Companies Should Declare the Philosophy They Depend On

I have written before about the asymmetry between people whose ideas are checked against reality and people whose are not. This is a narrower proposal that follows from it, and I have not seen anyone make it.

The Starting Observation

The commercial world expresses no philosophical, religious, or ethical commitment whatsoever.

The clearest illustration is the arms trade: the most powerful states manufacture and sell weapons, routinely to regimes they would otherwise disown. Money is in this respect inherently amoral. It does not matter who buys, only that they pay.

Harari makes the same observation from the other side — bin Laden may not have believed in capitalism or saluted the flag, but he accepted dollars.

And there is a real argument that this is a virtue. Monetary exchange makes parties who despise each other cooperate anyway. Commerce has plausibly prevented wars, and a medium of exchange that demanded ideological agreement would be useless for the one thing it is good at. Granted, and I do not want to argue against it.

The Consequence That Is Not Benign

Here is the part that troubles me, and it is separate.

Companies built on science and engineering demand no corresponding commitment from their customers.

I can believe fervently in astrology and still board an aircraft. The manufacturer and the airline rely utterly on aerodynamics, materials science, and control theory to keep that plane in the air. They require of me only the ticket price.

They do not ask me to acknowledge the foundations of their operation. They do not even declare them. Nothing in the booking process, the safety card, or the livery says: this aircraft flies because of physics, and the people who built it were right about how the world works.

Sacha Baron Cohen caught the absurdity exactly: my friend doesn't believe in technology — you can read about it on his website.

Why This Matters

Science and technology are powerful enough that a small fraction of humanity can generate the advantages enjoyed by everyone else while leaving them entirely ignorant of what produces those advantages.

That is a strange and unstable arrangement. The benefits arrive as though by magic — which is precisely how they are experienced, because nothing in the transaction indicates otherwise. A person can spend a life consuming the outputs of a worldview while holding an incompatible one, and never encounter a moment that forces the contradiction into view.

The silence is what does the damage. Not the exchange itself, but the fact that the exchange is arranged so that no one has to notice what they are relying on.

The Proposal

Companies should declare their philosophical commitments and wear their reliance on science openly. And we should expect it of them.

To be clear about what I am not proposing: nobody should swear allegiance to naturalism before boarding a plane, and no service should be withheld from anyone over what they believe. That would be both tyrannical and useless — coerced assent is not belief.

What I want is much weaker: that people understand they are consuming the fruits of a philosophy. An acknowledgement, visible at the point of use, that this thing works because certain claims about the world are true.

The Hard Part

How to do this is a genuine problem and I do not have a good answer.

Made mandatory, it becomes a compliance exercise — a line of legal text nobody reads, which would be worse than nothing because it would create the appearance of having addressed the problem. Made voluntary, it becomes marketing, and marketing is exactly the register in which such a claim means least.

There is also a fair objection that I am asking commerce to do a job that belongs to education. Perhaps. But education reaches you once, early, at an age when it competes with everything else, while the products reach you daily for a lifetime.

I hold the diagnosis more firmly than the remedy. The present total silence is the thing that is unacceptable, and it is worth saying so even before anyone has worked out what should replace it.