Value Competition

Management and Law Comparative Paper--Outline

What follows is an outline of a paper that would review and revisit the themes of Barley and Kunda (1992) and Eastman and Bailey (1998); the idea would be to submit it for the AoM conference this summer in Montreal and then revise it for journal publication:

a) Intro--paper theme--a new look at the historical, cyclical, materialist classification of management scholarship by B & K and the different historical classification of management and legal scholarship by E & B, which is non-cyclical and idealist;

b) Predicting the recent past--does B & K's approach or E & B's work better to explain trends in management scholarship and education since the 1990s when B & K and E & B wrote?  How about trends in legal education?

c)  The basic dichotomy between utilitarianism and deontology; the prevalence of the former in management and of the latter in law;

d) Utilitarian-Benthamite and deontological-Kantian approaches to mediating the fact-value antinomy;

e) How management with its predominantly utilitarian mediation surfaces methodological "rationality of means" value competition and represses substantive "rationality of ends" value competition; how law with its predominantly deontological mediation surfaces substantive value competition and represses methodological value competition;

f) The greater salience of business ethics as a field relative to legal ethics; why the utilitarian mediation of management leads to the rise of business ethics and why the deontological mediation of law leaves legal ethics as a backwater;

g) The growth of a methodological split in the legal academy with the rise of law and economics; management in that respect as pointing the way for law;

h) Relevance of the analysis for management education;

i) Conclusion.

Predictions on the Reframed Questionnaire

What follows are my hypotheses/guesses as to how the answers on the reframed questionnaire are likely to be different from or similar to those on the original questionnaire:

 

H1--Ideology: In the original framings, liberals are somewhat higher in rating Harm and Fairness as important and conservatives are much higher in rating Purity, Authority, and Loyalty as important.  In the revised framings, the prediction is that conservatives will be comparable or higher in rating Harm and Fairness as important and liberals will be comparable or higher in rating Purity, Authority, and Loyalty as important. 

 

H2--Education: My assumption is that on the original framings, highly educated respondents respond more or less as liberals do and less educated respondents respond more or less as conservatives do.  In the revised framings, the prediction is that in a correlation or regression analysis the more educated will continue to value Harm and Fairness more and Purity, Authority, and Loyalty less than those with less education, though by a lesser degree. 

 

H3--National origin: On the original framings, those from wealthier nations respond more or less as liberals do (though less strongly so) and less educated respondents respond more or less as conservatives do.  In the revised framings, the prediction is that in a correlation or regression analysis those from wealthier nations will continue to value Harm and Fairness more and Purity, Authority, and Loyalty less than those from less wealthy nations, though by a lesser degree.

 

H4--Ethnicity: My tentative guess is that on the original framings, whites and Asians respond more or less as liberals do and blacks and Latinos respond more or less as conservatives do (if ideology is controlled for).  In the revised framings, the prediction is that in a regression analysis whites and Asians will continue to value Harm and Fairness more and Purity, Authority, and Loyalty less than blacks and Latinos. 

 

 

 

 

Reframed Questionnaire

What follows is an altered version of the questionnaire on moral foundations that appears on yourmorals.org, a site run by Jon Haidt and others.  I believe it would be very interesting to see if and how the responses to the reframed questionnaire differ from those on the original, which is also shown below.   Each question on the orginal and reframed questionnaire relates to one of five dimensions identified by Haidt; the relevant dimension is identified in the text below, though not in the actual questionnaire.

 

Reframed Moral Foundations Questionnaire—Reframed version first [original question in brackets]

Part 1. When you decide whether something is right or wrong, to what extent are the following considerations relevant to your thinking? Please answer according to this scale:

  [1] = Not At All Relevant (This consideration has nothing to do with my judgments of right and wrong)
    [2] = Not Very Relevant
   [3] = Slightly Relevant
  [4] = Somewhat Relevant
    [5] = Very Relevant
    [6] = Extremely Relevant (This is one of the most important factors when I judge right and wrong)

1.   Whether or not someone was denied his or her freedom.

[Whether or not someone was denied his or her rights.]

Fairness

2.   Whether or not someone did something to betray his or her co-workers.

[Whether or not someone did something to betray his or her group.]

Loyalty

3.    Whether or not someone suffered.

  [Whether or not someone suffered emotionally.]

Harm

4.   Whether or not someone honored the tradition that money is the root of all evil.

[Whether or not someone conformed to the traditions of society.]

Authority

5.   Whether or not someone threw a multimillion dollar birthday party for himself.

[Whether or not someone did something disgusting.]

Purity

6.   Whether or not someone showed a lack of loyalty to his or her employees.

      [Whether or not someone showed a lack of loyalty.]

Loyalty

7.   Whether or not someone violated the purity and sanctity of the natural environment.

[Whether or not someone violated standards of purity and decency.]

Purity

8.   Whether or not someone showed a lack of respect for scientific authority.

[Whether or not someone showed a lack of respect for authority.]

Authority

9.  Whether or not an action caused job insecurity.

[Whether or not an action caused chaos or disorder.]

Authority

10.  Whether or not someone's action showed love for his or her cause.

  [Whether or not someone's action showed love for his or her country.]

Loyalty

11.  Whether or not someone was good at math.

[same]

Irrelevant--control

12.  Whether or not someone cared for someone.

  [Whether or not someone cared for someone weak or vulnerable.]

Harm

13.  Whether or not someone was cruel for no reason.

   [Whether or not someone was cruel.]

Harm

14.   Whether or not someone acted in a way that an Earth Spirit (Gaia) would approve of.

   [Whether or not someone acted in a way that God would approve of.]

Purity

15.  Whether or not someone acted unfairly.

   [same]

Fairness

16.  Whether or not some people were treated differently than others in the same situation.

  [Whether or not some people were treated differently than others.]

Fairness

Part 2. Please read the following sentences and indicate your agreement or disagreement. Please answer according to this scale:
  [1] = Strongly Disagree
    [2] = Moderately Disagree
   [3] = Slightly Disagree
  [4] = Slightly Agree
    [5] = Moderately Agree
    [6] = Strongly Agree

16.   I think it's morally wrong when people get something they don’t deserve.

   [I think it's morally wrong that rich children inherit a lot of money while poor children inherit nothing.]

Fairness

17.   It can never be right to murder a human being.

   [It can never be right to kill a human being.]

Harm

18.   It is more important to be respectful of all people in society than to express oneself.

   [It is more important to be a team player than to express oneself.]

Authority

19.  Respect for science is something all children need to learn.

  [Respect for authority is something all children need to learn.]

Authority

20.  The purity of the natural environment is an important and valuable virtue.

  [Chastity is an important and valuable virtue.]

Purity

21.  Science has proven that the concept of race is a myth.

  [Men and women each have different roles to play in society.]

Authority

22.  I am proud of the history of my political side.

  [I am proud of my country's history.]

Loyalty

23.  Charity for the truly needy is the most crucial virtue.

  [Compassion for those who are suffering is the most crucial virtue.]

Harm

24.  If I were a teacher and disagreed with my state’s rules that I teach evolution, I would obey anyway because that is my duty.

  [If I were a soldier and disagreed with my commanding officer's orders, I would obey anyway because that is my duty.]

Loyalty

25.  I would call some acts wrong on the grounds that they are contrary to the sacredness of nature.

  [I would call some acts wrong on the grounds that they are unnatural.]

Purity

26.  One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal for no reason.

  [One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal.]

Harm

27.  When the government makes laws, the number one principle should be ensuring that everyone gets what they deserve.]

  [When the government makes laws, the number one principle should be ensuring that everyone is treated fairly.]

Fairness

28.  Freedom is the most important requirement for a society.

  [Justice is the most important requirement for a society.]

Fairness

29.  People should not make more than a certain amount, even if no one is harmed.

  [People should not do things that are disgusting, even if no one is harmed.]

Purity

30.  It is better to do good than to do bad.

  [same]

Harm

31.  People should be loyal to their co-workers, even when they have done something wrong.

  [People should be loyal to their family members, even when they have done something wrong.]

Loyalty

Dilemmas of a Value Competition Believer

Going further into introspection with this post...

As a believer in a value competition analysis that says social value is generated by the competition of liberal and conservative ideologies that are both inconsistent on the individualism/communitarianism and pro-elite/ pro-majority dimensions, what ideology if any should I adopt?

Given my cultural identity--signaled by my beard and turtleneck--my comparative advantage lies on the left side of the spectrum.  People on the left are comfortable with my cultural characteristics, and I with theirs, in a way that I'm less sure of for people on the right, like the Republican Assemblyman and ex-high school principal I had an exchange with in Trenton the other day.  So by those lights I should be a centrist liberal, trying to help the Democrats turn in a more sensible direction on how to run the government and non-profits effectively and damping down my wilder forms of cultural liberalism, in keeping with a value competition analysis under which one should not be simply a tribune of an elite that favors both economic and cultural flexibility.  Or if I want to go the other way and join the conservatives I should cut my hair and beard, get some good suits, ditch the turtlenecks, and finally figure out how to keep my glasses clean and tuck in my shirt-tail properly...that last point I suspect might present me with an insuperable obstacle to changing my cultural identity, though...

But here's the rub: As a believer in a particular kind of value competition analysis, I believe that the system functions better when important cultural identities like CEO, bearded/casual professor, African-American, and so on, are split as close as possible to 50-50 rather than belonging to one side or the other.  So while I'm entirely comfortable with identifying as an eclectic utilitarian because doing so in my judgment accords with my comparative advantage as an individual, I'm not at all comfortable with identifying as a centrist liberal for the same reason.   My brand of value competition analysis tells me it' would be a good thing for my society to have more people like me be conservatives.  That collective case doesn't necessarily override the individual case for me identifying with the right side of the left.  But it creates a dilemma that makes the question of my optimal political ideology quite unlike the question of whether to espouse utilitarianism or deontology.

Mutual Respect

If Haidt is right about the greater ethical complexity of conservatives, that forms a reasonable basis for liberals to think better of conservatives than they might otherwise.  It does not form a reasonable basis for conservatives to think better of liberals, though.  By contrast, an approach that makes both sides more skeptical about their own as well as the other's consistent adherence to an ethical framework or ethical principles cuts both ways.  Combined with a utilitarian case that a value-based opposition is necessary, such an undermining approach strikes me as having more potential for reducing undue moralism on both sides than the claim that conservatism features greater ethical diversity.

Winners and Losers

Jonathan Haidt makes an argument that conservatives and traditionalists are more ethically complex than liberals and moderns, in that the former groups draw in a relatively balanced way from five moral foundations (purity/sacredness, loyalty, authority, harm/care, and equity/fairness), while the latter groups draw very heavily from the latter two foundations and eschew the earlier three foundations. 

Leaving aside for the moment the interesting issue of whether Haidt is right empirically (I have my doubts about his empirical case as it relates to liberals and conservatives, but believe his distinctions map the differences between moderns and traditionalists correctly), there is an interesting issue as to whether Haidt's results provide the basis for a good normative case for moderns respecting traditionalists (or liberals respecting conservatives, or, hypothetically, middle-class people respecting working class people, or managers respecting subordinates).  

A sketch of a case for why Haidt's empiricism can be a good reason for respect: Modern consciousness may be seen as a specialized case of the advantage of division of labor that Adam Smith dramatized in his famous case of the pin factory.  Compared to natural men, moderns are anything but stupid; they are cleverer as well as socially smoother, harder-working , more respectful of universal moral principles, and more accomplished.  But they are in some key respects simpler both than their pre-modern predecessors and their less successful counterparts in modern society.   Natural men did more than moderns do; one need not concur with Jared Diamond that the invention of agriculture was the greatest catastrophe of human history and that the pre-modern New Guinean is smarter than his modern counterpart to realize that as a modern one is a toiler in a vast social pin factory that far outstrips the economic and cultural output of its premodern predecessor but in which one has a highly specialized, narrow role.   That basis for modern respect of natural man does not work respecting an assembly line worker in the pin factory whose skills are considerably narrower than that of the manager.  But another argument does: The assembly line worker--if we extend Haidt's results--simultaneously believes in the manager's modern, middle class values of achievement, individual effort, and universal moral norms and also in a traditionalist set of values related to family, clan, authority, loyalty, holiness, and so on.  That complexity one may find admirable--not from a resource utilitarian perspective that finds modernity superior in its economic and cultural production nor from a universalist Kantian perspective that finds modernity closer to internalizing universal moral duty, but from aesthetically-oriented ethical perspectives such as Nietzsche's that find beauty in conflict as well as from certain eclectic versions of utilitarianism and certain non-universalist forms of deontology.

Competing Values in Law

On the face of it, law is a domain of surfaced value competition in a way that management is not.  Managers may employ individualist or communitarian--or for that matter left or right--ideas, but a direct competition of the sides with advocates for both defies the norms of the management field.  On the other hand, surfaced competition with advocates for both sides is entirely mainstream within law.  Further, quite often the positions the two sides are advancing are individualist, communitarian, left, or right positions.  

The key qualification to make about law and values is that what the competing sides advocate and what judges decide, if they are "speaking law" properly, is not Rawls or Nozick or MacIntyre or Burke but a version of ideology or ethics that is tailored to the distinctive legal task of blending and alternating between rules and standards.  John Hart Ely's wisecrack some decades ago about the Supreme Court voting 6-3 for Rawls over Nozick hits home as a criticism of the limits of politicized legal judgments not so much because law is apolitical or a ethical--it  most emphatically has very substantial political and ethical content--but because judges must speak properly in legal terms.  A brilliant libertarian or communitarian idea must remain tacit, or be translated into an appropriate rule, standard, or rule-standard. 

By comparison to judges, managers can draw from column A and column B without the constraint of having to justify their answer as the right answer over other possible answers.  Compared to law, a "right answer" discipline, management is a "move the ball forward" discipline.  A manager can draw on Bentham, Kant, Rawls, MacIntyre, Burke, and other ethicists and/or ideologues more freely in some respects than a judge can do.  Judges face greater consistency constraints than managers do; for a manager, honoring the grab-bag, local rationality over global rationality quality of management as a discipline constrains the manager from consistent commitment to one ethical or political perspective as the right answer but supports eclectic commitment to different perspectives that may in different circumstances help move the ball forward.

The Implicit Ethical Structures of Management and Legal Education

Why is business ethics more intellectually ambitious and more successful as a field than legal ethics?  A plausible materialist answer is that the professionalization of law has led to legal ethics becoming synonymous with a code of professional responsibility and to a concomitant diminution in intellectual ambition and disciplinary power.  But there is also a potential idealist explanation: The virtues and the flaws of management as an academic discipline map better onto major ethical schools than the virtues and flaws of legal education do.

Management education with its mix of calculative (finance, OM, etc.), cultural (OB, etc.), and mixed disciplines can be justified in eclectic utilitarian terms: To enhance their effectiveness as well as that of their firms and their society, managers should be able to draw on both utilitarian and non-utilitarian approaches.  From the eclectic utilitarian perspective, epitomized by Mill, effectiveness is often enhanced when utilitarianism is not directly relied upon; given that perspective, the central role of the calculation-culture dichotomy in management theory makes sense. 

Management education also can be usefully criticized in philosophical terms.  From a Kantian deontological perspective, there is a serious concern as to whether management forsakes moral seriousness and universality for an endless succession of morally relaxed utilitarian compromises.  From an Aristotelian virtue ethics perspective, there is a serious concern over whether the dominant split between calculation and culture in management loses sight of the manager as a whole person with a character in favor of viewing the manager as a device to achieve effective results.  From a communitarian utilitarian perspective a la Peter Singer, management education reinforces the failure to take into account remote but ethically pressing harms and benefits.  From an individualist perspective, management education oversocializes, cultivating organization men and women rather than free spirits.  Because critical stances as well as a justificatory stance on management education can be readily related to major ethical schools, business ethics courses have a reasonably straightforward logic.

By comparison, legal education with its emphasis on inculcating skills in blending and alternating between clear rules that avoid moral language and ambiguous standards that embrace moral language does not readily map onto Bentham, Kant, Aristotle, or other major ethicists.  First, because the utilitarian reason cultivated by law and economics is a subordinate kind of reason that dare not speak its name, there is no bright-line clash between utilitarianism and deontology in law the way that there is in management.  Next, because the legal curriculum is not as fragmented and dichotomizing as the management curriculum, virtue ethics has less critical bite in law than it does in management.  Finally, because legal education lacks the preoccupation management education has with the individual, firm, and social levels, individualist and communitarian critiques map less well onto law than to management.  For all that the structure of legal as well as management education has significant ethical content for the people who go through it, the structure does not accord as closely with major ethical theories in law as  it does in management.

Why I'm a Utilitarian

Some thoughts provoked by though not necessarily related to Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy...

a) It's not because I think utilitarianism overall offers a better account of ethics than its doppelganger deontology/duty/rights/law...maybe my background in law biases me, but my sense is that it's the deontological side that corresponds somewhat better not only to the way humans actually are but to the way we should be...sure, the consequentialist side of people is crucial both positively and normatively, and I can make a value competition case for consequentialism having a 50-50 role, but it does seem like the deontological side of the scales has more weight on it...

b) It's also not because I have a particular comparative advantage in doing utilitarian ethics compared to other kinds...it's not the way I have a comparative advantage as a mediocre tennis player in going to the net, where my ground stroke flaws are suppressed and an occasional sneaker-top volley winner brightens my generally futile athletic life...as noted before my background is in law, and my inclinations and skills tilt me more if anything toward a deontological cultural patterning approach to morality than to calculating consequentialism...

So why am I a utilitarian?   Two explanations, one specific to utilitarianism and one not...

a) My intuition is that in the next hundred years (or maybe a lot less than that) there's going to be a tres cool utilitarian theory of how different values, including moral and political values, interact in the human brain and human society in "optimal" or "suboptimal" ways...that theory will link up empirical results in psychology and behavioral econ with modeling...it will be contestable and unclear in its relation to normative ethics in much the same way that economics is, but it will be a beautiful intellectual edifice...believing that as I do, and hoping to have some small part in doing preliminary exploration for such a theory through the value competition stuff, I think it makes sense for me not to see the theory's utilitarianism as radically detached from my normative ethics but rather to see it as connected...

b) I think partisanship by ethicists is good, much in the same way that partisanship by sports fans is good...the quality of the arguments both by ethicists themselves and by the legions of lawyers, economists, and others who do applied ethics can be lifted up if partisanship rather than bland syncretism prevails...the real and increasing split in legal academia between the law and econ consequentialists and the deontological mainstream is a good thing for the legal academy...likewise, the central split in management academia between the finance/econ/OR consequentialists and the management deontologists helps make management academia and education successful, I believe.   Assuming that's right, it's not an argument for for which side to pick, but it is an argument for picking a side...

[addendum--finding the "partisanship works" argument I just gave to be important as well as true does strike me as having a connection to utilitarian sympathies...on reflection, I'm thinking my a) and b) points both are related to my being impressed by the potential of a utilitarian science of ethics...]

Value Competition and the Dichotomy between the Good and the True

My "Building Better Agents" paper positions value competition as a scientific/scientistic movement; so do a lot of my posts on this blog.  On reflection, though, I wonder whether VC is not better seen as a potential form of self-assertion by normative disciplines like management, law, and applied psychology and ethics.  These disciplines suffer from a persistent sense of inferiority to scientific disciplines, based on the blurriness and arguable incoherence that attends their normative, do-gooding mission.  VC may be understood as a way to stand up for these disciplines--"incoherence is good!"--as well as an effort to give them a more scientifically plausible way to talk about their mission.