Vendor Relations Principles

Identifying Unacceptable Complicity

Because complete freedom from complicity is impossible for any institution committed to remaining a member of a larger social community, we see our task as distinguishing acceptable kinds and degrees of complicity from unacceptable kinds and degrees. In doing so, we will follow these principles.

In what follows, "harm" means harm or wrongdoing of the kinds on our priority list.

"To respond" to a vendor which we have decided is unacceptably complicit in harm is to take steps to change its behavior or to extricate ourselves from our relationship with it. These steps may vary from one situation to another. They may include writing a letter to the vendor asking it to change its practices or its relations with other parties, monitoring its progress toward such changes, ceasing to do business with it, and publicizing our decision.

1. We aspire to avoid subsidizing harm.

If a vendor is directly engaged in harm, then we will respond.

If a vendor is not directly engaged in harm, but is owned one-third or more by a company or individual directly engaged in harm, then we will respond.

If a vendor is not directly engaged in harm, but acquires one-third or more of its goods and services from a vendor directly engaged in harm, then we will respond.

If a vendor is not directly engaged in harm, but acquires a subsidiary after we have begun dealing with it, and the subsidiary is directly engaged in harm, then we will respond.

In short, we feel responsible for the money which goes to our vendors, our vendor's significant owners, our vendor's significant vendors, and our vendor's wholly-owned subsidiaries. If any of these is directly engaged in unacceptable harm, then we will consider payments to the vendor as subsidies of the harm and we will respond.

We will not generally respond to a vendor if the harm arises from a vendor's owner's vendors, a vendor's vendor's owners, a vendor's vendor's vendors, or other parties two "layers" or more beyond the original vendor. The reason is that money circulates, and after a point we cannot hold ourselves responsible for where it lands. The layer beyond our immediate vendor is the point after which we have decided that our responsibility and economic support are too difficult to monitor and too indirect to require a response.

2. We aspire to avoid enriching those who profit from harm, even if our money does not subsidize the harm.

When a vendor has a wholly-owned subsidiary directly engaged in harm, then we will respond under the following circumstances:  (1) the vendor makes one-third or more of its revenues from the subsidiary, and (2) the subsidiary makes one-third or more of its revenues from harm.

When a vendor is owned one-third or more by a company or individual who substantially benefits from harm, then we will respond. One "substantially benefits from harm" when one makes one-third or more of one's revenues from harm or has a wholly-owned subsidiary directly engaged in harm.

We will not generally respond to a vendor just because it or its owner has objectionable customers, or just because it has an investor or stockholder who profits from harm through another investment. The reason is that the vendor or its owner may have indefinitely many such customers, investors, or stockholders, and it would be impractical to investigate them all or to hold ourselves hostage to their ethics.

When dealing with a vendor would make us complicit in this kind of harm, rather than the kind described in the first principle above, then our response should usually fall short of ceasing to do business with the vendor.

3. It is more important to avoid doing harm than to advance good causes.

It would be convenient to do both, and we should do so when we can. But we fear that making both tasks obligatory would strain our resources. We would need two sets of criteria:  first, for what is harm, and how much complicity in harm is too much, and second, for what is good, and how much participation in good is enough. This would make the policy roughly twice as complex, and implementation roughly twice as difficult.

4. We hold many values simultaneously. One is to avoid subsidizing harm. One is to avoid enriching those who profit from harm. Another is to ensure the thriving of Earlham College.

When all available vendors of a certain product or service are unacceptably complicit in harm, then we must ask whether we are willing to do without or to produce it from our own labor. Often we will not be willing to do either. Buying from one of those vendors can be an ethically acceptable outcome when the loss of the vendor's product or service (for example, electricity) would significantly compromise the institution.

Earlham's investment policies foresee analogous dilemmas. We try to maximize the return on our investment and to steer away from companies selling alcohol, tobacco, gambling, or armaments. When our financial and moral criteria conflict, then we give priority to our moral criteria and willingly take a lower return on our investment.

Vendor dilemmas may not be as easily solved. One reason is that the thriving of the institution is one of our moral values, not one which must be subordinated to our moral values. A second reason is that it is easier to take a lower return on our investments as the price of moral conduct than it is to operate without some critical goods and services provided by outside vendors.

To give priority to the thriving of the institution is not an abdication of our values, but one way to resolve difficult conflicts among them.

5. It is not always enough for a vendor to comply with all applicable laws.

We have already decided this with regard to investments. Alcohol, tobacco, and armaments are legal products. But we do not want to profit from them through our investments, or subsidize them through our purchases.

There may well be areas in which we use the law as a convenient test of moral acceptability. For example, we might decide that monitoring a company for invidious discrimination or excessive pollution is beyond our means. We might respond to a company for engaging in lawful forms of discrimination or pollution. But we might decide instead to investigate whether the company has, or has recently, been convicted of serious or repeated violations of discrimination and pollution laws.

<< Previous | Continue >>