Modeling Moral Education Related to Political Ideology:
Liberalism, Conservatism, and Business Ethics
Abstract
Business ethics as an academic field can fruitfully engage scholarship on political ideology. But should ethics teachers discuss such scholarship in the classroom, and if so how? This paper is designed to help readers reflect on that question and answer it for themselves. Its major claim is that scholarship on political ideology can ground useful informal and formal models on how moral education related to moral disagreement and diversity may flourish or fail. The paper employs a combination of hypothetical dialogues and game-theoretic analyses of teacher-student interaction to examine six forms of moral education that an ethics teacher might undertake: 1) education for valuing moral diversity; 2) education for liberalism, or another ideological stance; 3) education for letting go of righteousness; 4) education for valuing cross-cutting moral beliefs; 5) education for valuing a single moral dimension in politics; and 6) education for valuing liberalism and conservatism in business ethics.
INTRODUCTION
This paper contends that four major strands of scholarship on political ideology can be drawn on to build informal and formal models of interactions between a teacher and a student relating to moral diversity and disagreement. First, research in empirical moral psychology on the psychological correlates of liberalism and conservatism can be drawn upon to clarify the advantages and disadvantages associated with teaching oneself or others to value liberal-conservative moral diversity. Such psychological research can also be used to delineate the considerable problems and the potential value of trying to teach another person the advantages of liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism, or another political ideology over a rival system or systems. Additionally, such research can be a basis for analyzing the pros and cons of trying to persuade oneself or others to avoid disdain as a liberal for conservatism or as a conservative for liberalism. Next, empirical research by political scientists and sociologists on cross-cutting cleavages can serve as a basis for considering whether and how it makes sense to teach the utility of political and moral beliefs that counter an individual’s other interests and preferences. Third, formal modeling by economists and political scientists of the difficulties political systems have in dealing with preferences that cannot be arrayed on a single dimension can be used to analyze the merits and demerits of translating the formal modeling into a normative lesson about the desirability and the drawbacks of viewing political issues on one dimension rather than multiple dimensions. Fourth, legal realist scholarship that has claimed that legal doctrine is pervaded by an ongoing back-and-forth between liberal and conservative positions can be applied to analyze the consequences of teaching that business ethics is similarly pervaded by liberalism and conservatism.
For each of the four strands of research, a brief summary of key works[i] will be followed by an informal model of teacher-student interactions in the form of a hypothetical dialogue and then by a 2 x 2 game-theoretic matrix in the manner of Schelling (1960). The payoffs for the teacher will depend partly on those of the student; the student may be viewed as another person or as an alter ego of a teacher bent on self-education. Overall, the paper can be described as aiming to fuse Aristotelian concern for character and moral development with Benthamite analytical sharpness.
1. Empirical Moral Psychology: Where the Action Is
Within the broader field of moral psychology, empirical work on political ideology is a burgeoning subfield. Given the significant role of normative concerns in empirical moral psychology and the fact that the field at the present time is not characterized by the recondite modeling common in formal political science or the highly technical statistical analyses common in empirical political science, there is an opportunity for business ethicists not simply to observe but to participate in the field’s development.
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Central Works |
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Haidt and Graham (2007). When morality opposes justice: Conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize. Social Justice Research. Survey results indicate that conservatives rely on loyalty, purity, and authority as foundations of morality as well as fairness and care, while liberals rely more exclusively on the latter two foundations. |
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Jost, et al. (2003). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin. A meta-analysis of studies on psychological correlates of conservatism offers support for a “system justification” interpretation of conservatism as an ideology that upholds the status quo and inequality. |
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Haidt and Graham (2009). Planet of the Durkheimians: Where community, authority, and sacredness are foundations of morality (chapter). Researchers in a hypothetical world who shared Durkheim’s concern for social solidarity would find liberalism rather than conservatism a reflection of troubling psychological traits. |
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Braithwaite (2009). The value balance model and democratic governance. Psychological Inquiry. Most people have value orientations that are balanced between those of security- oriented conservatives and harmony-oriented liberals; “dualists” with high commitment to both sets of values can be useful bridge-builders. |
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Stenner, K. (2009) Three kinds of “conservatism.” Psychological Inquiry. There are substantial differences among three different mind-sets—support for the status quo, support for laissez-faire, and authoritarianism—that have been labeled “conservative”; research shows low correlations of authoritarianism with support for laissez-faire and the status quo. |
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Alford, et al. (2005). Are political orientations genetically transmitted? American Political Science Review. Twin studies from |
1.2 Education for Valuing Moral Diversity
What follows is a dialogue is aimed at illuminating how an overt commitment by a reasonably informed and conscientious teacher to the value of liberal-conservative diversity might play out in practice with a highly engaged student, who could be thought of as the teacher’s alter ego. The dialogue is not aimed to show that the teacher’s effort is either advisable or inadvisable, though it is written to present the teacher as well as the student in a favorable light. If one reacts to the dialogue by believing that the teacher errs by making an overt commitment to moral diversity and/or by treating political diversity as a form of moral diversity--as one might well--the hope is that the reaction is grounded in a sense of the difficulties of educating a student to value moral diversity given the available research and the tricky nature of the underlying moral proposition, rather than in a sense of the ineptitude of the teacher.
Education on Behalf of Valuing Moral Diversity |
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T. There is good reason to believe that there are deep-seated differences between people’s moral beliefs on certain important matters. In particular, beliefs about the moral valence and salience of authority, loyalty, purity, divinity, inequality, and markets differ widely from person to person. Further, these differences are systematically correlated, and aggregate to form the familiar opposition between liberals who believe in cultural change and social and economic equality and conservatives who believe in cultural tradition and markets. Research suggests that the differences between liberals and conservatives can be found across cultures and time periods, that these differences are in fair part heritable (separated identical twins are more likely to share political opinions than separated non-identical twins), and also that there are significant correlations between ideology and certain personality traits, such as openness to new experience and conscientiousness. A reasonable inference from these research findings is that both liberalism and conservatism have significant value to society. Both conservative support of tradition and markets and liberal support of change and equality play their own constructive role, it is reasonable to think. That doesn’t mean we have to believe the positions are equally good or right consequentially or deontologically—it could be that one side in general or on a particular issue is like the weaker side in an athletic competition that keeps the better side on its toes but that should lose if both sides play to their capacity. But it does suggest that we should value the human moral diversity epitomized by liberalism and conservatism. S. Your conclusion that liberalism and conservatism are both valuable if not equally so doesn’t follow from your research on the pervasiveness of both traits, does it? After all, honesty and dishonesty might both be pervasive, but it would be wrong to conclude that both qualities contribute to the greater good. T. The dishonest do not vigorously defend the morality of dishonesty in the way that liberals and conservatives both vigorously defend the morality of their positions. Liberalism and conservatism are moral as well as political positions that are widespread, strongly felt and defended, and rooted in human psychology as opposed to group interests, and as such are both presumptively worthy of respect. S. You don’t explain in a scientifically convincing way how the greater good is enhanced by the disagreement between liberals and conservatives. The metaphor about an athletic event is fine, but not a substitute for empirical or theoretical research. Perhaps you can elucidate? T. The research in moral psychology does not answer your question scientifically; we’ll be covering research in empirical political science and formal political science later. |
The dialogue illustrates what an attempt to teach the value of human moral diversity in a business ethics class, seminar, one-on-one discussion, or internal conversation might sound like. Whether it better supports an affirmative judgment on the teacher’s attempt at moral education (“this is the kind of normative assertion ethicists should make” or a negative one (“the evidence is too thin”; “the teacher should let the studies speak for themselves”; “the teacher is too equivocal”) is left to the judgment of the reader. In either case, two qualifications are worth noting. The first is that the results of the empirical and formal political science research referred to by the teacher in response to the student’s last question are less helpful to the “value moral diversity” proposition than the teacher would presumably like, as we shall see in the sections devoted to that research. Second, the dialogue with its invocation of principles and reasons models a universalizing, deontological mode people typically employ when they are trying to justify themselves. That mode, worthy as it is on its own terms, leaves out a second, particularistic mode of thinking and feeling about ethics that assumes people are different and have different legitimate feelings and interests.
To model the interaction between a teacher and a student in a way that gives a better sense than the dialogue can of the mutually interdependent feelings, calculations, and choices of the two individuals, game theory can be useful. The teacher and the student can be viewed as deciding simultaneously whether to commit to valuing moral diversity or not, with their preferences depending on their particular situations, concerns and interests. With such modeling, one loses the dialogue’s modeling of an attempt at normative persuasion, but gains the ability to view the teacher and student as making choices whose outcomes depend on choices made by the other.
Although game theory is widely thought of as entailing a view of people as being egoistically indifferent to the welfare of others, it can also be used to model a relationship in which one or both parties care about the welfare of the other. That will be done here by assuming that the teacher’s payoffs are formed by summing his or her own welfare from a given set of choices and the student’s welfare from those choices. Further, although game-theoretic analysis usually assumes that a given set of choices leads inevitably to a particular outcome, that assumption can be altered, and will be here. A choice by a student to commit to the value of moral diversity may not succeed or “take”; it will be assumed here that such a failed attempt by the student is especially likely when the teacher does not model commitment himself or herself.
A key difficulty for game-theoretic analysis of a topic such as moral education that does not involve monetary payoffs is that nonmonetary payoffs are often highly ambiguous and debatable. Allowing for that issue, the best that can be done here and for the later matrices is to lay out the assumptions clearly; a reader who disagrees with the assumptions made here may nevertheless find them useful in clarifying his or her own best estimates.
The basic assumptions made for the education for moral diversity matrix are as follows, beginning with the initial payoffs for the teacher T: The best initial outcome for T is when both T and the student S commit (spark of connection/potential sacred fire); the second best initial outcome is when T does not commit and S does (the student follows her own less sure but potentially rewarding path to the same goal); the third best outcome is when both T and S do not commit (facts may at least be learned if not the spirit); the worst outcome is when T commits and S does not (failure/disharmony/breakdown). For S, the best outcome is if neither side commits (facts may be learned or not without the costs and risks of commitment); the second best is if both commit (commitment by S has a fair chance to succeed given modeling by T); the third best is if T does not commit and S does (commitment by S has a lower chance to succeed with no modeling by T); the worst, as for T, is when T commits and S does not (failure/disharmony/breakdown). Since T’s payoffs are assumed to include S’s, T’s final ordering of preferences among the four possibilities can change from the initial ordering. A reasonable if not ineluctable assumption is that after incorporating S’s payoffs, T values the “don’t commit/don’t commit” outcome somewhat more than the “T doesn’t commit/S does” outcome, with “yes/yes” remaining the ideal outcome for T and “yes/no” remaining the worst outcome.
A further key assumption made in the model is that T and S are aware of the other’s payoffs. That assumption corresponds reasonably well to a situation in which a teacher presents articles by Haidt, Graham, and other psychologists in a class session devoted to liberal-conservative moral diversity. In that case, the perfect information assumption entails that the student knows that the teacher will be happier all else equal if the student commits to valuing moral diversity. Though that assumes a degree of sensitivity on the student’s part that may well exceed that actually possessed by many students (or teachers), it is likely that in many cases a student does indeed know where a teacher is coming from normatively, whether or not the teacher overtly commits to a normative position. In the matrix shown in Figure 1, an open commitment by the teacher is a signal that raises the stakes of the interaction and that models learning for the student, not a revelation of where the teacher stands.[ii],[iii]
INSERT FIGURE 1 HERE
The solution to the Valuing Moral Diversity game depends on the concept of a mixed or randomized strategy. That concept is intuitively familiar to many people in the context of a zero-sum game such as football, in which the offensive team does not want the defensive team to guess whether it is going to run or pass, just as the defensive team does not want the offensive team to guess whether it is going to, say, blitz or stack against the run. Mixed strategies are not intuitively obvious in the context of a positive-sum game, such as the moral development games of this paper, in which there are significant commonalities as well as significant differences between the interests of the parties. A key point of the analysis of Figure 1 and later matrices is that with a reasonably wide range of plausible payoffs, the mixed strategy analysis leads to a conclusion about optimal strategies for the teacher and student that is initially surprising, sensible upon reflection, and counter to the notion that game-theoretic rationality counsels close-to-the-vest egoism rather than cooperation.
In Valuing Moral Diversity, both sides want to avoid the T yes-S no breakdown outcome, which means that T has an incentive to steer away from the commitment he/she would otherwise prefer and S has an incentive to steer away from the non-commitment he/she would otherwise prefer. That leads under the matrices payoff assumptions to the conclusion that a rational T will rarely go out on a limb normatively by committing to the value of moral diversity, and that a rational S will commit most of the time to moral diversity In other words, both teacher and student in the matrix shown in Figure 1 end up doing most of the time what the other might be thought of as wanting them to do, rather than what they most want to do themselves.
As detailed in the endnotes, in the mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium in the Valuing Moral Diversity matrix, the teacher commits only 1/6 of the time, with the student committing a full 3/4 of the time.[iv] That combination of strategies corresponds to the following story: The rational teacher should be normatively reticent and not press his/her commitment to moral diversity most of the time, given the risk that creates of breakdown. The rational student on the other hand should commit most of the time to valuing moral diversity. That course of action entails considerable risk for the student, since commitment succeeds only ½ of the time with a teacher who models the normative commitment and only ¼ of the time with an uncommitted teacher, but also minimizes the risk of breakdown. As will be seen from the matrices for other scenarios, a basic lesson of this paper is that solicitude for the other—that is, normative reticence by the teacher and normative commitment by the student—remains high as long as there is a breakdown possibility that both sides are worried about and neither side has a dominant strategy.
1.3 Education for Valuing Liberalism (or Another Ideology)
A substantial part of the empirical moral psychology literature—the “Jost wing,” one might call it—is compatible not only with the normative message just discussed-- that the moral diversity between liberalism and conservatism is desirable for society--but with a different and much more divisive message: Conservatism is morally questionable in a way that liberalism is not, given conservatism’s ties to dubious values such as ethnocentrism and authoritarianism. One may viscerally believe that it is inappropriate to tell students that, or even to imply it through having them read Jost, et al without any disclaimers. But science is not always fair. It is possible that the truth hurts one side more than another. Although the example of “better way” teaching to be considered here is of a teacher invoking Jost et al in committing to a certain version of the superiority of liberalism, one should also realize that the teacher could instead be a libertarian who cites the formal political work of Buchanan and Tullock (1962) as providing a justification for limiting government regulation, or a social conservative who emphasizes the work of Brooks (2007) on happy, charitable religious conservatives to argue the superiority of conservatism.
Education on Behalf of Liberalism |
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T. There is a relationship between being a professor, especially in the fields of psychology, sociology, and political science, and being politically liberal rather than conservative. A reasonable explanation for that relationship is that psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists like other professors value reason—have an interest in it, one could say--and also know more than most others do about the characteristics associated with liberalism and conservatism. Ethnocentrism, authoritarianism, theism, and disgust at impurity are nonrational, emotion-based traits that have a strong correlation with conservatism. By contrast, traits such as flexibility and openness to new experience that are correlated with liberalism are conducive to reasoned inquiry, and lack the powerful and troubling emotionalism and negative potential of major traits connected to conservatism. One may prefer high-stakes emotion to calm reason and gut reactions to the life of the mind—but to make a choice for the side of reason in one’s life means that one should also logically be drawn to the liberal side. S. I have a concern about condescension; I’m not sure whether the life of reason that I’m being invited to join is truly open to me, as much as I’m sure you would assure me that it is. I also have a concern about your empiricism. It strikes me as plausible that there are psychological differences between conservatives and liberals other than the ones you mention on which reasonable people would think conservatives are better and better off. For instance, conservatives would tend to be more religious, and isn’t it the case that religious people are happier, have more friends, and give more money to charity? T. A good point; although there are the usual issues of replication, researcher bias and so on, there is indeed research supporting the claims you make about religion. Note, though, that the positive effects you describe operate through religious practices, with which conservatism is correlated, rather than through conservatism itself. Also, my point is not that everyone should be a liberal committed to the life of the mind. It’s fine to be, say, a religious conservative who runs a small business; the point is the more limited one that a commitment to reason as a guiding life principle goes along with a commitment to liberalism. S. Your position seems to me to involve an element of self-contradiction. You appear to be invested in my adoption of liberalism as a belief system or set of practices. At the same time, though, you believe in reason rather than authority. So I take it you believe that it is better for me to come to liberalism myself, through my independent exercise of reason rather than through your authority. T. You take correctly, and you raise a legitimate issue as to what if anything I should be advocating. However, even if it were entirely correct that I as an educator should not be advocating the idea of a connection between liberalism and the life of the mind, that does not vitiate the proposition that there is in fact a connection. |
In this dialogue, unlike the last one, the student and then the teacher in response to the student make points that suggest a plausible game-theoretic solution concept. It makes intuitive sense that in the case of committing to a controversial ideology, the teacher’s highest original payoff comes not from “Yes-Yes” but from “No-Yes,” in which the teacher is normatively reticent and the student commits on his/her own. Depending on the student’s chance of succeeding on his/her own (presumably quite good for an ideology such as liberalism that is widely adhered to in American higher education), it is likely that the teacher’s highest final payoff will also be from that “No-Yes” combination. In that case, the teacher should remain quiet all of the time because doing so dominates overt commitment to liberalism. Knowing that, the student should for his/her part not commit to liberalism as part of the interaction with the teacher (whatever he/she may do outside that setting). That story is illustrated in Figure 2, below.
INSERT FIGURE 2 HERE
The discussion here should not be treated as a purported proof that teachers should avoid partisan ideology in interactions with their students. The idea that there is a value in the student embracing what the teacher takes to be moral truth on his/her own, rather than as a matter of following the teacher’s lead, is one that can also be applied to assigning the payoffs in Valuing Moral Diversity (or any of our scenarios), although that idea seems especially applicable to Valuing Liberalism. The payoffs in Valuing Liberalism, as with nonmonetary payoffs in general, are not given in stone. The point of the exercise here is not to make a tendentious claim that game theory “proves” that partisan advocacy by teachers should be cabined (while advocacy for value diversity is indicated 1/6 of the time!), but to suggest that what one may see purely as a deontological issue of rights/duties/respect can also usefully be analyzed in utilitarian terms that focus on the rationality of the teacher’s behavior given his/her own beliefs.
1.4 Education for Letting Go of Righteousness
The body of empirical moral psychology that could be called the “Haidt wing” is compatible with a third type of moral education: education on behalf of letting go of righteousness. Haidt’s forthcoming book (2011) appears to be primarily in that genre, based on the online description of it. The dialogue that follows combines ideas drawn from that description with ideas drawn from Pascal, whose thoughts on how one may in time come to believe fully what one wants to believe have considerable applicability to the problem of how to let go of disdain for political beliefs other than one’s own.
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Education on Behalf of Letting Go of Righteousness |
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T. Properly understood, the research on liberalism and conservatism suggests more than a grudging acceptance of the “other” side as a necessary but second-rate element in an eternal competition. Rather, it suggests understanding liberalism and conservatism as moral equals in a yin-yang whole. As a liberal, one can be legitimately proud of the fine qualities particularly associated with one’s faith and practices, such as flexibility, openness to new experience, and commitment to coherence and reason in morality, but one should respect equally the fine qualities associated with conservatism, such as conscientiousness, charity, and reliance on a more comprehensive if less coherent set of moral foundations. As a conservative, one can be legitimately concerned about certain flaws to which liberals are especially prone, such as conjoining support for social aid to the needy with lack of personal action on that score, but one should be equally concerned with the flaws to which one’s own side is especially prone, such as ethnocentrism. In the end—and here one admittedly goes beyond the psychological research on ideology into a more personal, experiential domain—what is called for is letting go one’s sense of choosing a better side in favor of a sense of sides that choose you, yin and yang sides that are given life by the other side and sustained by love for the other side. |
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S. But what if I am so made that I cannot truly believe in what you say, though I may want to? |
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T. It is not belief but practice that is the key. If you are a liberal sociologist, go to a conservative place of worship, and then go again and again. If you go now to a conservative place of worship, take a sociology course at the local college, and then another. If you recite each day to the like-minded the case for your side on the issues of the day, instead write each day a paragraph in which you state a case for the other side until you are ready one day to say that paragraph out loud to your friends. If you shake your fist at a picture of George Bush or Barack Obama, instead hold your hand open and say to the image, “I love you.” If you change your practices, you will in time be able to let go of the righteousness that now afflicts you. |
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S. I wonder whether your vision will in the end lead to happy, flourishing individuals who let go of moralism and its discontents, or whether it will lead instead to yet more deeply conflicted, unhappy individuals who will have added another kind of righteousness—the righteousness of anti-righteousness--to their makeup. But my question is different. I wonder whether your vision, worthy as it may be in terms of human flourishing, works well for society. Is it just a coincidence that the West with its moralistic liberalism and conservatism and its long history of good-evil dualism has flourishing democracy, while |
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T. Good questions. The research in moral psychology does not answer them; as I said in an earlier class, we’ll be covering research in empirical political science and formal political science later. |
There is a considerable similarity between the case the teacher makes for anti-moralism and the case for moral diversity made in the earlier dialogue. The anti-moralistic case is harder to carry off in one important sense, since it makes a claim for the moral equality of the two poles that the moral diversity claim does not. On the other hand, the “where’s the proof?” point that the student raises against both claims cuts less sharply against the anti-moralism claim, which relies less on evidence of the value of both sides and more on a leap of faith against righteousness than the valuing moral diversity claim does.
For purposes of the game-theoretic analysis, the difference between the Valuing Moral Diversity matrix and the Valuing Anti-Moralism matrix is a fairly small one. Specifically, in Figure 3 success by the student in achieving freedom from unwarranted righteousness is given a higher value than the more prosaic project of succeeding in valuing moral diversity was in Figure 1, but also a more-than-offsetting lower probability of success—enlightenment don’t come easy, as Ringo Starr and others can remind us.
INSERT FIGURE 3 HERE
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Contrary to what one might guess, the lowered overall payoffs for the student committing to anti-moralism compared to committing to moral diversity do not result in lower commitment levels by the student or by the teacher playing rational mixed strategies.[v] In fact, both sides slightly increase their commitment in this scenario, with T committing a modest 2/11 of the time (note the continued teacherly reticence) and S committing a substantial 6/7 of the time. Given that the matrix assumes risk neutrality and also assumes that S is highly likely to fail to let go of his/her righteousness, one could assume risk aversion by S and generate a prediction, more in accord with intuition, that S will commit less in Valuing Anti-Moralism than in Valuing Moral Diversity. That is as it may be; for purposes of this paper, a more central point is the prevalence of accommodation in Anti-Moralism as well as in Moral Diversity, with the teacher quite normatively reticent and the student highly likely to commit to the teacher’s tacit, unexpressed position in both situations.
2. Empirical Political Science: Cross-Cutting Cleavages
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Central Works |
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Lipset and Rokkan (1967). Cleavage structures, party systems, and voter alignments (chapter). Party systems with cross-cutting cleavages tend to do better in managing social conflict than party systems with reinforcing cleavages. |
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Clark and Lipset (2001). The breakdown of class politics (edited volume). Across the wealthy nations, the old left-right cleavage system based centrally on class has largely collapsed; in its place is a new cleavage system based on culture as well as economics in which the more educated tend to the left on cultural issues. |
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Inglehart (1989). Culture shift in advanced industrial society. Across the wealthy nations, there has been a strong movement, especially among young people and the more educated, toward post-industrial values emphasizing individual fulfillment. |
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Dahl (1960). Who Governs? Politics in |
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Dahl (1956). A preface to democratic theory. Pluralist “polyarchy” is a viable though imperfect way of ensuring minority rights and at the same time empowering the majority. |
2.2 Education on Behalf of Cross-Cutting Moral Beliefs
Lipset, Dahl, and the other empirical pluralists in political science did not turn their work into an argument for cross-cutting moral beliefs. But there is a potentIal connection between their pluralist political science and the enduring and correct normative claim that a substantial part of both the utility and the inherent dignity of moral beliefs is associated with the way in which they sometimes—though of course in many cases they do not—counter the believer’s other interests and preferences. One has an interest in lying, or cutting corners, or some other questionable course of action, but one also has a belief—an interest, if one wants to call it that—in not doing so. The pluralists’ analysis of cross-cutting cleavages can be translated into a broad utilitarian claim about the merits of altruistic moral beliefs that in effect price the believer’s other interests; more modestly, it can be turned into a claim that political beliefs that cut across other interests the holder has are desirable.
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Education on Behalf of Cross-Cutting Moral Beliefs |
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T. A central contribution of postwar American political science and political sociology was the concept of cross-cutting cleavages. The starting point is that social divisions—the literature was concerned centrally with demographic variables like class, religion, and language, but the concept also applies to value divisions—can either reinforce one another or cut across one another. The normative conclusion is that cooperation is much more likely given cross-cutting rather than reinforcing cleavages. So, for example, religion and language are cross-cutting cleavages in peaceful |
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S. Fair enough, though the case that altruism can be a force for good does not necessarily need the technical language you surround it with, any more than the case for laws and moral norms to support cooperation needs the prisoner’s dilemma model. Here’s a concern: It’s unclear to me how your analysis pertains to ideology and moral disagreement. Are liberalism and conservatism bad per the cross-cutting analysis because they are overarching oppositions that swallow up everything and replace helpful multiplicity with reinforcing dualism? Or are they good because at least some of the time—as with a high-income liberal or a low-income conservative--they are associated with beliefs that cut against a person’s group interest or self-interest? |
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T. Both! The analysis does not lend itself to a simple verdict, but it does point out ways in which moral systems can lead to individuals experiencing cross-cutting or reinforcing pressures. It also has the effect of pointing out useful cross-pressuring that is often patronized or wrongly deprecated. Instead of viewing low-income people who support free markets as dupes of the rich, liberals could more charitably and accurately view them as useful altruists. For their part, conservatives could and should view less-educated “natural conservatives” who favor cultural liberalism as helpful altruists rather than as dupes of the cultural elite. |
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S. Your case for the value of cross-cutting cleavages sounds like something that economists or political scientists could put into a model. I appreciate your references to empirical political science, but I wonder if the normative case for cross-cutting has been modeled effectively by high-tech social scientists. If it has, I’d like to know about it. If not, I wonder some about the credibility of the intuitive argument you’ve made. |
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T. A good question! We’ll be covering the formal modeling of politics in our next class. |
The argument for the value of cross-cutting cleavages has a similar difficulty as the argument for the value of moral diversity. Appealing as both claims may seem, the evidence for them is less than dispositive. It would seem easier in some respects for a commitment to cross-cutting beliefs to succeed. The pluralists’ empirical political science provides a more developed if less emotionally compelling basis for the utility of cross-cutting cleavages than does the empirical moral psychologists’ sense that both liberalism and conservatism have a valid purpose, and the cross-cutting analysis translates well into a basic, widespread sense about the utility of altruistic beliefs that act as a helpful check on other interests. The counter—an important one--is that there may well be something dry and emotionally uncompelling about the case for cross-cutting compared to the case for valuing moral diversity.
With these countervailing considerations in mind, the payoffs for student commitment have been kept the same here as in Valuing Moral Diversity. The one important change in the matrix shown in Figure 4 is that the teacher’s original preferences are changed to reflect the less charged, less emotional quality of the cross-cutting scenario. The teacher’s most preferred payoff is still Yes-Yes, but Yes-No is no longer so negative for the teacher, given the more technical, lest invested nature of the cross-cutting case. The assumption made—debatable like all the payoff assumptions but reflective of the different valence of this scenario—is that the teacher has an original payoff of 3 from Yes-Yes and 1 for the other three outcomes.
INSERT FIGURE 4
The change in the assumptions about the teacher’s payoffs does result in some modest change in both T‘s and S’s optimal strategies. The teacher—now less worried about the Yes-No outcome—becomes somewhat less normatively reticent, committing to valuing cross-cutting moral beliefs 1/3 of the time. But the basic pattern of both sides accommodating the other continues, with the teacher mostly reticent and the student mostly committing.
3. Formal Political Science: The Prevalence of Pessimism about Politics
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Central Works |
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Arrow (1951). Social choice and individual values. Given a set of plausible assumptions, no voting system can translate people’s ranked preferences into a reliable ranking for society as a whole. |
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Black (1958). The theory of committees and elections. The social choice problem identified by Arrow is resolved when preferences are arrayed along a single dimension, such as left and right. |
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Buchanan.& Tullock (1962). The calculus of consent. Compared to consent, majority rule imposes high decision costs and externalities; constitutional constraints on majority power are one way to address the pervasive problems created by the lack of alignment between government actors and social welfare. |
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Riker (1982) Liberalism against populism: A confrontation between democracy and the theory of social choice. The theory of social choice provides support for a classically liberal, Madisonian emphasis on controlling government over a populist emphasis on translating the will of the people into policy. |
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Sen (1970). The impossibility of a Paretian liberal. Journal of Political Economy. Pareto optimality, which takes into preferences related to the behavior of others, is in conflict with liberalism. |
3.2 Education for Valuing a Single Moral Dimension
Given that Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem remains at the pinnacle of formal politics, the theorem is the logical basis for a possible normative lesson.
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Education on Behalf of a Single Moral Dimension T. The earliest and still likely the greatest major result in formal politics, Kenneth Arrow’s (Im)possibility Theorem, has significant implications for how we ought to think about politics and morality. Although the theorem is sometimes misunderstood as a proof of the ineffectiveness of social choice mechanisms in general, what Arrow’s work and companion work by Duncan Black actually did is demonstrate that certain problems for social choice arise when the preferences of voters are not “single-peaked” by virtue of being arrayed on a single dimension. How significant those problems are in practice is an empirical matter that lies outside the domain of Arrow’s math. We can infer that the problems are serious if we believe, as it is reasonable to do, that better-functioning if imperfect democracies from the early American republic onward have been characterized by a one-dimensional opposition, which in recent times has taken a liberal-conservative form. That overarching liberal-conservative or left-right polarity is not sufficient for democratic success, given that some unsuccessful democracies like S. I don’t recall the empirical point on democracy that you make as being one that is established in the political science literature, though perhaps I wasn’t listening closely enough when you described the research in class last week. But I’ll let that point go. Here’s what I’m thinking about: A single opposition can also be a complex one, I take it. Some of the earlier material we covered on liberalism and conservatism suggested exactly that, in that within the overarching opposition there are separate economic and cultural domains, and likely other domains as well. Given all of that, I’m left unclear on whether your overall message amounts to keeping liberalism and conservatism cabined in the political domain and out of business ethics because of their divisiveness, or whether it amounts instead to supporting both as complex psychological traits though not as markers of right and wrong—maybe we want a Myers-Briggs test for useful ideological diversity? T. Maybe that’s what the Myers-Briggs intuition versus sensing and judging versus perceiving dimensions already tap. Whether it would be a good idea to surface the role of liberalism and conservatism in business and in business ethics is indeed a $64,000 question, and you are indeed right in suggesting that Arrovian social choice analysis can be used to argue either side. I think the drift of the analysis is a mostly chastening one, personally, since it points to some difficulties with the laudable aspirations for democracy and moral diversity. |
For purposes of assigning payoffs, a Valuing One Moral Dimension game would seem to have a fair amount in common with Valuing Cross-Cutting Moral Beliefs. The drier, more technical, more macro quality of Valuing One Dimension is assumed in Figure 5 to lead to yet lower payoffs for a committed student, with the teacher continuing to be indifferent in his/her original payoffs to the outcomes other than Yes-Yes.
INSERT FIGURE 5 HERE
The continued diminution of student return from commitment again has an effect different from what might expect on the mixed strategy solution. The student remains very likely to commit and the teacher becomes less normatively reticent, raising his/her commitment level to nearly half. The result accords well with intuitions that ethics teachers are, and should be, more likely to take a complex normative stand based on a recondite, unemotional proposition like the Impossibility Theorem than a straightforward normative stand based on an accessible, gut-level proposition.
4. Legal Realism and its Descendants: The Ubiquity of Ideology
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Central Works |
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Holmes (1881). The common law. Judges rely on inarticulate major premises as to how the world works that cannot be stated in opinions and that are based on experience and broad worldviews. |
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Frank (1930). Law and the modern mind. Judges’ decisions are determined by a broad array of factors beyond legal doctrine, including psychological and political factors. |
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Kennedy (1976). Form and substance in private law adjudication. Harvard Law Review. In contract law, there is a connection between clear, fact-based legal rules and individualist beliefs, along with a corresponding connection between open-ended, morally-based legal standards and communitarian beliefs. |
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Kennedy (1997). A critique of adjudication. Judicial as well as legislative work is structured ideologically by a dominant opposition between liberalism and conservatism. |
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Scalia (1997). A matter of interpretation. The proper protection against arbitrary, politicized judging is reliance on clear rules, textual language, and the original intent of the framers of the Constitution. |
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Breyer (2005). Active liberty. The Constitution properly read embodies a commitment by the framers to ensuring democratic government. and should be read flexibly in that broad spirit, rather than as a narrow exercise in textual parsing. |
4.2 Educating for Valuing Liberalism and Conservatism in Business Ethics
Is there value in a business ethics version of the legal realist project of delineating how liberal and conservative arguments, sentiments, values, and outcomes are central in various respects in law? The following dialogue considers the issue.
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Education on Behalf of Embracing Liberalism and Conservatism in Business Ethics |
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T. Much as law as more professionalized and more socially powerful than business ethics, the two fields have significant parallels as normatively-oriented disciplines. The sanctions imposed by ethics are more informal and usually gentler than those imposed by law and the opposing parties are less clearly defined than in a courtroom, but ethics as well as law features a point-counterpoint of value-laden contention and potential persuasion. In law, legal realists of various kinds have maintained that legal outcomes and the arguments or sound bites by which they were justified were often better explained in terms of liberal or conservative ideology than in terms of governing law or consistently adhered to legal or moral principles. The realists’ claim that approaches preferred by a judge in one context—say, a reliance on the value of clear legal rules rather than open-ended standards to support the Miranda warnings--would be jettisoned in another where the ideological meaning of rules was different rang largely true when made in the early twentieth century, and continues to capture an important truth. What about business ethics? Just as the basic tools of legal analysis are flexible and manipulable, so too with our basic deontology/utilitarianism/virtue ethics historical toolkit and its modern supplements. One may wonder whether that toolkit of methods and principles is applied consistently, or whether ideology is the more powerful determinant, with libertarians in one sphere turning into communitarians in another. Additionally, there is reason to believe not only that ideology is often present at the micro level of specific arguments, but also at the macro level. It makes sense to see business ethics as structured in a way that blends liberal and conservative themes. We are in one key sense tilted as a field toward the conservative, market-oriented side, in that caring about the morality of people in business is most naturally though not inevitably understood as upholding flexibility and discretion for private actors as opposed to compulsion of them. But we are in another key sense tilted toward the liberal, economically communitarian side, in that the same emphasis on the morality of businesspeople is most naturally though not inevitably understood as upholding businesspeople embracing a morality broader than the morality of market rationality and strict legal compliance. S. What follows normatively, though, if anything? Some of the legal critics you describe were at least animated by a radical political vision, mistaken as it might have been. To suggest that business ethics is largely a form of liberal-conservative politics is most readily taken as an undermining point about the field. Do you mean it that way? T. No. I see it instead as another support for moral diversity and letting go of righteousness. If we have a good basis for understanding the discipline we are committed to as embodying within itself a deep and arguably necessary fusion of liberal and conservative themes, we are given another way to uphold the value of the other side and to free ourselves of unhealthy moralism. S. I’m not sure that what you’re proposing will work well for people who aren’t already committed to business ethics. T. It’s possible you’re right about that. That’s one reason why this dialogue is taking place in a paper aimed at business ethics academics rather than in a classroom or a presentation to executives. |
The dialogue contains within it a concession that teaching about liberalism and conservatism in business ethics may tend to estrange those not already committed to the field. For purposes of constructing a matrix, that concession has been reflected by assigning lower payoffs for commitment by the student in Valuing Liberal-Conservative Ethics than were assigned in the previous scenarios. Counter to what one’s intuition might be, those lower student payoffs here as before have the effect of making the teacher more normatively assertive; Valuing Liberal-Conservative Ethics is the only matrix in which commitment is expected more than half the time from the teacher.
INSERT FIGURE 6 HERE
CONCLUSION
Although the informal and formal models of moral education in this paper do not provide definitive answers to the tricky matter of the relationship between political ideology and business ethics, they clarify a number of points. In particular, the game-theoretic analysis of Valuing Moral Diversity and the other scenarios suggests that under certain plausible assumptions, both sides will play a mixed strategy under which teachers will usually be normatively reticent and students for their part will usually commit to positions that the teacher favors but avoids expressing. The one scenario in which there is a different result involves a teacher educating on behalf of a particular political ideology. For that scenario, the analysis suggests a game-theoretic rationale for the intuitions that the teacher should avoid an ideological tilt and that the student should not commit to the teacher’s preferred ideology.
FIGURE 1
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Valuing Moral Diversity-- Teacher payoffs in lower left—original payoffs in brackets—payoffs w/ student (S) welfare above. S payoffs in upper right--payoffs for successful commitment and prob. of success in brackets. |
Student-- Commit to Moral Diversity |
Student-- Do Not Commit |
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Teacher— Commit to Moral Diversity |
2 [4 x .5] 5 [3] |
0 0 [0] |
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Teacher-- Do Not Commit |
1 [4 x .25] 3 [2] |
3 4 [1] |
One-shot equilibrium: T commits 1/6 of the time, S commits 3/4 of the time[vi]
FIGURE 2
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Valuing Liberalism-- Teacher payoffs in lower left—original payoffs in brackets—payoffs w/ student (S) welfare above. S payoffs in upper right--payoffs for successful commitment and prob. of success in brackets. |
Student-- Commit to Liberalism |
Student-- Do Not Commit |
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Teacher— Commit to Liberalism |
1.5 [3 x .5] 3.5 [2] |
0 0 [0] |
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Teacher-- Do Not Commit |
1 [4 x .25] 4 [3] |
3 4 [1] |
One-shot equilibrium: T does not commit, S does not commit.[vii]
FIGURE 3
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Valuing Anti-Moralism-- Teacher payoffs in lower left—original payoffs in brackets—payoffs w/ student (S) welfare above. S payoffs in upper right--payoffs for successful commitment and prob. of success in brackets. |
Student-- Commit to Anti-Moralism |
Student-- Do Not Commit |
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Teacher— Commit to Anti-Moralism |
1.5 [6 x .25] 4.5 [3] |
0 0 [0] |
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Teacher-- Do Not Commit |
1 [4 x .25] 3 [2] |
3 4 [1] |
One-shot equilibrium: T commits 2/11 of the time, S commits 6/7 of the time.[viii]
FIGURE 4
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Valuing Altruistic Values-- Teacher payoffs in lower left—original payoffs in brackets—payoffs w/ student (S) welfare above. S payoffs in upper right--payoffs for successful commitment and prob. of success in brackets. |
Student-- Commit to Altruistic Values |
Student-- Do Not Commit |
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Teacher— Commit to Altruistic Values |
2 [4 x .5] 5 [3] |
0 1 [1] |
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Teacher-- Do Not Commit |
1 [4 x .25] 2 [1] |
3 4 [1] |
One-shot equilibrium: T commits 1/3 of the time, S commits 3/4 of the time.[ix]
FIGURE 5
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Valuing One Dimension-- Teacher payoffs in lower left—original payoffs in brackets—payoffs w/ student (S) welfare above. S payoffs in upper right--payoffs for successful commitment and prob. of success in brackets. |
Student-- Commit to One Dimension |
Student-- Do Not Commit |
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Teacher— Commit to One Dimension |
1 [2 x .5] 4 [3] |
0 1 [1] |
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Teacher-- Do Not Commit |
.5 [2 x .25] 1.5 [1] |
3 4 [1] |
One-shot equilibrium: T commits 5/11 of the time, S commits 6/7 of the time.[x]
FIGURE 6
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Valuing L-C Ethics-- Teacher payoffs in lower left—original payoffs in brackets—payoffs w/ student (S) welfare above. S payoffs in upper right--payoffs for successful commitment and prob. of success in brackets. |
Student-- Commit to L-C Ethics |
Student-- Do Not Commit |
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Teacher— Commit to L-C Ethics |
.5 [2 x .25] 4 [3] |
0 1 [1] |
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Teacher-- Do Not Commit |
.25 [1 x .25] 1.25 [1] |
3 4 [1] |
One-shot equilibrium: T commits 11/21 of the time, S commits 12/13 of the time.[xi]
References
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Braithwaite, V. (2009). The value balance model and democratic governance. Psychological Inquiry, 20, 87-97.
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Buchanan, J.& Tullock, G. (1962). The calculus of consent.
Clark, T. N. & Lipset, S.M. (2001). The breakdown of class politics.
Dahl, R.A. (1961). Who governs?
Dahl, R.A. (1956). A preface to democratic theory.
Frank, J. (2009; orig. ed. 1930). Law and the modern mind.
Haidt, J. (forthcoming, 2011). The righteous mind.
Haidt, J., & Graham, J. (2009). Planet of the Durkheimians, Where community, authority, and sacredness are foundations of morality. In J. Jost, A. C. Kay, & H. Thorisdottir (Eds.), Social and Psychological Bases of Ideology and System Justification.
Haidt, J. & Graham, J. (2007). When morality opposes justice: Conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize. Social Justice Research, 20, 98-116.
Holmes, O.W. Jr. (1991/1881). The common law.
Inglehart, R. (1989). Culture shift in advanced industrial societies.
Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A.W. & Sulloway, F. (2003). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129, 339-375.
Kennedy, D. (1997). A critique of adjudication.
Kennedy, D. (1976). Form and substance in private law adjudication. Harvard Law Review, 89: 1685-1776.
Lipset, Seymour Martin and Stein Rokkan. 1967. Cleavage structures, party systems, and voter alignments. Party systems and voter alignment, ed.
Riker, W.H. (1982). Liberalism against populism.
Scalia, A. (1997). A matter of interpretation.
Schelling, T.C. (1960). The strategy of conflict.
Sen, A. (1982). Choice, welfare and measurement.
Stenner, K. (2009) Three kinds of “conservatism.” Psychological Inquiry, 20: 142-159.
[i] These works could be assigned in part or in full to a class; a number of them have in fact been assigned to MBA or Ph.D. classes by the author(s) of this paper.
[ii] If either the teacher or the student can control the interaction by moving first, the solution to their game is simple. If the teacher’s commitment is a true first move, the student’s best option is to commit; if the student’s non-commitment is a true first move, the teacher’s best option is not to commit also. In some specific cases, it may well make sense to see one or the other as having moved first. But in the general case, it is difficult to justify the assumption that one party as opposed to the other is the first mover, and plausible instead to think of both as in a state of openness or readiness in which no move has been made. That suggests a focus on the analysis of the game in which the two move at the same time is appropriate.
[iii] There is an issue as to whether an analysis of the one-shot decision for the teacher and student is meaningful, given that education often takes place over a long period of time. It is certainly of interest to examine the solution concepts for a repeat game (which here as in many other cases, such as the prisoner’s dilemma, are much looser than for the one-shot game). But the analysis of the one-shot decision, which is what will be focused on in this paper, has its own value given its precision, as well as its correspondence to at least one sort of education that will be familiar to many ethics teachers, in which one has only one chance in one class session to discuss a particular topic and decide whether to go out on a limb by making a commitment to a normative proposition.
[iv] A Nash equilibrium occurs when neither player has an incentive to deviate from their own strategy conditional on knowing the other’s strategy (Baird, et al, 1994). In many matrices, there is more than one Nash equilbrium; for example, in the well known Chicken game there are three Nash equilibria (player 1 swerves and player 2 does not, player 2 swerves and player 1 does not, and a mixed strategy for both). In Valuing Moral Diversity, the mixed strategy for both players is the only Nash equilibrium.
[v] The intuition grounding that result is tricky: With everything the same except a lower payoff for Y-Y, T mixes in more Y in order to keep the outcome equal whether S plays all Y or all N.
[vi] The one-shot solution concept is that both sides play a strategy that does equally well no matter what the other side does. Whether S commits all the time, never commits, or plays any combination of commit and not commit, T does equally well in Valuing Moral Diversity when 5Y + 3(1 – Y) = 4(1 – Y). The solution for T is Y = 1/6, which means that T should openly commit to valuing moral diversity only that fraction of the time. On the other side, whether T comm its all the time, never commits, or plays any combination of commit and not commit, S does equally well when 2Y = 1Y + 3(1 – Y). The solution for T is Y = 3/4, which means that S should commit to valuing moral diversity 75% of the time.
[vii] The solution concept for Valuing Liberalism is dominance. N is a dominant strategy for T; knowing that, S will also play N.
[viii] The solution for Valuing Anti-Moralism for the mixed strategy for T: 4.5Y + 3(1 – Y) = 4(1 – Y). Y = 2/11.
The solution for S: 1.5Y =1Y + 3(1 – Y). Y = 6/7.
[ix] The solution for Valuing Cross-Cutting Moral Values for the mixed strategy for T: 5Y + 2(1 – Y) = Y + 4(1 – Y). Y = 1/3.
The solution for S: 2Y =1Y + 3(1 – Y). Y = 3/4.
[x] The solution for Valuing One Moral Dimension for the mixed strategy for T: 4Y + 1.5(1 – Y) = Y + 4(1 – Y). Y = 5/11.
The solution for S: Y =.5Y + 3(1 – Y). Y = 6/7.
[xi] The solution for Valuing Liberal-Conservative Ethics for the mixed strategy for T: 3.5Y + 1.25(1 – Y) = Y + 4(1 – Y). Y = 11/21.
The solution for S: .5Y =.25Y + 3(1 – Y). Y = 12/13.
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