I’ve expounded a number of times the
interesting (for me at least) parallelism between writing philosophically and
lifting weights, although I recognize the relationship and similarities escape
most people, that thus find the choice of subject matters of this blog utterly
baffling. This last month I experienced another instance of that parallelism,
in the response I received to my posts on business ethics. It is a well-known
fact of barbell sports that you get the best results from training with people
stronger than you: they inspire you, challenge you, show you what a
well-conditioned body is capable of doing and they can even check your form and
give you tips on how to better train and execute the key lifts in the platform.
It is better, from the standpoint of how fast you can progress towards your
genetic potential, to be the proverbial small fish in a big pond than to be the
biggest fish in a tiny one, meaning that the weights you are able to lift will
increase faster if you regularly attend a gym with many other lifters with many
years under their belts and able to lift higher poundages than you rather than
staying in your neighborhood gym (or in your home gym) and being the strongest
guy around but stuck forever with a 250 pounds bench, which may seem like a
great achievement and keep your little and fragile ego happy, but is nothing
really to write home about (as you may realize the moment you set foot in a
serious strength gym, where people warm up with that weight, and then go up to
400 hundred pounds in a heavy day).
However, I’ve always trained alone
in my own gym, and, back to the other term of the comparison, written mostly to
myself (not that the comment section of this blog has been a bubbling source of
alternative ideas to challenge and refine my own, guys)… so it is a very
welcome surprise when people intellectually better equipped than me (or at
least far more clever than myself) have something to say about my musings, as
my friend Pedro Linares had a chance to do a few weeks ago in his own blog (The Vintage Rocker on Business Ethics ). I found his comments very apposite
and stimulating, I’ve been pondering about them since then and they have helped
me refine my own ideas about the matter (and see how much I lose by not putting
them in the open more forcefully, and thus missing on the opportunity of
discussing them, and refining them, and enriching them with other cogent people
contributions). In this post I want to discuss three points he mentions
(although I will devote much, much more space to the first one:
·
“corporations
have their own culture, so it’s OK to treat them as persons (by, for example,
punishing them)”, with which I basically agree (that’s why I said that
personhood was a “useful fiction”,
the usefulness deriving from the fact that they do indeed seem to have agency
(to be part of the causal explanation of why people within them act as they
do), and thus they require being considered as agents, and being, if possible,
goaded into responsible, socially useful behavior. I will have much more to say
on this point, so let’s for the time being move on to…
·
“cases
are great for teaching”, I basically concede this one, I’m 100% for going to
the old scholastic method of the “disputatio” and have the students debate to
death the relative merit of each moral position… but only after I’ve taught
them the tools to bring to each defense. Indeed, half my classes thus last term
were devoted to the discussion of cases. What I wanted to convey is that, being
valuable educational tools to illuminate the content of moral theories and
illustrate how they apply to real life, I find the abusive resource to them of
most business ethics books both tiresome and counterproductive. Specially
because, again, lacking any firm moral conviction (because moral conviction
requires the embrace/ acceptance, critical or otherwise, of a pre-existing
tradition to give it content and bite, and modernity is built on the explicit
rejection of any such tradition, understood as an unacceptable source of
heteronomy, and thus contrary to the sacred and promethean self-invention and
self-actualization of the individual, only accepted source of value and worth)
those cases illuminate and illustrate little, and end up taking the universal
form of “on the one hand… but don’t forget that on the other…”, giving to the
students the impression that anything goes and almost any outcome can be
morally justified.
·
“identifying
corporations as devoted to the exchange of commodities is too narrow a
definition, they should create value to society” (yup, like tobacco, gun
manufacturers or advertising agencies… and I won’t go into consultants, lawyers
and the like) although I basically agree with the “should”, I cannot but sadly
observe that this is one of the cases where the gulf (or rather, the chasm)
between what is and what ought to be seems more unbridgeable.
Fact is, my poor students will indeed work in companies that create no value
whatsoever to anybody outside of its shareholders (if they are publicly listed)
and, if they pay a decent wage, to its employees, and they will need to make do
with that. Not all (I hope), but some will, although some of them were already
wealthy enough to work entirely for free, or to forego working altogether for
the rest of their lives). I myself worked, for the first fifteen years of my
career, for a company that even in the most lenient understanding of social
value did not produce much of it (unless you fully subscribe to some form of
trickle-down economics in which making a few top partners filthy rich somehow
benefits everybody else, because those rich partners will then require the
services of maids, butlers, chauffeurs, interior decorators, landscapers and
the like, giving them all stupendous opportunities to flourish and prosper they
would have otherwise lacked… not entirely implausible, but not terribly convincing
either), so I still think it more operational, or educative, or pedagogic, to
stick to my definition of what job-providing companies are and stand for, and
make my students think about how to behave in this imperfect world of ours,
instead of in an ideal one where the is-ought divide is not so manifest.
Now I wanted to expand a bit the
first point, as it may require me to add some substantial material to my
already written and in search of an editor book. Organizational culture does
indeed exist, and we have to consider to what extent it influences its members’
behavior. From a first-person perspective, it does seem to influence it very
much, as an appeal to a “culture of corruption” is indeed one of the most extended
lines of defense in any case of corporate malfeasance that ends in front of a
judge. And there is some truth to it, as we humans are social animals,
constantly looking for our fellow human’s validation, finely attuning our
behavior to what we see as prevalent in the group we want to belong to. And
there seems to be no upper bound to the depravity of the behavior one can
indulge oneself in with the appeal to such compliance, as amply attested in the
literature, from the infamous (and apparently not-entirely-replicable)
experiments of Milgram (students administering lethal doses of electricity to
their apparently screaming and writhing subjects) and Zimbardo (students
reveling in sadistic behavior when asked to play the role of prison guards in
Stanford) to the countless reports of otherwise well-behaved and civilized citizens
turning against a minority between them and almost exterminating it (Nazi
Germany and to a lesser extent Fascist Italy).
Of special import to my teaching,
how does the acknowledgement of such influence of corporate culture affect what
I tell my students about how to act? I have to confess that my initial reaction
was to answer such question with “in no way or manner, responsibility is always
individual, ethics is about how individuals should behave, as only individuals
have agency… the recourse to what others do or avoid doing is but a poor excuse
for not living up to our own codes and rules”… but on reflection, a more
nuanced answer is needed. Part of the reflection has been prompted by my
re-reading (this time in their original German) of the writings of the foremost
thinkers of the Frankfurt School, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Out of
fashion today, and adhering to a questionable Marxist interpretation of how
society worked (derived by the fact that what they did for a living was to
teach in a university environment, even in exile in the USA, which equipped
them very poorly to understand how private companies work, what the profit
motive really is, and what get salaried men ticking -salaried men, that is,
that could lose their job in a moment’s notice, as opposed to tenured
professors with all the security you can dream of), they still are first-line
witnesses of an advanced society going collectively bonkers (and then escaping
it and landing on another one apparently more free, only to find that it
harbors its own kind of insanity and irrationality), and have thus something valuable
to teach us. And one of their lessons (hinted at both in Adorno’s Minima Moralia and in Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason) has to do with the
subtle incompleteness of the mora rule that summarizes all of cognitive ethics
(according to their “kinda-successor” Jürgen Habermas), that is, the
categorical imperative or, in Habermas telling, the good ‘ol “golden rule”: do
unto others as you would have done unto you (ore, in more technical terms, as
crafted by Kant, act only according to maxims you would like to see enacted as
universal rules).
Adorno and Horkheimer thought that such
directive was incomplete in the face of the Holocaust, they proposed a new
formulation along the lines of “act only according to norms that make the
repetition of Auschwitz more unlikely”. If I may get a bit technical again,
what made Kant’s classical formulations insufficient for them was precisely
their focus on the individual, taken in abstraction of the group, and the fact
that if the maxim-rule dichotomy was understood in a certain way (a way that
precludes only “logical impossibility” of universalization, then nothing
prevented its adherents to universalize the most heartless and brutal
exclusionary behaviors, as you can universalize without contradiction rules of
the type “despise everybody belonging to group X (or having the salient identifying
feature X)” that is, you can see no logical impossibility in such maxim being
accepted even for those belonging to such group (or exhibiting themselves such
feature), even if it is unlikely they would be very enthusiastic in their
adherence to it. Modern Kant scholarship tends to dismiss such criticism, pointing
out that Kant surely wasn’t thinking in logical impossibility, but in a less
restricted universalizability test, and in that reading, Adorno and Horkheimer’s
expansion does indeed seem a bit redundant, but if we abstract from the realm
of what Kant’s expression “really” mean (or, more broadly, of what an internally
self-consistent deontological position would entail) we can see that they have
indeed a point. One can live as a dutiful, free of blame public servant (or
salaried employee), doing exclusively what is right (and if he is to be a
paradigmatic deontologist, doing it for the right motive, acting “from duty” in
Kant’s sense), but with that contribute to the evil ends of the authoritarian,
bellicose state he serves, or the self-enriching, social-good-be damned ends of
the profit-maximizing company he works for.
Limiting ourselves to the more
circumscribed field of business ethics, I worry that my students may apply my
teachings to the letter, and still contribute to a more unequal, more unfair,
less valuable (all things considered) work environment. They may be loyal and conscientious
workers, never attempt to bribe a public servant, never lie to advance their
careers, never use their colleagues as mere means, but always treat them as
ends in themselves, recognize their dignity and intrinsic worth in every
interaction… and still fail to contribute to a better world, where the higher
good is realized. Not only that, but end up being a bit of a self-righteous
pricks that are very good at competing (and that compete very fairly and
according to socially sanctioned norms… but ruthlessly all the same) and even
very talented (their talents including acting as an inspirational leaders of
those teams that are put under their responsibility), the unreflective use of
those talents being applied only to further a more deadening, more materialistic
society, more inimical to true human flourishing. A bit of how I see I was
myself in those first fifteen years of professional career I’ve frequently
referred to.
It surely kinda sucks, because
everybody I know that goes into teaching ethics, and I’m certainly no
exception, does so in the hope of contributing to a better world, both for
those that directly receive the teaching and for the society in general, to
which we expect they will be willing to contribute differently and more
ardently. Have them become excellent drones, optimally efficient slaves, great
rule-followers, when those rules guide us collectively over a cliff seems
pretty much the definition of failure in our field. Of course, such problem
goes well beyond our initial discussion about corporate culture. It has to do
with the dominant reason I so frequently decry in this post, the extended way
of judging within a society what is rational and what is not, what constitute a
valid reason for acting and what doesn’t, what desires are intelligible and to
be socially sanctioned, and which ones are deviant and to be repressed, suppressed
or punished when acted upon. Paying attention to such vastness, maybe the
needed reformulation of the categorical imperative should be along the lines of
“act only in ways that delegitimize and erode the current dominant reason, and
that bring about an alternative one that is not as self-destructive and
anti-humane as it”…
Which is, by the way, what I’ve been
trying to do for the last ten years, first by devoting a
substantial amount of
my time to understand said dominant reason, then to extend such understanding
within my limited environment, then to expand such environment by returning to
teaching in a subject where I could have the most impact (wow! Told that way it
almost makes for a compelling, consistent life-story! How uncommon these days!)
And which, by the way, makes me see that indeed I’m not teaching my students
enough if I just drive their attention to the great ethical traditions and
present them as frameworks for thinking about their individual behavior, shorn of
any social influence. I need indeed to make them see how the people they
surround themselves with is going to have an enormous, oversized influence in
what they end up doing. What they do will also influence them, but it is a very
asymmetrical situation, specially at the beginning of their professional
careers, where most of the influence goes from the group to the individual (in
an almost Lorentzian manner, individuals are primed in those first years into
what will be their longstanding attitudes and understanding of what is right
and what is wrong in a job) and very little goes in the opposite direction.
And that being so, I have to imbue
in them the perception of their responsibility not only over what they
individually do, and what they individually achieve, but over what the group
deems acceptable and worthy of being collectively enforced. Over their group’s
culture, in other words. It is not enough to be personally upright and just if
you allow yourself to be surrounded by bigoted opportunist and say nothing when
they vent their noxious opinions, because you would then, at least, be committing
a sin of omission by allowing their ideology to go unopposed, to present itself
as the accepted, de facto standard and thus to become dominant (or strengthen
its previous dominance). There is, then, a positive duty to contribute to a
healthy culture, a culture that embodies those values that allow the
individuals to prosper and flourish, and that sees to it that the company (the
organization based on the legitimate improvement of the social ranking of its
members) does indeed contribute to the social well-being, and thus reduces the
distance between what there is and what there should be. I recognize that such
prodding is not free of perils, as toxic, anti-humane cultures come in all sort
of ways, and our hyper-ideological, hyper-partisan age, fueled by social-media
that trades in our attention by encapsulating us in ever-more similar
echo-chambers has made us become very adept at identifying the toxicity of
those cultures less aligned with our pre-existing ideological and epistemical
preferences. So for a conservative, a toxic culture to be reformed may be one
more respectful of variety (even when it is for variety’s sake) than of merit,
where political correctness rules and where progressive pieties are routinely
given lip service, whilst for a liberal (in the American sense) toxicity would
rather manifest itself in a lack of recognition of the inherent value of
diversity, an overzealous identification with the dominant (white heterosexual
male oriented) Western tradition to the exclusion of any other perspective, or
a monomaniacal pursuit of material benefit, alternative social goods (like a pristine
environment or more relaxed lifestyles) be damned. It is not, however, my
intention to take a side and defend the superiority of one (ideologically
aligned) culture over another. Suffice it to say I now recognize the need to
pay attention to corporate culture in what I want to teach to my students, to
give them the tools to identify the aspects of the culture of the corporation
more likely to affect their own moral outlook, and to be careful and critical
of them, so whatever they end up doing, they are more aware of why it is they
are doing it.
As a teacher, I don’t think one can
aspire to more.
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