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.

Utilitarian and Deontological Mediations of the Fact-Value Antinomy

Eastman and Bailey (1998) contend that the contemporary legal academy features surfaced value competition in a way that the management academy does not, and advocate management scholarship that is overtly normative in the legal mode.  Their positive claim is partly correct, in that the surfaced clash of substantive political visions—individualist, communitarian, left, right—that is central in law is far more muted in management.  But it neglects an important way in which value competition has traditionally been surfaced in management, but not in law.

Management scholarship represses open competition as to substantive visions—the rationality of ends.  But it surfaces open competition as to methods, in particular between the “rational” and “cultural” poles, to adopt Barley and Kunda’s nomenclature.  Legal scholarship by contrast has traditionally repressed methodological competition.  Law has its own methodological parallel to the rational-cultural split in the form of the division between rules stated in factual terms and standards stated in moral terms.  But this methodological division has not traditionally resulted In anything parallel to the intricate divisions in business schools between calculative and cultural approaches.   Duncan Kennedy, Kathy Sullivan, and others have correctly identified the power of the rules-standards split, but have not prevailed in leading the legal academy toward surfaced methodological competition between rules and standards camps.  What has instead worked to crack open the legal academy on methodological lines is basically the same calculation-culture split that dominates in management, with law and economics as the legal equivalent of the calculative finance/econ and optimization/OR camp in management.

Relating the above to the general Bentham-Kant dichotomy and to the utilitarian and deontological modes of mediating the fact-value dichotomy: Utilitarianism mediates empirically, with a faith that logic plus data will at least some of the time lead to moving the ball forward with better ideas.  Deontology mediates a priori, with a faith in universal rules.  Management features utilitarian mediation, with the calculative and cultural camps engaging in an eclectic local competition to move the ball forward.   Law features deontological mediation, with substantive camps competing time after time after time to establish which is right.

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...]

Dichotomies in Chinese and Indian Ethics

What's the equivalent in Indian and Chinese philosophy of the master dichotomy in Western ethics between utilitarianism and deontology?   It's easy to see the parallels to character-based Aristotelian virtue ethics in China (Confucius) and India (the Krishna-Arjuna story, etc.), but I don't believe Bentham and Kant map too well onto the Indian and Chinese context.

My sense is that Indian and Chinese ethics have not polarized the way Western ethics has since the eighteenth century, and in any case have not polarized along Kant-Bentham lines and are not likely to do so except to the degree Western ethics becomes hegemonic.  But there are Chinese and Indian dichotomies that are candidates for matching or supplementing the utility-deontology split.  In yin-yang/dark-light/subtle-direct/cautious/bold, there's an obvious candidate for a Chinese-derived dichotomy that, whatever its potential for breaking open contemporary Chinese ethics, strikes me as having considerable potential for teaching and scholarship in business ethics in the West as well as in China.  India is less straightforward; my candidate for an India-derived dichotomy that could help open the minds of Western students and scholars in ethics is pluralism-monism/diversity-unity/complexity-simplicity.

Individualist, Communitarian, and Individualist-Communitarian Philosophers

Robert Wright's Next Book

The Evolution of God is very good as a critical but sympathetic guide to the Abrahamic religions and their scriptures.  I would like to see Wright's next book be something that the current one isn't, namely an argument for God as a plausible scientific hypothesis.  That hypothetical book would challenge those of us who are secular in a way that his current book and related NYT op-ed don't, as Daniel Dennett points out in today's letters.  

How might that work?   In the book and the op-ed, Wright refers to the possibility that a divine presence arranged the algorithms of natural selection, presumably including the "non-zero-sumness" of reciprocal cooperation that Wright rightly regards as a central feature of the way history and evolution work.  My skeptical response is, "How could it be any different?"  That is, if the algorithms of natural selection, including the logic of reciprocal cooperation, have to be what they are regardless of the universe you're in, I don't see a case based for God based on those algorithms.  But if I'm persuaded that non-zero-sumness is like physical constants that could be anything but have to be just so for matter to coagulate as it actually does, then an advocate for God as a plausible hypothesis has an "isn't it amazing that things are so neatly arranged morally as well as practically in our universe" argument that a good scientific Bayesian has to engage.

Personally, I'm a skeptic about the "isn't the moral order wondrous" argument; my prior is that the algorithms of natural selection and non-zero-sumness--and the humbler algorithms of value competition that I try to tease out--are universe-invariant like math, not universe-variant like physics.  But I'm less than confident about that prior, and would love to read a book by Wright that tries to persuade me that I'm wrong.

Falsification and Confirmation

For a human science to work well, it should be able to negate as well as to affirm the strongly held moral preconceptions of the scientist.   I strongly agree with Marvin Harris's criticism in Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture of the Hegelian dialectic in its original form and in its modified forms in Marx and Levi-Strauss as failing under this criterion.  But it also seems to me that Harris's own "cultural materialism" fails under the same criterion.  The absence of an economic analysis of whether particular forms of social stratification are or are not conducive to social welfare allows an anthropologist using cultural materialism to see the world as an endless demonstration of exploitation in action if he is so inclined, just as an anthropologist using Marx's dialectical materialism can.  By comparison, economic analysis with its constant variations on the themes of market success and market failure usefully challenges strong believers in both regulation and markets, in both equality and inequality.   At the same time, economic analysis helpfully offers the possibility of confirmation to believers.   Economists with strong value commitments--such as Milton Friedman with his libertarianism or John Maynard Keynes with his statism--can do fine work that supports their predilections. 

One way to think about value competition is as a subset of economics that deals with collective decision, especially political decision backed by compulsion.  For all their very considerable value, public choice analyses of collective decision that assume rational, self-interested actors are subject to the criticism that they fail to take into account the ambivalence and complexity of human motivation.  By trying to do so, a value competition analysis has something to offer to those with more hopeful beliefs about collective action than appear warranted based on an assumption of rational self-interest.  Because a value competition analysis can also come up with the conclusion that collective decisions and agents vested with discretion will diverge from optimality, the method also has something to offer those skeptical about collective action.  Given that duality, the method has the ability to usefully discomfit both believers in politics and skeptics about politics.

Contradiction: Empirical not Metaphysical

An inquiry into contradiction needs to avoid metaphysical overreach.  An example: Light and dark by themselves are not contradictory, simply contrasting or different.  One can develop a polarity that divides up the cosmos between light and dark, and then proclaim a contradiction.  But unless two more conditions are met, no actual contradiction exists.  First, one's metaphysical system needs to correspond to something outside one's imagination--such as a Taoist shared metaphysics that constitutes a cultural reality, or an actual "light center" and "dark center" in the brain that constitute a biological reality--to be something other than a personal phantasm.   Second, there needs to be a socially understood if not agreed upon argument between the poles--if in the polarity of light and dark neither side makes a moral claim to be better (truer, more virtuous, more beautiful) than the other, no contradiction between the poles obtains. 

Another Take on Abstracts

The categorization of abstracts according to whether they adopt a particular pole over another (e.g., calculation over culture) or mediate between the poles can be seen in relation to an underlying attitude toward dualism involving a clash or contradiction of basic interests or principles.  A given work might fit into any of the following categories:

1) Dualism--partisan for one side;

2) Dualism--negative toward both sides;

3) Dualism--positive toward both sides;

4) Anti-dualism--cooperation rather than conflict/contradiction/clash;

5) Anti-dualism--pluralism--multiple interests, principles, etc.;

6) Anti-dualism--cross-cutting cleavages.

The value competition tilt is toward position 6, with position 3 in practice standing in as a proxy for it.

Stich on Morality and Cognitive Science, part 3

In his third Nicod lecture, Stich deals with psychological egoism and altruism: http://www.institutnicod.org/lectures2007_outline.htm 

The basic argument: Some philosophers, including Bentham and Mill, have worried that if people are psychologically egoistic, acting solely on the basis of their own pleasures and pains, cooperation is fragile and always vulnerable to being undermined because of its instrumental rather than intrinsic nature.  One may counter this concern--as Sober and D.S. Wilson do--by taking the position that humans are likely intrinsically rather than extrinsically concerned with the welfare of others, given that intrinsic concern for others is a more reliable, cost-effective mechanism to implant in human beings through evolution than instrumental concern.  Or one may counter the concern about egoism--as Stich and Sripada do--by taking the position that instrumental concern for others related to one's own feelings can be just as firmly rooted as intrinsic concern; S concludes by suggesting that egoistic concern for others associated with emotion is more appealing morally than concern detached from feeling. 

A value competition take: VC relies on the conjecture that human beings are constructed in a way that makes it comparatively easy and low-cost to inculcate in them feelings (which may be either intrinsic and thus altruistic per S or instrumental) that lead them away from promoting their own welfare to promoting that of others (or to inaction), if and only if these "altruistic" feelings or values are combined with "egoistic" or "self-oriented" feelings that lead them to overcome inaction to promote their own welfare.   The underlying argument for why that is so could presumably be put in evolutionary terms a la Sober and Wilson; it can also be put in terms of an economic model of optimal individual decision under uncertainty, with optimality viewed from the perspective of society.   None of this in VC strikes me as in any basic conflict with S, or Sober and Wilson; the difference is that VC is more preoccupied than S or Sober and Wilson appear to be with the value of egoistic feelings that motivate people to work harder than would otherwise be the case.