xenomorphs, we may nonetheless find ourselves quite familiar with the feeling of being ripped open from the inside out—namely, after reading the latest demand letter from our bank or insurance company.