Friday, September 7, 2018

What is a person? (hint: corporations need not apply, neither do computer programs, by the way)


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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