Social Responsibly of Business Argument PHI 103: Informal Logic
November 3, 2014

In Milton Friedman’s article, “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits”, published in The New York Time Magazine back in 1970 Friedman proposes the argument that a corporations social responsibility is to increase profits. “Milton Friedman’s article entitled The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profit is one of the most often used counter arguments for people who would eschew the idea that a corporation should consider more than just shareholders.” (College of Law) While creating a very debatable argument Friedman has opened my eyes to a topic of which I have never thought about or pondered. One premise that he makes is that only people or humans have responsibilities while a corporation may be considered an “artificial person” with artificial responsibilities yet an actual business cannot have social responsibilities. So does this mean corporations are to only look after themselves and shareholders and let customers deal with it? Working for the large corporation Ingersoll Rand I have seen first-hand that profit is more important than satisfied customers. For instance, there was a certain product my store was purchasing locally and selling it at different margins depending on the circumstances and customer. By purchasing this product locally we had the freedom to sell at basically whatever margin we wanted. Almost three months ago corporate decided this product cannot be purchased locally anymore and that it will be monitored by them and now each week we are given a very strict price sheet to sell this product at. Their reasoning being if we sell a quantity of one of this product with forty percent margins it would be more profitable than selling a larger quantity with lower margins. It sounds to me like they have