Value Competition

One way to learn from the Gita

[riding on the bus to visit my parents...feel like a brief break from working on the Society for Business Ethics matrix project paper due 3/15 that the last post is about...feeling a certain enthusiastic spirit at the moment that doesn't work too well for that basically cool-spirited paper..so, here goes...]

I am a non-Hindu who is a loyal Unitarian-Universalist.  At the same time, I have something of a missionary's enthusiasm for the Bhagavad Gita.  It seems to me to be a full peer of the Garden of Eden story and the Crucifixion and Resurrection story in its power, and the vastly lesser knowledge of it by people in my country seems to me something that should change.

Perhaps the story is best appreciated by people like me if it is told not only in its original version but also in a way that suggests how it can be received by someone like me...the Gita's story of Arjuna's unwillingness to fight and Krishna's remonstrances to him, potent as it is, is embedded in a cultural pattern that is profoundly distant from that of the modern West...Arjuna's reluctance to fight is articulated not in terms of a universal objection to killing, or of an overarching "we are all equal" ethics, but rather of a specific objection to killing kin.  No matter how bad the foes are--and Arjuna has no doubt, at least none that he expresses, about the superiority of his Pandava side over the greedy opposing side commanded by Dhritirashtra--they are still kin, and killing them will disorder the laws of caste.   Similarly, Krishna's admonitions to Arjuna are couched not in the universalist lexicon of a moral duty that applies to all, but rather in terms of a particular duty that lies upon Arjuna as a member of the warrior caste, the commander of his army, and a warrior of singular power--"The Scorcher of Foes".

So how to cast Arjuna's deep self-doubt and Krishna's advice to him--Fight, for the Self, as opposed to the body that is born to die, is imperishable; Fight, for there is in truth neither a Slayer nor a Slain--in a contemporary cultural context?  

Here is one way that resonates for me...I believe that others can recast the Gita in their own way to make it live for them...

The reluctant warrior-politician-businessperson-spouse, etc: "I do not want to fight.  I do not trust myself, for I see inside myself hatred and anger that makes me judge myself and makes me doubt that I am any better than the side I fight.  I do not want to fight.  I am too afraid of what may happen if the other side prevails and the burden of failure lies upon me, for it would be a terrible thing if the other side were to win and I were to be the bringer of that catastrophe.  I do not want to fight.  It is wrong to fight.  I should walk in the ways of peace in all the days of my life."

The guide: "Fight. The causes you cherish and the causes the other cherishes are alike impermanent and corporeal, just as you and the other are.  They are the causes of a day or a millennium, born to die.  What lives forever is the idea of you and the other and the idea of your cause and the cause of the other locked together eternally in harmonious struggle.  Fight, for that idea is imperishable.  The husk of your body and your cause is only that.  Fight, for there is neither a slayer nor a slain."

Turning the Other Cheek as a Winning Strategy

[Working on my advantageous altruism paper for the 1/10/12 Academy of Management deadline and then for business ethics journal submission...some draft notes for the "Jesus" section of the paper follow...comments welcome as always]

If your enemy hits you on the cheek, turning your other cheek, rewarding as it may well be in giving one a satisfying sense of moral superiority, does not seem to have much potential as a way of getting ahead in the world.  The fact that a preacher of a gospel of turning the other cheek and loving one's enemy became the central figure of the world's most widely followed religion, though in some sense a confirmation of the idea that altruism can in some fashion redound to one's practical benefit, is also a profound challenge to that idea.  Compared to Plato and Aristotle, with their successful lives and their notion of a virtuous character whose self-interest lies in following the good, Jesus with his disastrous end and his notion of radical self-sacrifice is on the face of it a great rebuker of the notion of advantageous altruism.   Think not of the morrow...be not like unto the Pharisees...it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God: In all of these maxims attributed to Jesus one senses a spirit radically opposed to calculation and to a morality of egoistic prudence and self-advancement.

And yet, the logic of relative success and resultant Darwinian advantage in cultural reproduction is not simple.  It can be the case that the way to get ahead is to disdain getting ahead, and that the way to win is to disdain winning and indeed to embrace outcomes in which one loses.   In what follows, I will trace out a claim that the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount can be reasonably understood as advocating not only self-sacrifice that loses in practical if not moral terms, as he indeed does, but also as advocating a form of altruistic forgiveness that is highly advantageous to the forgiver in his interactions with an egoist.  Further, I will suggest that this advantageous form of forgiving altruism has two great virtues compared to the egalitarian altruism of Plato and the masterful altruism of Aristotle.   First, forgiving altruism solves an important family of assurance (or trust) games that are not solved by the Platonic or Aristotelian forms of altruism.  Second and even more important, forgiving altruists do well with other forgiving altruists.  Not everyone can be a successful egalitarian guardian or great-souled man, but everyone in a society can be successful together as forgiving altruists playing games with other forgiving altruists.  

The basic idea of advantageous forgiving altruism can be stated as follows: You as the forgiving altruist have a deep positive feeling for the other's payoff, for yourself, and for the situation when you as the forgiving altruist choose an action that could or should result in the highest combined payoff for both of you (with either the best payoff for you and the second best for the other, or the second best payoff for both of you), but the other player "messes up" by choosing an action that gives both of you lower payoffs than you could have enjoyed.   The basic concept is expressed much more succinctly in Luke 23:34: "Jesus said, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do." 

Forgiving altruism as just defined is helpful to the forgiving altruist because it amounts to a commitment to play a strategy that is as good as or better for the forgiving altruist as it is for the other player when the other player responds optimally to the commitment.  It is also good for the other player--though not quite as good as it is for the forgiving altruist--because the other player receives no worse than her second best payoff, and may well receive her best payoff along with the forgiving altruist. 

Although forgiving altruism is not an approach that wins for the altruist or for both players collectively in all games, it has a considerably broader sweep than egalitarian altruism and masterful altruism do.  While those two types of selective altruism are effective in three out of the seven games of interest, forgiving altruism is effective not only in Leadership and the Battle of the Sexes, but also in the three assurance games--Trust, Schelling, and Stag Hunt.  The only games on which it has no purchase is the Prisoner's Dilemma, where no form of selective altruism can have any purchase given the dominance of non-cooperation for the egoist, and Chicken. 

In Chicken, the Greek altruists rule the roost because of their commitment to lead, which causes the egoist to yield.  By contrast, the forgiving altruist as defined here does not commit to lead, because doing so would stick the egoist with her second worst payoff.  (footnote--A less nice variant of forgiving altruist--Jesus with more Aristotle in him?--who commits to the highest value outcome when it is best for him even when it would stick the other player with a second worst outcome does win Chicken with an egoist.  Further, that un-nice but forgving altruist avoids lead-lead wrecks in Chicken with another un-nice forgiving altruist because both commit only to a highest joint value outcome.)  The result is that the game is up for grabs with a forgiving altruist and an egoist (or two forgiving altruists), just as it is in a game with two egoists.  (footnote--Socially, the "up for grabs" outcome in Chicken in which both players play mixed Nash is not as good as the outcome in which the leader gets first best and the follower gets third best.  That is the one case in which the Greek altruists socially outperform the forgiving altruist in interactions with an egoist.)

The Greek altruists clean up in the two pure leadership games.  By comparison, the forgiving altruist takes a smaller though still preponderant share of the pie in Leadership and Battle of the Sexes games with an egoist.  The reason is that the forgiving altruist as defined here, unlike the Greek altruists, does not play the strategy that gives her the highest payoff if it is not also the strategy that has the highest joint value.  That restraint has the very considerable virtue of allowing two forgiving altruists to do very well indeed in playing leadership games with one another.  (footnote--One will get his or her highest value payoff, and the other will get her second highest value payoff.)  But it also means that the forgiving altruist will not commit to leading if the highest joint value outcome is for the egoist to lead.  In those situations, the game between a forgiving altruist and an egoist is up for grabs, as it is in a game between two egoists.  (footnote--A nicer type of forgiving altruist than the basic type defined here has a warm glow when the other messes up by deviating from an outcome in which the forgiving altruist earns her second highest payoff and the other earns her highest payoff.  That type does not beat the egoist in leadership games; combined with the fact that the basic type as defined here does not beat the egoist in assurance games, the result is that the nicer variant on forgiving altruism does not prevail over the egoist overall, though it also does not lose to the egoist.)

In the three assurance games--Trust, Schelling, and Stag Hunt--the forgiving altruist as defined here does not beat the egoist.  In these games, the best payoff for both players comes if they both trust.  The "forgive them" commitment by the forgiving altruist to play trust leads to both players getting their best outcomes, not to a win over the egoist by the forgiving altruist.  (footnote--A less nice variant of the forgiving altruist that is only committed to trust when his cardinal payoff is at least as high as the other player's will prevail over the egoist.  Such a less nice or competitive forgiving altruist will not throw away value in playing assurance games with another un-nice forgiving altruist, since both players will recognize and follow the other's commitment and coordinate on trust-trust.) 

Overall, the forgiving altruist does not take the egoist to the cleaners the way the Greek altruists do.  But the forgiving altruist does indeed outperform the egoist.  And crucially, the forgiving altruist does even better in interactions with another forgiving altruist than she does with an egoist.  In contrast with the guardian and the great-souled man, who are both elite types, the forgiving altruist is an excellent candidate to be a general or universal type. 

Testing for (A)symmetry in Motivated Reasoning

Just read an excellent post at Dan Kahan's Cultural Cognition Project site on the issue of whether there is an asymmetry or not between liberals and conservatives in regard to motivated reasoning.   I've been working on a review article on political ideology and business ethics that covers the work of John Jost, Jon Haidt, Kahan, and others, so this subject is of deep interest to me.  Here are four thoughts on whether it's possible to craft empirical studies that compare the level of liberal and conservative motivated reasoning and that will be accepted as credible across ideological lines:

1) First, Tetlock and Mitchell are right on point with their call for adversarial collaboration.   If possible, let's get John Jost or his equivalent--a neo-Adornian who believes that motivated reasoning is distinctively a conservative problem--and Jon Haidt or his equivalent--a neo-Shilsian who believes that motivated reasoning is a problem of leftist true believers just as much as rightist ones, and that in the social psychological academy the former are far more common than the latter--to agree beforehand on a research design;

2) One possible approach: Have subjects read a complex, fact-laden, scientific, non-normative article on a sensitive topic such as the ones studied by Kahan (e.g., abortion, global warming, etc.)  Then see whether liberals or conservatives err more in favor of their favored position in their recall of the facts, the fact-based conclusions of the article, and their own interpretations of the article.  If the results parallel those in Kahan, et al's "They Saw a Protest," one would expect subjects not to be unduly biased on clearly stated, highly salient facts, but would expect both sides to be substantially biased in recalling fact-based conclusions involving an element of judgment and in drawing their own conclusions.  My own intuition, FWIW, is that motivated reasoning is a bigger problem in recalling text than in recalling video.  I would expect that considerable motivated bias will come up in both liberals' and conservatives' recollection of clearly stated numbers in a complex article they read a little while ago a way that it didn't in their recollection of clear facts in the Kahan, et al video.  My own ideological sympathies lead me to hope that both sides are fairly symmetrical in their level of motivated recollection and interpretation, but I don't have a strong objective prior expectation for symmetry, for liberals being more motivated, or for conservatives being more motivated. 

3) By using a single issue, the design just described deals with a key problem with using the "They Saw a Protest" study (or similar studies that use two or more different issues, such as abortion and military recruiting, that may be of different salience) to compare levels of motivated reasoning on the left and the right.  But a problem remains.  It is possible that a single given issue is more salient to one side than the othe.  Hence, a finding of more motivated reasoning by libs or cons on, say, climate change may still create a defensive, "we've been jobbed" response that has arguable merit by the side whose ox is gored by the study.  One possible way to deal with that issue would be to use a study with an article relating not to an issue but to personal traits of a candidate identified as being either a Democratic liberal or a Republican conservative, and to examine the degree of motivated recollection and interpretation given that framework.   My prior for that study is that liberals will show more motivated recollection and interpretation than conservatives, and that Democrats will show less than Republicans.   The reason is that the Democratic coalition is more ideologically diverse than the Republican one; liberals are considerably more concentrated on the Democratic side than conservatives are on the Republican side.   Though confirming (or disconfirming) that prior would be an interesting poli sci result, it's not too illuminating in regard to the psychological issue of (a)symmetry in motivated reasoning among libs and cons.  One could adjust the raw results in a candidate study to adjust for the greater numbers and partisan diffusion of conservatives compared to liberals, but in doing so one creates a complicated format that lacks credibility as a test of relative levels of motivated reasoning.

4)  In whichever study design one adopts, there would be value in employing a 2 x 2 matrix such as the one Kahan deploys rather than a simple liberal-conservative polarity.  In addition to the possible scientific value of being able to pin down whether individualist, communitarian, hierarchical/ meritocratic/desert-based, or egalitarian sympathies are more conducive to motivated reasoning, the use of two dimensions rather than one has potential value in depolarizing the design and interpretation of studies of relative levels of motivated reasoning.

 

 

 

 

Applying Kahan to Kahan

I believe Dan Kahan is doing excellent work in blending social psychology and law.  In particular, I find myself deeply in sympathy with his proposal that judicial resolutions of culturally contested matters be done if posssible in a way that affirms the worth of different cultural stances rather than judicially taking sides with one position over another.

In that spirit, a proposal: Kahan over the years has called the stance that more or less corresponds to modern conservatism "hierarchical individualism."  I believe that's a term that's likely to provoke in many conservatives exactly the sense of science being used in a biased, culturally partisan fashion that Kahan is concerned about.  How about "meritocratic individualism" or "desert-oriented" individualism?  Either term works better than "hierarchical" as one that conservatives are likely to accept as a self-description.   If Kahan wants to emphasize a traditionalist component in conservatism as opposed to liberalism, then "traditionalist individualism" would work fine, I believe.

I suspect part of the problem here is that Kahan has kept the same terms for cultural stances for years, even as his view of conservatism has become less negative over time (and/or his concern about both sides respecting the other has increased).

Compare "hierarchical individualism" with its more than faintly pejorative associations to "egalitarian communitariansm,"  the term Kahan usually uses for the stance similar to modern liberalism.   If you wanted to emphasize the culturally modernizing side of liberalism, you might pick another name, like "modernizing communitarianism (or egalitarianism)."  But the label Kahan uses (like the alternative labels) is not likely to be seen as pejorative, and corresponds pretty well, I believe, to the self-understanding of liberals in a way that "hierarchical individualism" does not, or so I believe, for conservatives. 

 

 

Moral Confusion as a Mirror Concept to Prejudice: An Alternative Use of the IAT

By itself, the IAT has no political valence.  In addition to its well-established use as a device to discover latent prejudice, as criticized by Tetlock and Mitchell and defended by Jost, et al, the IAT could be used as a device to discover latent moral confusion.   Respondents could be asked to quickly match positive and negative valence words such as GOOD and BAD with pictures depicting scenes in which a social consensus exists that what is shown is bad (photographs of violence, for example) or good (photographs of students working, for example).   A few hypotheses that could be tested: 1) Respondents who show less moral clarity/more moral confusion by matching up morally incompatible words and images as fast or faster than morally compatible words and images are more likely to be low academic performers and to engage in conduct destructive to themselves and others;  2) Respondents who show more moral confusion as measured by the IAT are likely to show more moral confusion as measured by pencil and paper surveys; 3) Respondents from lower status ethnic, racial, and social class groups will tend to show less moral clarity/more moral confusion than respondents from higher status groups.  

Such an alternative use of the IAT would present troubling issues.  It would also have the potential to do good.  The focus in social psychology on prejudice has very possibly helped move many people's behavior in a better direction over the past decades.  A focus on moral confusion might over time help do the same, with the significant difference that the people engaged in introspection and self-reformation, instead of being drawn heavily or exclusively from dominant groups, would be drawn from all groups, with a tilt toward non-dominant groups if the third hypothesis above is correct.  

One can criticize a focus on moral confusion on the basis that it amounts to blaming the victim, or on other grounds.   Or one can defend it on the basis that it grants moral agency to members of non-dominant groups as well as members of dominant groups in a way that the prejudice/bias construct often does not, and in doing so offers a useful alternative to understanding individual and group disadvantage in terms of dominant group prejudice, non-dominant group collective culture, or individual or collective deficits in skills as opposed to moral judgment.  

A use of the IAT to unmask moral confusion, like a the standard use of the IAT to unmask prejudice, is likely to draw different reactions from the "statist interventionist" and "market purist" camps identified by Tetlock and Mitchell. The latter camp, disinclined to support the IAT in the prejudice context, would be expected to be supportive in the moral confusion context, while the former camp would be expected to shift from support in the prejudice context to opposition in the moral confusion context.   For those like Tetlock and Mitchell who worry about the excesses of righteous ideologues of whatever political stripe, a desirable side effect of a stream of research focusing on moral confusion is that it would make it harder for either side to righteously defend or to righteously excoriate the IAT, since both sides would be using it for their respective purposes.

 

Jumping on the Third Rail: Reflections on Tetlock and Mitchell, Jost et al, and Haidt

My three sources:  1) Philip Tetlock and Gergory Mitchell’s effort in the Review of Organizational Behavior to rebut claims that the Implicit Association Test shows ongoing, endemic dominant group prejudice that warrants adherence to affirmative action and legal redress against firms with low numbers of minorities or women in high places; 2) the effort of Jost, et al in the same publication to rebut Tetlock and Mitchell by reviewing studies showing a clear relationship between the IAT and various forms of expressed prejudice in the workplace and elsewhere; and 3) Jonathan Haidt’s writings online and in the manuscript version of The Righteous Mind on anti-racism as the supreme tribal value of the community of liberal social psychologists. 

My reactions to Tetlock and Mitchell: a) I find their rebuttal to the use of IAT as a rebuttal to certain uses of the IAT by plaintiff’s attorneys convincing.   An assertion that a low percentage of minority or female managers in a firm plus the IAT equals a prima facie case of discrimination requiring extensive rebuttal evidence seems to me wrong; a plaintiff should need to do a good bit more to get over the prima facie hurdle, as the Supreme Court recently ruled in deciding for Wal-Mart in a class action gender discrimination suit against the company; b)  I find T and M’s criticism of the righteous, defensive ideologies of “statist interventionism” and “market purism” highly congenial, but do not believe T and M have in fact shown in a scientifically convincing manner that these righteous ideologies are widely present among researchers or that they present a significant practical problem.   At a level of introspection and casual observation, those of us who are attracted to the ideological position that righteous ideology is a major problem will be highly inclined to believe that T and M are right; as such a person, I indeed strongly believe that  they (and Haidt) are right.  But as Jost, et al repeatedly and correctly emphasize, science is different from intuition; c) the T and M call for “adversarial collaboration” in which adherents of the competing ideologies are explicit in advance about their priors and what results would make them change their minds strikes me as exactly right.   Jost, et al have a point in asking T and M to do such research themselves rather than simply calling for it, but miss T and M’s point by claiming that the ideology of researchers is irrelevant; T and M are right  to claim that adversarial collaboration with prior transparency about the  results that would lead the researchers to changed views on policy has far more potential to speak to the unconverted than standard, “ideology does not matter” research; d) the heat between Tetlock and Mitchell and Jost, et al is considerable.  My explanation for that is that the differences between adherents of an "ideology as righteousness" position like T and M and an "ideology as rationalization" position like Jost, et al are themselves ideological.  Ideology as righteousness unmaskers like T and M are to Jost, et al what Jost, et al and other ideology as rationalization unmaskers are to conservative believers in the basic acceptability of current social arrangements.  Just as ideology as rationalization unmaskers provoke a defensive, anti-righteousness reaction by believers in what is unmasked, so too do ideology as righteousness unmaskers.  Critics of ideology as righteousness like T and M will be seen by the criticized like Jost, et al as annoyingly righteous.   Given their own position, that presents an interesting riddle for critics of ideology as righteousness like T and M, who might be well advised to acknowledge that a centrist dislike for the overly defended partisanship of left and right can itself be a righteous ideology; e) I do not find T and M’s effort to take down the IAT in general, as opposed to the lawsuit-motivated effort to jump from the IAT to court-mandated or court-induced proportional hiring, to be convincing at a core level, much as many of their micro-level criticisms of the test strike me as having at least some merit.    The basic problem is that in criticizing the IAT they are playing on the “statist interventionist” side of the field.  Even if their criticisms were completely devastating to the IAT—which they are not, in that Jost, et al plus introspection suggest that there is a very considerable amount of merit to the IAT—all T and M would achieve is getting to the 50-yard line.   If they take away half of the force of the IAT—which seems to me roughly what they do-- the result is that the ball is on the 25-yard line, with the “statist interventionist”side on the offensive and not too far from scoring.   Maybe that is fine—but if one wants to get to a more even position, one needs to do more than debunk the IAT.    What one needs to do if one truly wants to provide a balance to the IAT is to come up with a psychological construct that mirrors the construct of immoral and detrimental prejudice/racism by members of dominant groups through coming up with a parallel form of immoral and detrimental thinking, feeling, and acting that also applies, and possibly more so, to members of non-dominant groups…to that charged subject I will turn in the next post.

Hurray for Daoist Individualists

Reading Jon Haidt's Righteous Mind manuscript and reflecting on the Durkheimian (or Confucian) utilitarianism he espouses--see the previous post for more on that--has stimulated me to come up with a tagline for my own value system/ideology/whatever.   My nominee as a label for myself after a week or two of Haidt-inspired reflection: Daoist individualism.  For all my problems with what strikes me as undue left-liberal cocksureness about enlightenment "march of progress" individualism and disdain for conservative communitarian traditionalism, I am myself a deep-dyed believer in enlightenment individualism.  As much as I strongly respect Durkheimian/Confucian social cohesion, order, tradition, etc., what speaks to me most deeply are the great successes we as a species have experienced in the last several centuries in science, in the arts, and in moral and practical standards of everyday living as we have dialed up our emphasis on individual freedom and individual responsibility.   I am thus a deep-dyed individualist--at the same time, I also believe deeply in a competing, collaborating communitarian truth that is eternally necessary for human beings and human society.  Thus, Daoist--or yin-yang--individualism.  I'm happy to subscribe to Durkheimian/Confucian utilitarianism in the public policy arena, but it is Daoist individualism that I am emotionally committed to as a person.

Jon Haidt--Hurray for Durkheimian Utilitarians

I've been reading a manuscript version of Jon Haidt's new book, The Righteous MInd, which I hope will be a big success when it comes out in February.   His self-identification as a public policy utilitarian concerned with the rational calculation of costs and benefits and also as a Durkheimian who worries about how utilitarians can neglect social cooperation, tradition, and cohesion in their calculations strikes me as just right in its blend of assertiveness and ambivalence.   I'm very happy to sign up as a foot soldier in the Durkeimian utilitarian movement, if such there be.  (As well as in the even more notional Daoist individualist movement, which I'll talk about in my next post.)   

 

Human beings being the contentious creatures we are, my fervent positive reaction to Haidt's position is accompanied by a quibble.  As I read the manuscript, Haidt seems to see Durkheimian utilitarianism as a mediation between the left and the right, in that there is a conservative flavor to a Durkheimian emphasis on social ties and a liberal flavor to a utilitarian emphasis on cost-benefit calculation in public policy.  I agree on the Durkheimian side, but not so much on the utilitarian side.  Although the philosophers of utilitarianism have indeed been mostly on the left-liberal side, the outstanding practitioners of it--the economists from Adam Smith on who have theorized how markets work--have not.   One could go on about this--there is a critical part of economics that theorizes market failure, and as important as I believe Chicago and other pro-market economics is an exempar of applied utilitarianism, I would not claim that public policy utilitarianism tilts right overall.   Instead, my sense is that the liberal-conservative split on utilitarianism applied to policy maps pretty well onto the act utilitarian-rule utilitarian distinction, with conservatives generally being more inclined to the rule utilitarian side and liberals to the act utilitarian side.  Peter Singer's position in favor of a wealthy individual in the West donating a substantial portion of his or her income to poor people in poor nations is a respectable act utilitarian position; a counterclaim that a widespread practice of doing so would have negative effects on incentives and moral responsibility and would create a poorer world overall is a respectable rule utilitarian position.   For an application of this point to the current economic debates on stimulus, a recent post by pro-market conservative economist John Taylor, in which he asserts that liberals favor situation-specific interventions while conservatives favor predictability through long-term rules, is worth checking out.

Kennedy's Judge and Other Partisan Actors

I'm working on a paper that begins with Duncan Kennedy's introspective analysis of the work process of a left-liberal judge and extends that analysis to the work of a local politician, a candidate for an academic job, and a social scientist.  An issue with the paper in its current form is that it is largely descriptive and lacks a normative thesis; a possibly related issue is that the actors in the case studies can all be seen as self-absorbed and lacking in loyalty to the greater good as opposed to themselves and their partisan groups. 

Some thoughts :

a) One way to frame the case studies, all of which deal with work in non-profit and government settings, is to use for-profit managerial work as a backdrop. Kennedy's judge and my politician, dean, and scientist are all driven, just as the manager impelled by the goal of seeking the best return for the firm is driven.  Just as the manager's goal of firm profit-maximization is partial, so too are the judge's goal of advancing left-liberal values, the politician's goal of advancing centrism over left and right values, the dean's goal of advancing conservative values, and the scientist's goal of developing a model to support what he already believes to be true.  For the manager, goal-directedness and principle converge: The principle is to follow the goal of maximizing firm welfare.  For the judge, the politician, the dean, and the scientist, on the other hand, the goals must be justified in terms of principle that are different from the partial, partisan goals.  The judge must speak about freedom of association, precedent, and so on rather than advancing the left; the politician must speak about a more vibrant community rather than advancing the center; the dean must speak about improving education rather than reforming tenure; the scientist must speak about truth rather than supporting his priors.  In that sense, the situation of the non-profit or government goal-seeker is more ethically troubled than that of the for-profit manager from the perspective of transparency.  With the manager, what you see is what you get.  With the judge, the politician, the dean, and the scientist, that is not the case.

b) There are two main normative defenses of the goal-directed manager, judge, politician, dean, and scientist.  First, their dedication to a partial, partisan cause stimulates higher quality work than would be generated otherwise.  Assuming that they operate in a well-functioning system in which there are competing centers of power, their partisan self-interest thus turns into an engine on behalf of the general good.  As long as the manager needs to tailor her profit-maximization to an economic and social system that checks misbehavior, as long as Kennedy's judge needs to tailor his leftism to the requisites of a rule of law system, as long as the politician needs to accommodate his centrism to a political system in which activist advocates on the left and the right are central, as long as the dean needs to temper his anti-tenure fervor to function well in a system in which his beliefs are heterodox, and as long as the scientist is checked by a system of peer review and publication in which his biases are disciplined, there is reason to believe that their partisanship redounds to society's benefit.   Or, to put the point in the terms of this blog, value competition works.  Second, the partisan manager, judge, politician, dean, and scientist who are aware of the ambivalent combination of conflict and harmony between their partiality and their commitment to the whole are finer types than their peers who are also partial but lack such awareness.  That is so whether or not the partisans' self-awareness makes them more effective.  Knowing the truth about oneself is intrinsically valuable.  More controversially: Self-aware, conflicted partisans are also a higher type than their unconflicted peers who do not seek to advance a special interest.  The manager who simply tries to manage on behalf of society, the judge who simply tries to follow the law, the politician who simply tries to help the community, the dean who simply tries to improve education, and the scientist who simply tries to advance truth are not necessarily self-deluded or hypocritical or ineffective.  They may simply be saints, and effective ones at that.  But in their simplicity of vision, they are limited and child-like as well as admirable.  In the doubleness of the partisan but also community-oriented manager, judge, politician, dean, and scientist there is a tension that is more powerful aesthetically and that is also potentially ethically finer than the steady virtue of the saint is.  The saint who naturally does the right thing is like Kant's amiable man; the conflicted partisan who does the right thing is like Kant's cold person who is charitable because of the moral law.  For Kant, the cold person who is charitable is a higher type morally than the naturally charitable person.  I believe Kant was right. In the conflicted partisan there is not only moral drama but also the possibility of a finer kind of ethical action than is the case with the unconflicted pursuer of the good of all.  Finally, a Kierkegaardian-Nietzschean codicil: The conflicted partisan who does the right thing can be admirable when violating the conventions that govern her role as well as when overriding her partisanship to adhere to those conventions.  Doing the right thing is not just a Sunday school, pietist, Kantian matter of adhering to the fused power of moral rules and social roles, though it most certainly is exactly that most of the time.  Doing the right thing can also be a matter of defying general moral rules and defying the ordinary expectations associated with one's role. To take that path of defiance as a general course of action is to take the path of madness, but to deny the possibility of taking that path is to close off one important way of doing the right thing. The conflicted partisan keeps the path of right defiance open as well as the path of right compliance; in her divided, struggling consciousness she embodies an ethic as fine and perhaps finer than the unified consciousness of the saint.   Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling: "Everyone shall be remembered, but each became great in proportion to the greatness of that whith which he strove.  For he who strove with the world became great by overcoming the world, and he who strove with himself became great by overcoming himself, but he who strove with God became greater than all."  And again: "There was one who was great by reason of his power, and one who was great by reason of his wisdom, and one who was great by reason of his hope, and one who was great by reason of his love; but Abraham was greater than all, great by reason of his power whose strength is impotence, great by reason of his wisdom whose secret is follishness, great by reason of his hope whose form is madness, great by reason of the love which is hatred of oneself."

 

The Self-Aware Egoist Reflects on Playing Chicken and Other Games with an ALT-LEAD Boss

My first impression of this guy was that he was all about himself and being the boss.  If there's a Chicken-type situation in which either one of could readily lead, it's always got to be him.  And wouldn't you know it, he does better than I do in those situations, though it works out all right if not great for me to follow him.

He usually goes with the move that would be the very best for him if I follow him.  He doesn't always lead with his chin, though--he doesn't do it if what's best for him is worst for me, and he also doesn't do it if I have a logical response to his going for the top that leaves him with a very bad outcome.

There are quite a few situations in which his sticking his neck out means that I get to be served by him and he gets less than I do.  What's interesting is that he's not grudging at all when that happens.  In fact, he's happy for me as well as for himself in those situations. There are more situations where I serve him than the other way around--still, the fact that he serves me and is happy about it when it happens makes him a lot easier to take than if he were always driving the outcome his way. 

Also: It's his willingness to stick his neck out and be happy for me when it turns out that he's serving me that makes me serve him most of the time.  I can't get him or other people to follow me that way because I don't feel for them when I stick my neck out to lead and they won't go along with me.   He's happy for me when he's going big, even if it doesn't work out for him.  That ain't me, and it's because of that that I serve him most of the time instead of the other way around.  Which is good because if I were like him there'd be a war of leaders and everything would be screwed up.