Business Ethics Beyond the Moral Imagination 73
Dispatches From The Frontier: Some Pedagogical Implications
74 P.T. Harper fields of philosophy would be the history of philosophy and moral philosophy. But these are the areas that are already least professionalized, and most thoroughly intertwined with other disciplines.
This is basically what has already happened. That does not mean that philosophy departments no longer exist in colleges and universities. But, anybody who has con- sidered joining an Anglo-American analytic philosophy department within the last generation cannot help but be struck by the narrowness of the course offerings and the limitedness of what is considered an “authentic” philosophical inquiry. Though it may be somewhat clear which courses one must take to begin one’s training in philosophy, it is not clear at all what sort of dissertation would constitute a contri- bution to the field. It is no wonder that philosophers are rarely called upon for an opinion by their colleagues within the university, and are never called upon for an opinion by mainstream cultural institutions outside of the academy. Indeed, Rorty’s Rebellion holds the wreath of victory.
I personally find it exhausting, though, that Rorty still spends the time to kick the dead corpse of professional philosophy. Either he does not realize that he has had the victory – highly unlikely – or he realizes that his pet audience never tires of the effective ways that he belittles professional philosophers – highly likely. Whatever the reason, I think that he does himself a disservice by still thinking that professional philosophy is one of the ethical theorist’s moral problems. The effect of Rorty’s fixation on professional philosophy is that he makes a kind of category mistake by confusing the symptom with the cause.
Racism is a moral problem. Sexism is a moral problem. Imperialism is a moral problem. Cultural chauvinism is a moral problem. Homophobia is a moral problem.
Religious radicalism is a moral problem. Totalitarianism is a moral problem. Poverty is a moral problem. Professional philosophy is not a moral problem. The problems that Rorty laments concerning professional philosophy are symptoms of the fact that racism, sexism, imperialism, etc. are operating and have operated stealthily within the Western intellectual tradition from its very start. The work of Foucault has helped me to learn this valuable lesson.
Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has registered a similar complaint against Rorty:
I register a fundamental disagreement with a position taken by Richard Rorty in an exchange with J¨urgen Habermas. Rorty criticizes Habermas for the latter’s conviction “that the story of modern philosophy is an important part of the story of the democratic societies’ attempts at self-reassurance.” Rorty’s statement follows the practice of many Europeanists who speak of the histories of these “democratic societies” as if these were self-contained histories complete in themselves, as if the self-fashioning of the West was something that occurred only within its self-assigned geographical boundaries. At the very least, Rorty ignores the role the “colonial theater” (both internal and external) – where the theme of “freedom”
as defined by modern political philosophy was constantly invoked in the aid of the ideas of
“civilization,” “progress,” and latterly “development” – played in the process of engendering this “reassurance.”25
Chakrabarty views Rorty’s fundamental sin as one of omission, e.g. that Rorty has managed to miss the ways that modern philosophy provided the philosophical justi- fications and identity classifications that allowed European imperialism to advance
Business Ethics Beyond the Moral Imagination 75 unimpeded.26For Chakrabarty, Rorty’s fundamental sin is one he shares with most of his well-meaning colleagues in the philosophical academy. I am mostly in agree- ment with the point that modern political philosophers, as well as economists, social psychologists, and literary critics, are quite na¨ıve about history in general and colo- nial history specifically, though I am less sure that Rorty is this group’s icon and, therefore, critical target. However, one should expect some sort of overstatement of the counter-position now that the empire has had the chance to write back.
My critique of Rorty is not that he “intentionally” subverts colonial history but that he has failed to utilize colonial history in his effort to deconstruct modern philosophy. I think that Rorty has missed a grand opportunity to be a leader in postcolonial studies and postmodernism when it is fairly clear that these intellectual paradigms fit neatly within the spirit and letter of his general critique of modern philosophy. By focusing too much on the deconstruction of professional philoso- phy Rorty neglected to re-construct its pedagogy and curriculum along more ethical lines. Further, I believe that Rorty is philosophically outpaced by Foucault and the Continental critical philosophy and theory because unlike the latter Rorty does not have a philosophy of action. As a matter of fact, I believe that it is his philosophical
“quietism” that leads him to be interpreted as politically and intellectually conser- vative.
It is my goal, then, to cede the victory of Rorty’s rebellion against professional philosophy and to use this as a moment for turning the power of that critical gaze toward theorists across the humanities and social sciences. I want to do this by suggesting ways to make the larger moral constructs, e.g. racism and sexism, more opaque so that they can be recognized and addressed. It is time that moral philosophers begin to understand the processes though which their own work, and especially their work in ethics, potentially reinforces the pernicious stranglehold racism and other beliefs have on our moral imagination. In other words, the rea- son why the moral imagination is insufficient for moral progress is because it is as contaminated with cultural chauvinism as all the other contributors to the reasoning process.
Leadership and Limits
When it comes to the procurement of moral progress, theory and praxis find their nexus in human action that is the result of critical thought. Critical thought, re- member, is thought that is active, courageous, and experimental. Now I want to address and make clear how Foucault supersedes Kant’s understanding of critique and, as a result, provides the key to the portal connecting moral theory and practice in the service of progress. Remember that for Foucault the attitude of modernity is characterized as a stance we must have toward the limits of our knowledge: “This philosophical ethos may be characterized as a limit-attitude.” But what does this actually mean?
76 P.T. Harper Leaders need to be obsessed with limits so that they can learn how to extend those that need extending and also negotiate those that need respecting. At first glance, extending and respecting limits may seem like the same process, but there is an important difference between the two. Extending limits is about how we in- crease the volume of our moral universe, whereas respecting limits is about how we avoid making our extension a transgression. But, one way or another, we have to theorize ethical limits in ways that are not simply jurisprudential. Therefore, the limit-attitude is about how contemplation of the limits of knowledge and the con- templation at the limits of normalcy and acceptance assist with moral progress. The notion of a virtuous limit is similar to Salman Rushdie’s “frontier” in the following passage:
The frontier is a wake-up call. At the frontier we can’t avoid the truth; the comforting layers of the quotidian, which insulates us against the world’s harsher realities, are stripped away and, wide-eyed in the hard fluorescent light of the frontier’s windowless halls, we see things as they really are. The frontier is the physical proof of the human races’ divided self. . .27 In other words, there is something special about limits, borders, and frontiers that need to be mined for ethical reasons. And those that seek to transcend limits must find a way to live at the borders and face the frontier.
The pedagogical challenge for leadership training, then, is to create concrete practices that put humans into situations where they experience and then utilize this limit-attitude. All of us need to be decentered from time to time. This means that while it is often easy and desirous for us to remain within established identity- based enclaves, we grow ethically when we find ways to get ourselves outside of these comfort zones. I believe that the same mind-set that allows one to transcend intellectual situations is also a prime resource for one to find innovative practical solutions. Leaders must be thinkers.
Curriculum Considerations
There are three kinds of pedagogical activities that I think will cultivate a limit- attitude in our future and existing leaders: clinical analysis, literary analysis, and acting. All of these activities concern issues of character and, therefore, provide a strong intellectual platform for leadership development. While most programs in management and leadership capture and deploy the technical skills needed to per- form a function in an organization, they fall flat where there needs to be value-driven decisions about when and where to deploy functional knowledge, let alone how to improve it. It is my belief that, if existing training programs were augmented by these more “existential” exercises, future managers would become better leaders.
By clinical analysis, I mean that the beginning of leadership studies should in- clude a psychoanalytic evaluation with regularly scheduled follow-ups and check- ins. This is important because these visits to the clinician serve to make managers more thoughtful about themselves and the ways that they affect and are affected by their environment.
Business Ethics Beyond the Moral Imagination 77 By being psychoanalyzed, potential leaders will have a clearer sense of their blind spots and places for perspectival improvement. Many programs give the Meyers-Brigg survey, but this is far too general a classification scheme to be of much long-term use; e.g. it is just a start. The depth that can be reached by a clin- ician is much more personalized and provides more specific information about the motivations, assumptions, and chauvinisms of managers.
It may seem curious to some readers that I would put the analysis of literature in the leadership curriculum, but poets and writers have always plumbed the depths of the human condition and their works have yielded important insights into the human psyche. The themes of hubris, evil, treachery, love, deception, and honor have motivated writers and dramatists throughout history, and there is no reason that we cannot learn from these important texts. Further, literary criticism as its own separate literature is important because it helps us to form good ideas about how to read and learn from the texts. Literature, then, should play as central a role in leadership training as it does in the liberal arts.
Finally, the actual act of acting creates in managers practical wisdom, whereby they will have the ability to lead in situations they have never encountered, because acting demands that one put oneself to the side and sincerely attempt to become someone else. Managers will be able to think through “difference”, e.g. what it means to be somebody else in circumstances other than their own. And it is by think- ing through difference that managers will come to understand diversity. Leaders value diversity for both ethical and strategic reasons because it is through diversity that leaders become ethically three-dimensional and also more innovative in their management practices.
Finally, there is a specific logic for teaching these techniques in the order I have given. I began this chapter with a consideration of the role of the moral imagination in Richard Rorty and Patricia Werhane. My conclusion at the end of the first section was that critical thought was more fundamental to moral development than the moral imagination. But, my position was slightly overstated in order to emphasize the role of critical thought as outlined by Kant and Foucault. The moral imagination be- comes increasingly important only after critical thought has been inaugurated in the subject. My pedagogical sequence assumes this in its progression: psychoanalysis makes one’s thoughts more critical, literary criticism activates the moral imagina- tion, and drama enacts and embodies the ideas that result from the cultivation of the moral imagination through literature. In the end, it is the moral imagination that spans the distance between management and leadership. But, it is critical thought that activates the moral imagination.
Conclusion
There are many areas that we could choose to illustrate how business and society intellec- tuals can begin to redescribe business. We shall focus on two areas, namely, feminist theory and psychoanalytic theory, simply because we have some familiarity with them. We could have focused on religious thought, family therapy, mythology, or even an analysis of pop
78 P.T. Harper culture like video games and Madonna, and been perhaps fruitful. Both feminist theory and psychoanalysis pay special attention to the concept of “silence,” what has not been said. If we can give voice to some silences, we can come to redescribe business in ways that may well be liberating, that enables us to live differently and better.28
In 1982, Edward Freeman provided the above reflections on the field of business ethics in what could be called that field’s own version of Kant’s exhortation towards Enlightenment. He called for a project essentially about the strategic value of di- versity, characterized in this passage as “giving voice to some silences.” Freeman also saw the value of psychoanalysis for business ethics. My underlying motivation for writings this chapter is to play the role for Freeman that Foucault played for Kant. I am not at all sure that Freeman’s call for a diversity of thought in leader- ship training and applied ethics has been met. My impression from analyzing the class/racial/gender/sex/ethnicity identities of those at ethics conferences and in the ethics journals is that we have a long way to go.
I will conclude this chapter with one final thought about the moral imagination:
imagining what it would be like to be somebody else is no substitute for the inclu- sion of other people. I began with an analysis of Richard Rorty’s “Is Philosophy Relevant to Applied Ethics.” His answer is mostly “no,” or at least he believes that philosophy is no more relevant than all the other disciplines in the academy. I have asked the question differently and, as a result, chosen a different project. “How Is Philosophy Relevant to Applied Ethics” is my question and this chapter is its answer.
Philosophy is relevant to applied ethics when it serves to create the conditions under which diverse populations are not just subjects but also citizens in our shared moral universe.
Notes
1. G.W.F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge (Albany: SUNY University Press, 1977). In that text he makes the valuable distinction between speculative and reflexive philosophy. In his mind, reflexive – sys- tematic – philosophy would end up being perfected within physics and mathematics departments.
Speculative philosophy, then, was the only kind of philosophy that he believed would remain.
2. Patricia Werhane, “Moral Imagination and the Search for Ethical Decision Making in Management,”
Business Ethics Quarterly (Special Issue No. 1,1998), 76.
3. Ibid, 89.
4. Ibid, 92.
5. Mie Augier and James March, “The Pursuit of Relevance in Management Education.” California Management Review Vol. 49, No. 3 (Spring 2007), 129–146.
6. Karl Marx, “Alienated Labor,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 85–94.
7. Judith Butler, “What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue,” in The Judith Butler Reader ed.
Sarah Salih (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), 308.
8. See Hannah Arendt, “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship,” and “Thinking and Moral Con- siderations,” in Responsibility and Judgment ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Random House, 2003), 17–48 and 159–189.
9. Mahzarin R. Banaji, Max H. Bazerman, Dolly Chugh, “How (Un) ethical Are You?” (Harvard Busi- ness Review Article #R0312D), December 01, 2003. http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/
Business Ethics Beyond the Moral Imagination 79 b01/en/common/item detail.jhtml; jsessionid=FXL4RSQNY5WWOAKRGWDR5VQBKE0YIISW?
id=R0312D & referral=2342 (accessed 28 May 2008).
10. J. Hammond, R. Keeney, and H. Raiffa. “The Hidden Traps of Decision Making.” Harvard Business Review 76(5), (Sept.–Oct. 98), 47–48.
11. Patricia H. Werhane, “Moral Imagination and the Search for Ethical Decision-Making in Manage- ment,” Business Ethics Quarterly (Special Issue No. 1), 82.
12. Werhane, 82.
13. Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984: Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth (New York: New Press, 1997), 303–304. I have also been deeply influenced by African-American philosopher Frank Kirkland’s very insightful contribution to this critical ge- nealogy, “Enslavement, Moral Suasion, and Struggles for Recognition: Fredrick Douglas’s Answer to the Question – What is Enlightenment?” in Fredrick Douglas: A Critical Reader (Malden: Black- well, 1999), 242–310.
14. Surely, there is a speculative dimension to historical understanding and also a historical basis for any speculation. But, for the purposes of this chapter, it will be sufficient to overstate the separation of these two outlooks if only to emphasize their relationship.
15. For more on the social benefits of critique, see David Couzens Hoy, Critical Resistance: From Poststructuralism to Post-Critique (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004).
16. Foucault, 309–310. Emphasis mine.
17. Kant, Immanuel, “What is Enlightenment?” http://www.english.upenn.edu/∼mgamer/Etexts/kant.html (accessed 24 May 2008)
18. On the emancipatory function of criticism, see Judith Butler’s “What is Critique? An Essay on Fou- cault’s Virtue,” in the Judith Butler Reader, ed. Sara Salih (Malden: Blackwell, 2004) and Fredrick Jameson’s “Metacommentary” in The Ideologies of Theory, Essays 1971–1986: Volume 1 Situations of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
19. See Robert Pippin’s Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of the Euro- pean High Culture, 2nd ed. (Malden: Blackwell, 1999).
20. Foucault, 306.
21. To be critical in this way does not guarantee that you will not make moral mistakes. But that is no reason not to forge ahead. For critiques of this position see Mark Lilla’s The Reckless Mind:
Intellectuals and Politics (New York: New York Review Books, 2001), and Richard Wolin’s The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance With Fascism From Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). The classic statement is Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
22. Foucault, 316. It is important to point out the “Global” here is a synonym for universal or absolute.
This is not a critique of contemporary theories of globalization.
23. Consider T.S. Eliot on “tradition” versus “repetition” in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, http://www.bartleby.com/200/sw4.html (accessed 27 May 2008). “Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, ‘tradition’ should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.”
24. Foucault, 315.
25. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History” in Provincializing Europe: Post- colonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 45. For the full text of Rorty’s comments see his “Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity” in Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
26. For a clear statement on this position see Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study of Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
27. Salman Rushdie, “Step Across This Line” in Step Across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction 1992–
2002 (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 353.
28. R. Edward Freeman and Daniel Gilbert, Jr., “Business, Ethics, and Society: A Critical Agenda,”
Business and Society 31, (Spring 1992), 9–17 (p. 13).