Paul T. Harper
Introduction
In August of 2005, Richard Rorty gave a keynote speech to the Society of Business Ethics entitled, “Is Philosophy Relevant to Applied Ethics?” Rorty explored two distinct but related dimensions of moral discourse, namely the philosophical and the pedagogical. He arrives at the important conclusion that the philosophical ethics curriculum must itself come in for some overdue scrutiny if applied ethicists are going to effect a change in the ethical culture of institutions and participate in the progress of the moral development of individuals. Rorty goes on to say that even though philosophy has no privileged position in relation to moral reasoning relative to other academic disciplines, it continues to be useful for the intellectual process of determining what it is right for us to do and believe in any given understanding of a complex live situation. For Rorty, philosophy is as helpful as any other discipline for applied ethics.
The aim of this chapter is to use an analysis of Rorty’s talk to open a way toward my own answer to his question. I want to interpret the question differently, though.
Which philosophers continue to be relevant to applied philosophy? It is my strong belief that only certain philosophies continue to be relevant to applied ethics and that the engagement with the broader philosophical tradition – to include European, in addition to Anglo-American philosophers – will continue to yield important in- sights into the process of moral reasoning, whatever the virtues of the other genres of writing and research may be. My approach will differ from Rorty’s by specifying the contributions of specific philosophies and philosophers rather than stressing the interdisciplinary nature of good theoretical inquiry. I agree that an interdisciplinary approach to moral theory is what moral theorists should aspire to, but that insight and motivation still do not make clear what kind of contribution philosophers can
P.T. Harper
Darden School of Business, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA [email protected]
This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Margaret Dauler Wilson, late professor of the History of Modern Philosophy at Princeton University.
G. Flynn (ed.), Leadership and Business Ethics, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008
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58 P.T. Harper make in that kind of multifaceted theoretical endeavor. Therefore, this chapter, while spending time analyzing Rorty’s thoughts on the value of philosophy and the values inherent in its pedagogy, will ultimately advocate for the work of a specific philoso- pher: Michel Foucault.
What kind of philosophy continues to be useful for applied ethics? G.W.F. Hegel has provided us with a useful way to understand the two modes of modern phi- losophizing: reflexive and speculative.1 The reflexive mode is characterized by a systematic approach that seeks to model our knowledge of the world into a hermet- ically sealed but complex set of relationships. Reflexive philosophers try to work out general principles and axioms from which all subsequent knowledge claims must derive. Systematic completeness is the goal of reflexive philosophers. Their overriding anthropological metaphor is that minds function like computers, as if the cognition was reducible to computation. Speculative philosophers, by contrast, have a very different moral anthropology. We have learned from social and clinical psychologists that the way people actually make decisions is far from programmatic and computational. Speculative philosophers have a view of the mind that includes emotions and imagination in the reasoning processes and, as a result, they can ac- count for the possibility of decisions that would be unpredictable for the reflexive philosopher. The speculative mode is characterized by an openness and incomplete- ness in its approach to knowledge.
On its surface, it seems like applied philosophy should derive from reflexive phi- losophy because of the need for practitioners to arrive at fast and effective decisions.
In most of the literature, the process of applied philosophy is like baking a cake, e.g. we take some ingredients from life, mix them with a few philosophical criteria distilled from the tradition, apply a little pressure, and then out comes a solution. I think that this is a very unfortunate, though common, mischaracterization. One must ask for a more critical role for philosophy. For philosophy to have a catalytic role, one where it can help to birth more insights, options, and worldviews, it must be of the speculative mode. Speculative philosophers recognize that one cannot expand the number of conclusions one has about the world until one expands the number of questions one asks about it.
Ethicists in a philosophically speculative mode – I consider Richard Rorty to be in this camp – do the important work of attempting to articulate what is always already beyond the horizon of human knowledge in the conventional sense. Though speculative ethicists are dubious to the attempts to separate claims of “what there is” from claims of “what we can know about ‘what there is,’ ” they do hold out for the hopeful chance that claims of “who we are” can be meaningfully separated from claims of “who we can be.” Theirs is a contingent future with an ever-broadening moral horizon. The speculative mode of theorizing has the advantages of being able to provide a richer account of human ethical behavior that is also pragmatically prudent. As I will argue, if there is such a thing as moral progress, and I hope there is, it is probably the result of these speculative efforts.
What is the proper leadership curriculum? Historically, moral education has al- ways been connected to notions of leadership and solidarity. The Greeks placed a high premium on theories and techniques of moral education because they always
Business Ethics Beyond the Moral Imagination 59 assumed the priority of a thoughtful citizenry as the most important precondition for a flourishing democracy. From the bardic performances of Hesiod and Homer, to the performance of the dithyrambic tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides at the annual festival of Dionysus, through the literary dialogues of Socrates and Plato and the peripatetic dispatches of Aristotle, the ultimate contribution of the Greeks was to make clear the intimate connection between ethics and education.
Rorty revives some of the Greek spirit by querying whether we are being well served by the current dominant mode of Anglo-American philosophical education. I will argue that not only is the content of moral education a central consideration for any ethical theory, it will also prove to be the bedrock to any theory of leadership. It is the question of the proper function and education of business leaders that continues to bring ethical discourse into the management domain. In the rest of this introduction, I will articulate three different frames for approaching ethics in management.
Imagination, Innovation, and Leadership
Consider Patricia Werhane’s work on the moral imagination and its importance for managerial decision making:
I shall argue that most individuals. . .and institutions are not without moral sensibilities or values. Rather, they sometimes have a narrow perspective of their situation and little in the way of moral imagination. They lack a sense of the variety of possibilities and moral consequences of their decisions, the ability to imagine a wide range of possible issues. . .consequences and solutions.2
It will turn out that the simple teaching and application of moral principles or rules may not alleviate this problem, since it is not always lack of logic or ignorance of moral principles that causes moral amnesia but their specificity in their application. This specificity has not so much to do with the particular situation at issue, per se, but rather with how the situation is perceived and framed by its protagonist.3
The lynch-pin of this process is a highly developed moral imagination that perceives the nuances of a situation, challenges the framework of the scheme in which the event is embedded, and imagines how that might be different.4
Werhane’s insight that organizations need leaders who have a well-developed moral imagination is clear to those who are already dissatisfied with the commercial status quo and, therefore, predisposed to seek and make changes. But, many times it is hard to initiate important conversations that would be critical of current business practices or the people who execute them because people in business think they are quite well served by the status quo and, therefore, have little motivation for seeking any change. This is further exacerbated by the fact that training programs only teach the uncritical application of the reigning practitioner paradigms in the various business functions, thus leaving the theory creation processes that drive business innovation to forces located outside the firm.5 Under this description, innovative thinking is limited to some kind of reaction by leaders of the firm to perceived changes in its commercial environment.
This is a problem because unless the market changes are predictable according to old and established methods of detection, chances are that the mechanisms instituted
60 P.T. Harper to detect the movement will lie mute. Business has a theoretical base and firms need leaders who can think beyond the present configuration of resources and the current arrangements between institutions. In order for them to do this, leaders have to think about what could have been and what could possibly be. Werhane’s theory of the moral imagination acknowledges an expanded view of managerial thinking, one particularly appropriate to a leadership point of view. Applied ethics education, then, should provide an intellectual basis for a leadership model where any given business leader embodies the nexus of innovation in thought and innovation in practice.
Critique, Responsibility, Leadership
All business decisions have normative content, regardless of their function or scale.
One of the jobs of a business ethicist is to fish out the moral content of business decisions and come to some understanding of the stakes and interests involved. A central contribution of the ethicist to management practice is the presentation and application of precepts and models taken from the history of moral thought. But, to be useful, ethics should not be thought of as some external ruler by which a decision can be judged “good” or “bad.” If it were, ethics would merely be a conversation about that external ruler (all too often this is the case). Karl Marx was right when he theorized that behavior merely complying with or following external rules is alienated and inauthentic.6 Ethics must be characterized as something internal to the decision-making process to be something that is of interest to leaders rather than just philosophers and theologians.
How do you make ethical decision-making an authentic enterprise for business leaders? Michel Foucault makes one of the most sophisticated contemporary anal- ysis of the problems of authenticity and agency and, therefore, this chapter will culminate with a discussion of his reflections. For the purposes of brevity, I will use Judith Butler’s summary of Foucault’s ethical impulse in this introduction:
There are some preliminary ways we can understand Foucault’s effort to see critique as virtue. Virtue is most often understood as an attribute or a practice of the subject, or indeed a quality that conditions or characterizes a certain kind of action or practice. It belongs to an ethics that is not fulfilled merely by following objectively formulated rules or laws. And virtue is not only a way of complying with or conforming to pre-established norms. It is, more radically, a more critical relation to those norms, one which, for Foucault, takes shape as a specific stylization of morality.7
For Foucault and Butler, virtue is the action of thinking rather than an attribute of thought. This makes the subject of ethical consideration the person making the judgment. If we frame ethical discourse in this way, then it only makes sense that it is more interesting to talk about good people rather than good decisions. This under- standing of ethics is particularly important in business because a firm cannot hold a
“decision” accountable for its own effects. People must be held accountable for their actions and, therefore, the theoretical basis by which a firm holds people responsible for their acts must be biased and the assumption of the freedom, authenticity, and thoughtfulness of the moral subject. It is only if we acknowledge that leaders have
Business Ethics Beyond the Moral Imagination 61 the virtue of critical thought that we can then hold them responsible for what those thoughts make them do.8
Moral Awareness, Self Awareness, and Leadership
. . .Ethics training must be broadened to include what is now known about how our minds
work and must expose managers directly to the unconscious mechanisms that underlie biased decision-making. And it must provide managers with exercises and interventions that can root out the biases that lead to bad decisions. Managers can make wiser, more ethical decisions if they become mindful of their unconscious biases. . .What’s required is vigilance – continual awareness of the forces that can cause decision-making to veer from its intended course and continual adjustments that counteract them.9
Social psychologist, Mahzarin Banaji, has developed a test for cultural bias in de- cision making. Her Implicit Attitudes Test measures the response time to different questions. By analyzing the variance in response times, Banaji is able to gauge how honest a person’s answer is to any given question. As the above passage makes clear, the Implicit Attitudes Test is not just a method of diagnosis but also an important normative training tool. It can help with moral development and education just by making the manager aware that these biases exist.
The problem of biases and blind spots is a challenge for leaders in general. As one group of leadership psychologists has found:
For executives, whose success hinges on the many day-to-day decisions they make or approve, the psychological traps are especially dangerous. . .It’s important to remember, though, that the best defense is always awareness. Executives who attempt to familiarize themselves with these traps and the diverse forms that they take will be better able to en- sure that the decisions they make are sound and that the recommendations proposed by subordinates or associates are reliable.10
It is up to the manager to take a leadership point of view, which would demand incorporating the insights from the bias tests and colleague feedback into his/her daily routines. Leaders who seek out methods for obtaining information about their moral blind spots will prove to be more effective in achieving their organizational and personal goals.
This chapter will progress as follows: In the next section, I will summarize Richard Rorty’s argument for moral progress from his Society of Business Ethics address. In the talk, his ethical theory is grounded in the notion of the “moral imag- ination.” My argument will be that his notion of the moral imagination is not robust enough to procure the kind of moral progress he desires. In the second section, I will offer an alternative model by explicating the intellectual paradigm that I think both explains and produces the desired innovations in our moral understanding: critique.
Through a consideration of Michel Foucault’s characterization of the uses of the critical method and the critical outlook, I will demonstrate that critique allows for a broader and clearer pedagogical platform for moral development and leadership cultivation. In the third section, I will outline the shape of one kind of pedagogy that I think would serve to reinvigorate business ethics and make ethical discourse
62 P.T. Harper more of a reflection of our contemporary concerns. Our responsibility as ethicists is to provide for our audience intellectual resources that help them to identify and then work through the moral challenges of today’s commercial environment.
The embrace of difference that I am calling for has many pedagogical implica- tions and, therefore, must be reinforced by the leadership curriculum. Specifically, we need to find ways to identify and then listen to the people at the margins, because there is something about being on the borders of ethical conversations that provides valuable insight into the assumptions operating within the moral core of a given community or society. Not only must we find ways to incorporate the experiences of marginal people, we also need to experience what it means to be marginalized.
In the end, then, my leadership prescriptions will be a set of exercises where leaders can gain an intimate knowledge of life on the ethical frontier.