An Exercise in Moral Philosophy
1
AN EXERCISE IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY
The assumption current in all modern legal systems [is] that intent to do wrong is necessary for the commission of a crime...[However], politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.
Hannah Arendt
How can we trust that we get the information we need to make intelligent decisions? How can we know what is the right information to look for? How can we remain sensitive to and retrieve the information we lost when we went looking for the information we got?
Margaret Wheatley
Instead of moral philosophy starting from a notion of the human subject as a sovereign agent for whom free choice is the essential condition...a different kind of moral philosophy would be centered on the conditions of self-knowledge.
Mary Douglas
In “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” Hannah Arendt (1971) restates her primary conclusion from studying Adolf Eichmann’s trial. Despite “the monstrosity of the deeds” in which he played a leading role, Eichmann was “neither monstrous nor demonic.” He instead demonstrated a “curious, quite authentic inability to think.”
Arendt’s verdict of the banality of evil is hard to swallow, especially for many of those intimately familiar with the Holocaust. But the late Hannah Arendt is worth listening to and here is what she asks:
The question that imposed itself was: Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining and reflecting upon whatever happens to come to pass, regardless of specific content and quite independent of results, could this activity be of such a nature that it “conditions” men against evil-doing? (1971, 418)[1]
Has Arendt unearthed an anomaly given our conventional representations of the relationships between moral agency, intent, and cognition? If she has, then what, precisely, is entailed by “the activity of thinking as such”? And to what, if any, end(s)?
Anomalies
The representation that defines the problem space is the problem solver’s “way of looking at” the problem and also specifies the form of solutions. Choosing a representation that is right for a problem can improve spectacularly the efficiency of the solution-finding process. The choice of problem representation is...a creative act.
Hubert Dreyfus
Hannah Arendt opens her analysis with a crucial distinction.
We owe to Kant the distinction between thinking and knowing, between reason, the urge to think and to understand, and the intellect, which desires and is capable of certain, verifiable knowledge. (422)
“Truth” pertains to knowledge whereas “meaning” pertains to thinking. Knowledge exists and operates within “problem spaces”; thinking exists and operates within the interstices of problem spaces, interstices created by two or more “representations.” Put another way, knowledge is learning or acquiring skills whereas thinking is “unlearning” or “letting go” (Varela et al., 1991).
Arendt, repeatedly emphasizing that the activity of thinking as such “does not serve knowledge and is not guided by practical purposes” (424), turns to Socrates (her exemplar). “The first thing that strikes us in Plato’s Socratic dialogues is that they are all aporetic. The argument either leads nowhere or it goes around in circles” (428). Not only does such thinking require taking “time out” but, more ominously, it is “out of order.” Moreover, “not only is this faculty for the ordinary course of affairs ‘good for nothing’ while its results remain uncertain and unverifiable, but it also is somehow self-destructive...the business of thinking is like the veil of Penelope: it undoes every morning what it had finished the night before” (425).
So who can justify taking “time out” for a such an inefficient and ineffective activity in today’s busy (business) world? And who wants to be “out of order” if such thinking risks getting you labeled a troublemaker, fired, or terminally quarantined? Worst of all, why engage in anything that is both “good for nothing” and “somehow self-destructive”?
Perhaps we are not asking the right questions. Perhaps the activity of thinking as such begins to make more sense if we wish to change “the representation that defines the problem space.” Or if, in Wheatley’s words, we are attempting to “retrieve the information we lost when we went looking for the information we got.” Or if, as Arendt puts it, we wish to “unfreeze as it were, what language, the medium of thinking, has frozen into thought” (433). Or if, in more conventional terms, we wish to “think outside the box,” “box” being a metaphor for “context” which is the ground of meaning.
Wilfred Campbell Smith offers us a box--a context--to ponder. It is an especially interesting box for it denies its own existence and, as a direct consequence, the potential value of the activity of thinking as such.
As is often remarked, reason has descended from a consideration of ends to a concern merely with means. Reason...is in this curtailed outlook seen as something that serves us: an instrument to be used, in our pursuit of whatever personal interests we may happen or may choose to have. Thus modern culture, in the phrase of Jacques Ellul, has become the striving by ever more "rational" means after ever more irrational ends. (Smith, 1988)
To the degree that the “box” of Instrumental Reason infuses our modern times, conventional representations of moral agency confront a second anomaly which Arendt termed “the Rule of Nobody.” Langdon Winner (1977) offers us the general architecture of Nobody:
In classical ethics a person is excused from blame for a misdeed if sufficient extenuating circumstances can be shown to exist...What is interesting about the new ethical context offered by highly complex systems is that their very architecture constitutes vast webs of extenuating circumstances. Seemingly valid excuses can be manufactured wholesale for anyone situated in the network. Thus, the very notion of moral agency begins to dissolve.
Joseph Weizenbaum (1988) offers us a more concrete and Kafkaesque characterization of Nobody:
Computer personnel believe in certain fairy tales. These include: 1) Computers are merely tools; 2) People control computers rather than the reverse...[S]everal questions should be asked about any computer system. These include: 1) Who controls it? 2) Who designed it?
3) Who said they wanted the system? 4) Who has authority over it? When the final question of who is held accountable for its operation is asked, the answer is no one.
But how, exactly, are we to represent the Rule of Nobody? What does Its problem space look like? Surely it is something more than an anthropomorphized “rational actor”? But as Argyris and Schön note, there is something “paradoxical [that] organizational learning is not merely individual learning, yet organizations learn only through the experience and actions of individuals” (1978, p.9). Similarly, in How Institutions Think (1986), Mary Douglas--again, “paradoxically”--titles her first chapter “Institutions Cannot Have Minds of Their Own.” And yet another decade later, Metzger and Dalton (1996) document the continuing controversy—and confusion—over what it means to hold organizations morally accountable for “their” actions.
Perhaps we are not asking the right questions. After all, paradoxes, (ethical) dilemmas, and other forms of deep confusion cannot be resolved within their own frames of reference. So what if, in Douglas’ words, we were to alter our representations of moral philosophy from assuming “free choice is the essential condition” to centering on “conditions of self-knowledge”? Would realizing the latter
challenge the Rule of Nobody? Would it lessen the chances of our tacit compliance--our “intent by default”--in evil yet banal acts?
Such possibilities confront at least two obstacles; one is philosophical, the other practical. First, there is very little in Western epistemology that permits one to conclude that “’Know Thyself’ is the most essential of all conditions for meaningful and responsible engagement when thinking about the future” (Michael, 1985). Second, if “Know Thyself” were a reasonably straightforward business, most of us would be saints.
A Modest Exercise
Simone Weil said that morality was a matter of attention
not of will. We need a new vocabulary of attention.
Iris Murdoch
We must not cease from exploration.
And the end of all our exploring will be
to arrive where we began and to know
the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot
We shall first describe, then “explore” the phenomenon of organizational distortions of information. The exploration is our primary concern. Information distortion --an often lethal variant of the Rule of Nobody--provides the vehicle. The point of the exploration is to develop a “new vocabulary of attention.”
Describing It[2]
Most of us first encountered the phenomenon of organizational distortions of information when, as kids, we played that game where what you whisper to the person next to you is nearly unrecognizable by the time it circles back to you. As adults, all of us are caught up in variations of this game to varying degrees.
The insidious and sometimes catastrophic consequences of organizational distortions of information have been the subject of extensive inquiry. This is especially so due to the distressing frequency with which well-intended, competent leaders and managers continue to make fatal mistakes which upon hindsight seem to be obvious errors.
Examples abound. The more notorious include the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the “march of folly” into the Vietnam War, the space shuttle disaster, the Hubble Telescope foul up. Less catastrophic variations occur regularly in both public and private sectors.
Consider a banal example. Someone in your outfit informs you that unfavorable information has been omitted in a report evaluating a new product line. Succumbing to an urge to be ethical, you determine to find out who is responsible.
But how are we to represent this “problematic situation”? For that is what it is. Like “problems,” almost everyone agrees something has gone wrong. Unlike problems, it is by no means clear, agreed upon, or both, how and why things have gone wrong.
Exploring It
Since explorers don’t know where they are going until after they’ve been where they’ve gone, we shall deliberately try to resist seeking solutions to the problematic situation of information distortions. This is because seeking understanding is a qualitatively different strategy from seeking solutions. And seeking understanding is at the heart of the activity of thinking as such.
In seeking to understand what is entailed by seeking to understand, we shall honor T.S. Eliot’s admonition by exploring a specific sequence of boxes or representations. This particular sequence requires us take less and less as given--by anybody in general and by Nobody in particular--thereby expanding our understandings of individual moral response-abilities. Yet, “paradoxically,” such explorations also threaten to peel away those layers of insulation that protect us from exercising individual moral response-abilities.
This essentially means that Hannah Arendt re-presents for us the primary paradox of the world’s great monotheistic religions—the coexistence of good and evil. To her lasting credit, she (re)introduces us to crucial relationships between cognition, intention, and morality.
Figure 1 is my attempt to honor Arendt’s fundamental insight. It is a map for exploring individual moral response-abilities based on expanding our “vocabulary of attention.“
Figure 1
Objective Subjective
“Outside-In” + “Inside-Out”
“Actor” “Author”
SystemicIIIII
SyntheticHard Systems Soft Systems
Holistic Functionalist Causality Intentionalist Causality
Darwin Durkheim
+
ReductionistIIV
Analytic Individual Rational ChoiceMindfulness
Atomistic Mechanistic Causality Con-science
Descartes Damasio
As we circle through the above quadrants, we will repeatedly ask:
1: Who is making decisions (who is distorting information)?
2: How is this being done (what are the processes of information distortion)?
3: Why or on what basis (what are the reasons or purposes fueling these
processes)?
4: So what does each re-presentation reveal in terms of individual moral
response-abilities?
The “+” signs mean we’ll try to transcend either/or traps--e.g., “Systems thinking is the fusion of analysis and synthesis” (Ackoff, 1993). And the arrows (“”) mean that we don’t “end up” in any Quadrant. Indeed, if we end up anywhere, it will be where we began.
QUADRANT I: NOBODY IS SOMEBODY
The characteristic way of management that we have taught...is to take a complex system, divide it into parts, and then try to manage each part as well as possible. And if that's done, the system as a whole will behave well... [to be continued in Quadrant II]. Russell Ackoff
Our first representation or box (Quadrant I) is that of the “the rational actor.”[3] Economic analysis, political theory, and most modern moral theories, for example, inhabit this quadrant. René Descartes is its leading philosopher and Issac Newton its principal architect. Its root metaphor is the machine. Mechanistic causality structures this problem space, hence the form of solutions.
The below schematic, a humorous if all-too-familiar representation of organizational distortions of information, serves to illustrate essential presuppositions of Quadrant I or what Ackoff terms “machine-age” thinking. In this problem space, somebody or something causes--conspires to, should be blamed for--the untoward effects of organized distortions of information.
[insert Figure 2]
Quadrant I representations remain many (most?) people’s favored way of explaining “What happened?” This is especially so in turbulent times such as ours when conspiracy theories, scapegoating, and other virulent blame games flourish.
Key Questions
So, who is making the key decisions? How is this done? On what basis or for what purposes? And given this genre of representations, what does it mean to be a morally responsible person? The answers are familiar to a fault.
Some “entity with attributes”--an individual or anthropomorphized organization--is responsible. It makes little difference whether the individual is being rational or irrational, emotional or unemotional, satisficing or maximizing. The point is that (only) individuals make decisions.
And how are such decisions made? What are the mechanisms or decision processes? “General Linear Reality.”[4] Subject-verb-object: I choose this, unmoved movers, solitary wills. On the other side of the same coin, this-does-that: the “concussion” metaphor for causal relationships, independent and dependent variables, regression analyses, “fishbone” causal maps.
On what (moral) basis? To what end(s) or for what purpose(s)? Maximizing or satisficing personal utility or more specific “preferences” or “values”; living out suppressed childhood needs; responding to stimuli; enhancing self-esteem. The point is that nothing transcends the rational actor.
Therefore, what does it mean to be morally responsible? That depends on the context. In the context of Quadrant I it means “be rational”--think through the likely consequences of alternative choices, avoid getting emotional, weight alternatives by (“good”) values or principles. The larger point is that cognitive processes are goal oriented; thinking functions as problem solving.[5] Thus moral reasoning is a “skill.”
Iris Murdoch summarizes Quadrant I’s ideal type.
[W]e derive from Kant, and also Hobbes and Bentham through John Stuart Mill, a picture of the individual as a free rational will...He is morally speaking monarch of all he surveys and totally responsible for his actions. Nothing transcends him. His moral language is a practical pointer, the instrument of his choices, the indication of his preferences. His inner life is resolved into his acts and choices, and his beliefs, which are also acts, since a belief can only be identified through its expression. His moral arguments are references to empirical facts backed up by decisions. The only moral word which he requires is "good" (or "right"), the word which expresses decision. His rationality expresses itself in awareness of the facts, whether about the world or about himself. The virtue which is fundamental to him is sincerity. (Murdoch, Against Dryness: A Polemical Sketch )
None of this should come as a surprise. We have been explaining and justifying things more or less within Quadrant I’s “problem space” for at least three hundred years.[6] And so it should also come as no surprise that while the considerable research on organizational distortions of information has contributed to our understandings of this phenomenon, there has been a marked tendency for managers--as well as consultants and academics--to focus on isolated factors and not on the broader organizational contexts that foster these behaviors. This, of course, “every schoolboy knows....”[7]
QUADRANT II: Nobody IS THE SYSTEM
[cont’d from Quad I]...and that's absolutely false because it's possible to improve the performance of each part taken separately and destroy the system at the same time.
Russell Ackoff
In our official [and flawed] theories of causation we typically suppose that all causal relations must be between discrete events ordered sequentially in time.
John Serle
Information distortions need not be solely attributed to “causes” such as the malicious intent or hidden agendas of individuals and groups. Such factors clearly can and do exacerbate information distortions, but they are neither necessary nor sufficient to account for all sorts of moral lapses including monstrous deeds.
Quadrant II expands our vocabulary of attention by re-presenting organizational distortions of information as systemic distortions. Here, the root metaphor is biological--the adapting organism. Systems behave as if guided by “invisible hands,” as if they have purposes or “attractors” of their own. Functionalist causality structures this problem space, hence the form of solutions. This means that micromotives cannot be inferred from macrobehaviors and vice versa--patterns of interactions “emerge” which cannot be fully explained by examining “parts.” Such patterns feature feedback loops or circular causality. In this domain, Darwin remains dominant.
Sound functionalist explanations have a demonstrated and growing relevance in our modern times. Major accomplishments include explaining the mechanisms of our immune system (Cziko, 1995), the intriguing possibility of understanding consciousness as an emergent reality (Serle, 1995), and the distinct likelihood that the vast majority of organizational problems are systemic in nature.[8]
Be careful
Moving from Quadrant I to Quadrant II requires care and rigor; thinking “holistically” is not as easy as many seem to believe. William O’Brien is blunt: “We are absolutely illiterate in subjects that require us to understand systems and interrelationships” (Senge, 1994, p.14). So it should come as no surprise that a large number of sloppy and often self-serving functionalist explanations have proliferated over the years.[9] At best, these explain “the system” as if it functions like a big individual--Quadrant I explanations decked out in Quadrant II buzzwords. At worst, they equate what is with what ought to be--e.g., the “fit” survive and if you don’t survive you’re not “fit.”