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.
Business Ethics Beyond the Moral Imagination 63 One of the lessons that Rorty has culled from the study of the history of culture is that our species improves with age, both technologically and socially. Humans are not doomed to repeat the same decisions; we learn. Further, the knowledge available to any person or to people accrues over time. We benefit from the civilizations that have passed before ours, and those that come next will benefit from the achievements and the failures of our own age. Therefore, for Rorty, as humanity gets older and wiser it gets better at discriminating between choices based on its understanding of the moral implications.
Though this line of reasoning bears the odor of Hegel’s philosophy, it is important to note that Rorty is no Hegelian, e.g. he does not believe in an ultimate Historical Consciousness or Absolute Knowledge. Contra Hegel, Rorty’s historical progres- sion includes no eschatology or noble end-state. There is no “end of history” for Rorty’s philosophy, and this poses a particular problem for his theory. Hegelians and Marxists have a built-in culminating point in their philosophies of history that, like inertia, pulls human history towards it. In their theories, the endgame explains the motion of history and the eschatology procures the historical progression. Rorty has to rely on a different kind of explanation for the historical motion that he described as moral progress. Rather than the end of history, it is the moral imagination that is the engine of progress.
Moral progress is not, on this pragmatist view, a matter of getting clearer about something that was there all the time. Rather, we make ourselves into new kinds of people by inventing new forms of human life. We make progress by having more alternatives to consider. . . The emphasis I have been placing on the role of imagination follows a line of thought familiar from the work of Patricia Werhane. But I am inclined to adopt a more radical stance than hers. Werhane says that she realized that “ignorance of moral theory and lack of moral reasoning skills” were not enough to explain “why ordinary, decent, intelligent managers engage in questionable activities and why these activities are encouraged or even instigated by the climate or culture of companies they manage.” This realization, she says, led her to realize that “something else was involved: a paucity of what I have come to label ‘moral imagination’ ” Her book argues that “moral imagination is a necessary but not sufficient condition for creative managerial decision-making.”
I suspect that it may, in fact, be sufficient, as well. I think of moral imagination not as a supplement to moral theory and moral reasoning skills, but as pretty much all you need. Although an acquaintance with moral theory may sometimes come in handy, you can usually get along quite well without it. The principles formulated by thinkers like Kant, Mill, and Rawls provide handy little summaries of sub-sets of our moral intuitions. Invoking such principles speeds deliberation, but it does little to help with the tough cases – the ones where institutions conflict.
For Rorty, there is a fairly direct connection between the degree of moral progress a culture can claim and the size of its basket of alternative solutions to hard cases. As is clear from these passages, Rorty believes modern philosophers have spent most of their time asking the wrong side of the moral question. They are convergence the- orists. What I mean by this is that modern ethical theorists have worked hard to pro- mote a method for ethical decision-making that seeks to winnow down the number of possible solutions to any problem. Convergence theorists serve their intellectual goal of producing some sort of uniformity across decision-makers. Convergence theorists have served their moral universe well if through their moral methodologies
64 P.T. Harper they can get most reasonable people to arrive at the same reasonable solution most of the time.
Rorty is a divergence theorist and, therefore, brings a more postmodern sensi- bility to ethical discourse. For him, it is not about limiting the number of reason- able responses but precisely the opposite. Divergence theorists are not interested in foreclosing on the future but, instead, find their motivation in the idea of a future unknowable in advance and, therefore, ripe with opportunities for novelty. “We cre- ate new forms of human life. . .” by not being overly committed to current and past modes of culture, and “. . .we have more alternatives to consider” when we become less satisfied with the alternatives currently under consideration. The divergence side of moral reasoning is more interested in multiplying the number of questions we ask of any one situation than it is interested in trying to posit the same solution to most moral questions.
Further, it is only in an environment where the future has not been foreclosed or colonized that the imagination can play an informative role in the decision-making process. The problem of convergence as a theoretical outlook is that in its attempt to eliminate the uncertainty of effect it can smother diversity of thought. There is a significant difference between the elimination of uncertainty and the management of uncertainty: Managers of uncertainty are leaders rather than Gestapos. And philoso- phers that seek to eliminate uncertainty plant the seeds of their discipline’s demise.
Rorty believes that moral imagination moves morality forward because, by it, leaders can grasp a novel solution to customary questions that can then change the way we problematize people, places, and things in the present tense. In other words, the moral imagination can change with the way we think about solutions by changing the way we think about problems. Again, we are opened to the future by continuing to struggle and rethink those understandings that have become common- place and quotidian in the present.
This stance differs from that of the convergence theorist because of its risk profile. Through their attempt to eliminate uncertainty, convergence theorists ulti- mately hope to eliminate risk. But this is folly for two reasons. First, convergence theorists leave themselves open to the risk that they attempt to sweep under the rug precisely because they did not find a way to convert the risky element from a strategic liability to a strategic asset. Convergence theorists are particularly prone to fall prey to the return of the repressed or the oppressed. The second reason, the hope for the elimination of risk is folly in that where there is no risk there is little return. Divergence theorists are willing to risk their comfort and stability for the idea of a better world order. For divergence theorists, then, the risk is that they or their children will end up with a world less attractive than the one they helped to undermine. In their attempt to expand the bandwidth of moral possibility, the starry-eyed divergence theorist can easily become complicit with the creation of a different world that is not at the same time particularly progressive. But, and this is important, divergence theorists are optimistic about the future of humanity and, though the path to progress is sure to be fraught with foibles and fallbacks, they believe that in the long run, humanity is more likely to be better off than worse off.
Business Ethics Beyond the Moral Imagination 65 There is a final distinction of Rorty’s that still remains to be explained, and that is the difference between his version of the uses of moral imagination and that of Patricia Werhane. He claims that he has “adopted a more radical stance than hers”
and only now can I begin to describe the contours of Rorty’s supplement. According to the philosophical interpretation that I have been using so far, it would be best to characterize Werhane as a convergence theorist, one who still clings to the idea that the moral imagination needs to be domesticated in order to be of use in moral deliberation. While she acknowledges the emancipatory power of the imagination in the service of human affairs, her theory shows deep discomfort with the idea of an uncertain and risky future. Thus, I detect hesitancy in her moral theory, a theory that points the way out of our current morass but is unable to separate itself from some of our traditional philosophical attachments. Rorty, on the other hand, seems to have purged himself of the traditional modern philosophical reflexes and is perfectly willing to risk adopting new ones.
My comments should strike readers as somewhat ironic, because no philoso- pher within the field of business ethics has worked harder to get both theorists and managers to take the moral imagination seriously than Patricia Werhane. Out of fairness, then, I want to take a few moments and revisit her chapter “Moral Imagination and the Search for Ethical Decision-Making in Management.” It is this chapter where she most clearly defines her understanding of the moral imagination and also recounts its origins in the Scottish Enlightenment. This is also the chapter that Rorty cites when he makes his own contrasting comments concerning the moral imagination.
The role of imagination is crucial for an understanding of Smith’s notion of sympathy and indeed his whole moral psychology. Smith argues that each of us has an active imagination which enables us mentally to recreate feelings, passions, and the point of view of another. In this imaginative process one does not literally feel the passion of another, but one is able to
“put oneself in another’s shoes,” so to speak, and to understand what another is experiencing from their perspective.
Werhane follows David Hume and Adam Smith in her desire to provide some sort of explanation of how humans grow to care about persons other than them- selves. These philosophers theorize from a position that assumes humans are fun- damentally social creatures. But, their position does not take it for granted that the fundamentally social nature of humanity also makes the species fundamentally com- munal; the fact that humans are social creatures is only the beginning of the moral inquiry, not its end. Their studies of ethics center on moral psychology because that is the mechanism through which they believe the fundamentally social char- acter of humanity gets refined, and subsequently expressed in the achievement of community.
Sympathy, according to Werhane, is the lynchpin of Smith’s moral theory. She characterizes this attitude as the result of an active imagination reaching out and latching on to the lives and experiences of others; it is a moral intuition of sorts.
Though she is careful not to overstate the knowledge that one can gain from the moral imagination, e.g. one cannot know that their intuition of what another person is actually experiencing, or that one’s interpretation of another’s experiences maps
66 P.T. Harper on to the interpretation the other person is making about their own experiences. But, that is not the point. The moral imagination is more or less an attitude. It reflects a desire, whether large or small, of a person to consider the experience of others in coming to our own understanding of the world. The moral imagination, in this sense, also plays a strong revising role in that how we intuit the experience of oth- ers challenges the understanding of the world we would have otherwise. What else could sympathy be if not the ability we have to value another person’s experience as much as our own and sometimes even more?
“Smith breaks with a rationalist tradition by linking moral judgment to moral sen- timent. Moreover, it is moral imagination along with sympathy that helps to discern what society ought to approve of, thus shaping moral rules out of community rather than individual values.”11For Werhane, it is the ability for us to sympathize that is paramount when it comes to codifying some sort of guidelines that will function as the basis, or contract if you will, of a community. A human community that flourishes is one where the constituents feel for their fellows. Again, it is the moral imagination that underlies our ability to sympathize with others and, therefore, it is the moral imagination that for Werhane is the iconic expression of our social natures.
But Smith’s work is limited by his assumption that all of us deal with the world in the same way – through the conceptual scheme of a Scottish gentleman. So, on that assumption one can more easily project and sympathize with another person or make self-evaluations, and actually be correct a good deal of the time. But each of us functions from a set of conceptual schemes, schemes which most of us are only vaguely aware. And these schemes are not identical to those through which others experience. Smith’s analysis introduces the notion of moral imagination, but it cannot take into account how one sympathizes with others whose view of the world is not that of a Scottish gentleman, nor can it account for how it is we can reshape our own conceptual schemes.12
In this passage, Werhane introduces the problem of “difference” and frames it as a limit on the abilities of the moral imagination. She considers the possibility that moral conclusions supposedly based on sympathy among people who are identi- cal may not be very sympathetic at all, but rather uncritical assumptions based on perceptions of sameness. Therefore, sympathetic intuitions resulting from an active moral imagination cannot be the only basis of community and civil agreement. For Werhane, sympathetic moral intuitions must be domesticated by some proxy for rationality before they can be of use in the process of social construction. It is pre- cisely this domestication that I think Rorty is criticizing when he states: “I think of moral imagination not as a supplement to moral theory, and moral reasoning skills, but as pretty much all you need.”
It is the search for moral minimums that separates Werhane from the pragmatists she cites. The moral minimums show up in many places within Werhane’s chapter.
One can find them in the tropes under consideration, e.g. such as the overlapping Venn Diagrams of Michael Walzer and the intersecting sets of interests (imaginary or real) representing John Rawls’s reflexive equilibrium on the Cartesian plane. The moral minimums are necessary because Werhane is a “rights” theorist and, as such, is involved in a project that attempts to articulate the least that we should be able
Business Ethics Beyond the Moral Imagination 67 to expect from each other regardless of cultural, racial, ethnic, national, sexual, or economic backgrounds. Hers is a moral theory of the lowest common denominator.
In contrast, the pragmatist project is an attempt to articulate moral maximums.
Pragmatists want a society not based on the minimum that we can expect from the group but, instead, based on the maximum that we can expect from each other.
For this kind of community to come into existence, our ideals would need to be somewhat idealistic. It is by having expectations that seek to maximize an individ- ual’s contribution that we embrace the kind of diversity that is so often enumerated in social theory, but still so neglected in social composition and so misrecognized in social interaction.
The problem that both Rorty and Werhane are left with is that moral imagina- tion, while a useful bulwark against theories promoting pure or extreme rationalism or empiricism, may not provide the most useful foundation for a moral philoso- phy that seeks not only to provide for human survival but also to promote human flourishing. Rorty, unlike Werhane, has an entire corpus replete with contributions of the kind that I am promoting. Werhane, on the other hand, has done much to help us understand the modern philosophical categories but, unlike Rorty, she has not deconstructed them all the way down. In other words, she gives a very modern critique of modern philosophy. I think that this poses significant limits on her moral philosophy’s ability to address contemporary social problems.
If, as Werhane suggests, the moral imagination is insufficient to the task of eth- ical and political reasoning – e.g. its “sympathetic” intuitions did not stop Euro- pean imperialism – it is not because it needs to be domesticated by some form of rationality but because we need to start the ethical inquiry with a different con- ception of human thought. I think that the real problem for the procurement of progress is not whether there is an absence or surplus of moral imagination but something much more fundamental than that. What moral progress needs is thought of a particular kind. In other words, I want to move beyond or underneath the prob- lematization of rationality in relation to imagination and toward a conception of thought that renders that relationship uninformative. To frame this up a bit, it is not a matter of “to imagine or not to imagine” but “to think or not to think.” Further, and in contrast to most narratives of the history of modern philosophy, it is not about thought that can be characterized as either rational or empirical, but about thought that can be characterized as traditional or innovative. I believe that we need to theorize more about the conditions under which this kind of thought becomes possible.
Rorty’s professional project has been to provide the intellectual basis for theo- rists to push beyond the shopworn conventions of modern traditionalism toward a reinvigoration of the grand philosophical tradition. Thus, inspired by his example, I want to change the frame of this conversation about moral progress from one of the legitimacy of modern philosophical categories and concepts in the service of moral progress, to a discourse concerning the critical role thought plays in the movements of the world and the vacillations of its citizens. To this end, I will divert the stream of philosophy under our consideration. The time has come to make a Continental excursion.