Whats wrongwithus
- 1. The failure of philosophy and economics and the corruption of almost everything else John Bardi Penn State Mont Alto Professional Development Day 1/5/2012
- 2. Who Am I? Am I a fallen angel? If so, then I should be discouraged and deeply ashamed. Am I a rising animal? If so, then there is every reason to be proud and encouraged despite what I see transpiring around me.
- 3. Where Am I? In the middle of reality. The order of reality (to speak in a medieval fashion) is as follows: First Being, then Truth, and then Goodness
- 4. This seems ridiculously abstract. Why is it important to prioritize Being? It is important to clarify that reality precedes knowing to make it clear that while knowing may shape and influence the current disposition of reality, it does not create reality. It follows, then, that truth reveals reality. Of course, some people resist truth, mostly by claiming already to possess it. Three main strategies for doing so are (1) to feign a lack of interest, (2) to close the mind, and (3) to adopt an attitude of know-it-all certainty. Each of these cognitive postures prevents the knowing subject from practicing the humble silence that is the prerequisite to genuine knowing.
- 5. I am very practical and don’t have the time for Philosophy. Also, I am not sure that your ideas are compatible with my ideology. Lacking interest in philosophy on the grounds that you are “practical” means that the assumptions operating beneath the level of your ordinary awareness will remain hidden. As a result, your inner world and experience will continue to be programmed by unconscious psycho/cultural constructs. Adopting an ideology means that you are no longer listening to “Being” so it can inform your “knowing.” Instead, ideologues projects their “knowing” upon Being.
- 6. How Should I Live? “With a doctrine of In obedienc commandments or e to duties…there is always comman the danger of arbitrarily d? drawing up a list of requirements and losing or sight of the human person who “ought” to Constantl do this or that.” Joseph y Pieper, “The Four Cardinal Virtues” creating goodnes
- 7. OK, so why are we experiencing what seems to be an ethical crisis? This is the question of the day, and there is no shortage of people eager to affirm that we are in the midst of an ethical crisis. Here is a somewhat typical statement from someone who spent his life working on Wall Street, Michael Thomas: “I have lived what now, at 75, is starting to feel like a long life. If anyone asks me what has been the great American story of my lifetime, I have a ready answer. It is the corruption, money-based, that has settled like some all- enveloping excremental mist on the landscape of our hopes, that has permeated every nook of any institution or being that has real influence on the way we live now. Sixty years ago, if you had asked me, on the basis of all that I had been taught, whether I thought this condition of general rot was possible in
- 8. The Chinese Fortune Cookie Just as I started to work on this presentation, I got the following fortune cookie: “Yesterday’s philosophy is today’s common sense.” It struck me that this thought relates to our topic because what we today think of as “ethics” was largely created at the beginning of the modern world in the 17th and 18th centuries as speculative ideas. Accordingly, it may be that the problem today is not that we are failing to be ethical. Rather, it is that the entire way we think about ethics is increasingly obsolete and inadequate to the challenges of our time. In other words, our ethical “common sense” is inadequate and our unconscious ethical “defaults” are obsolete.
- 9. Are people less ethical than they used to be? Speaking generally, the opposite is the case. If ethical awareness is the recognition by an individual of the rights and dignity inherent in the existence of other individuals, then that awareness is growing globally and is at an all-time historical high.
- 10. This is crazy! If people are more ethical than ever, why so many spectacular public ethical failures? Ethical behavior is derivative, being the natural result of ethical awareness (i.e. of understanding the priority of the common good and of loving one’s neighbor as oneself). The problem, then, is not our behavior but our awareness. And in terms of ethical awareness, it seems that the most powerful people in our society have the least evolved awareness. Also our cultural “defaults—our unconscious way of thinking about goodness, rights, duties, and freedom—are increasingly obsolete. And finally, the powers-that-be have learned to take advantage of the way our brain works to manipulate us more effectively, keeping many of us uninformed and effectively deluded.
- 11. Please explain what it means to say our cultural defaults, especially in the area of ethics, are obsolete. Fair enough. I am working with an evolutionary perspective according to which our understanding is constantly evolving and growing. Many of our mainstream ethical ideas come from the Enlightenment period in which people were struggling to free themselves, especially economically, from the monopolies of Church and State. They therefore emphasized the virtue of self-interest. As Bernard Mandeville put it in 1714 in “The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits,” we benefit the whole when we pursue our private good. In other words, it came to be accepted that we are essentially and by nature inherently selfish, but it was also claimed that that is actually a good thing. Over time this justification of selfishness became so deeply accepted that it began to function as an automatic part of the architecture of
- 12. But isn’t that true? We are naturally selfish, right? Yes, but not exclusively. We are also naturally empathetic and caring. As a result, the particular way we function—mostly selfish or more empathetic and caring—is influenced and shaped by both by cultural expectations and the effort we put in to master ourselves. Significantly, in our culture we are constantly encouraged to work, aim, and struggle to be materially successful. It is thought to be “nice” to be empathetic and caring, but not essential. This is one of our “defaults.”
- 13. Empathy and caring—don’t these go against our nature, which is to be selfish? Recent advances in cognitive science have shown that the capacity for empathy and caring is biologically hard-wired into us. Significantly, this hard-wired biological capacity can be overridden by strong psycho/cultural ideas (what I am calling “defaults”). In spite of this, globally and culturally we are in the profound process of upgrading our “defaults,” moving to what Jeremy Rifkin calls an “empathetic civilization.”
- 14. This process of identifying and upgrading our defaults sounds scary! “My sense is that the fear Indeed it is. that is spreading like a wild Since our defaults fire across America is due, in normally function large part, to a seismic shift beneath the level occurring in our thinking of our ordinary awareness, we about the most cherished are not generally values of American life: our aware of them. notions of However, since freedom, equality, and they filter and “set democracy. In other up” our everyday words, what we are really experience, to discussing—underneath the question them surface of the political and can feel like ideological debates—are our questioning
- 15. Why bother? In order “The ability to recognize oneself in to make the other and the other in oneself is a deeply democratizing experience. a better Empathy is the soul of democracy. world It is an acknowledgment that each for life is unique, unalienable, and deserving of equal consideration in others the public square. The evolution of and a empathy and the evolution of better democracy have gone hand in life for hand throughout history. The more empathic the culture, the more ourselv democratic its values and es. governing institutions. The less
- 16. Watch out! This is getting into politics. Hmm. Aristotle defines politics as the pursuit of human betterment through public means, and he classifies politics as a branch of ethics. The premise implied by your remark is that we should avoid talking about this. How utterly shameful. In their 2009 book, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, epidemiologists Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argue that a society's overall happiness is linked to income equality. They have found that, statistically, it is equality—not more income or more consumption— that makes us healthier and more contented. Their research also shows that less equal societies like the United States have higher rates of anxiety and illness, violence, teenage pregnancies, obesity, and drug abuse. They also have significantly less public trust and greater levels of irrational fear.
- 17. OK. So what does any of this have to do with Penn State? “Emotions are physical. They An exciting development in ethics is the are very complex processes birth of research programs aiming to that occur in our brains, each understand the physical, biological, and serving vital purposes for our evolutionary foundations of morality. A survival. Disgust in particular major discovery is that morality is is the result of our bodily grounded in our bodily experience. We need to avoid toxic substances, especially rotten actually feel right and wrong in our bodies. and poisonous foods. Thus it The stronger the physical feeling, the is most closely associated more potent the strength of our ethical with bodily functions having response. Accordingly, the most to do with digestion. significant moral feeling is our physical At its most basic experience of disgust. level, disgust can be thought Research by Paul Rozin, Jonathan of as the unpleasantness that Haidt, and Rick McCauley have revealed arises when the body is contaminated. The brain has that the physical experience of disgust sensors to recognize when provides the bodily foundation for the the body has been foundational moral concept of purity. contaminated and it uses When something we hold as sacred and specific chemical markers to pure is tainted, we experience the feeling remember events that may of moral disgust. This is more than a have lead to the
- 18. So are you suggesting that people were literally “disgusted” when they heard that children had been sexually abused in the athletic department? Absolutely. Even when we have impeccable table manners, imagine how we might respond if we bite into a piece of moldy and rotting meat. With many people having essentially the same neural response to the Sandusky scandal as literally discovering a rotting rat in their bowl of steaming stew—this explains the extreme response of so many people around the nation. Leaving Penn State for a moment, it is worrying that powerful interests in our society understand this and use this information to manipulate us.
- 19. As Joe Brewer explains: Once we associate those negative feelings with an idea (like 'liberalism' or 'Obama the Muslim') it is very hard to shake off. The explanation for this comes from the field of evolutionary psychology, which explores the evolutionary origins of human thought and behavior. Animals that remember the foods that make them sick are more likely to survive and reproduce. So those who have a long memory of disgust are better adapted for survival. Applied to politics, this phenomenon implies that once a political idea becomes a rotten apple it will remain a rotten apple. Disgust tends to stick around. This is why so much time, effort, and money is dedicated to painting the opposition with negative feelings. If a disgust response can be evoked, it will tend to stay around. Think about the ramifications for gay marriage. If children are taught that homosexuality is disgusting, they will want to stay far away from it. As their moral sentiments develop, they will begin to see homosexuality as a contaminant in society. When thinking about the sacred institution of marriage, they will feel the threat of this impurity to something they want to keep clean. It's pretty easy to mobilize them against this threat because the feeling is long-lasting and easy to activate with a political sound bite. There are two lessons to learn from this. First, if you want someone to support your idea (like the notion that addressing global warming might be a sensible thing to do), don't let it get associated with disgust….Second, if you want someone to oppose an idea, just riddle it with associations to the profane and impure. Do so with references to
- 20. But Penn State, and especially the football program, has long been associated with the highest ethical standards. How could something so unethical have happened there? Obviously this is not a uniquely Penn State problem. However, to understand how this could have happened at Penn State (of all places) let me turn to the recent book, “Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What’s Right” (Bazerman and Tenbrunsel, 2011) Drawing on the findings of evolutionary psychology and the new sub- discipline of “behavioral ethics” the authors take a careful look at how people in fact respond to ethical dilemmas.
- 21. Please continue. First a clarification. Contrary to common opinion, most ethical problems do not take the form of a person deciding between right and wrong. Rather, ethical problems take the form of ethical dilemmas in which two subjectively attractive choices present themselves. Of course, one of the options is often illegal and/or immoral, but it almost always has some sort of compensating “good” attached to it. For example, it is clearly illegal to drink and drive, but those who do so are often primarily choosing to have fun, with breaking of the law and risking an accident being secondary risks they are willing to take. The assumption of current ethics training is that people are fully aware they are facing an ethical dilemma, and the training is designed to encourage them to make the ethical choice. Behavioral ethics has found this assumption to be unfounded. Instead, most people are unaware of the ethical
- 22. What is wrong with encouraging people facing an ethical dilemma to make an appropriate ethical choice? Of course, there is nothing wrong with that. It is just that it is generally ineffective. As the authors say, traditional ethics training programs “lack an understanding of the unintentional yet predictable cognitive patterns that result in unethical behavior.” What behavioral ethics has discovered is that when someone harms another in ways that violate the actor’s own conscious ethical beliefs, he or she is not generally aware of the contradiction. This is what the authors call “bounded ethicality.” As they put it, “…functional boundaries prevent individuals from viewing a problem as an ethical one. Organizations often segment decisions within particular groups or disperse different aspects of a decision to different parts of the organization. As a result, the typical ethical dilemma tends to be viewed as an engineering, marketing, or financial problem, even when the ethical relevance is obvious to other groups.” (16) This gives rise to what the authors call “ethical fading”—that is, where the ethical ramifications “fade” from the decision making process. The result is that decision makers fail to realize the ethical implications of their decisions. Over time, this allows “ethical sinkholes” to develop in organizations. The point is that many (if not most) ethical infractions are “rooted in the intricacies of human psychology rather than integrity.” (21) As a dramatic
- 23. So the suggestion is that structural biases in our thought processes blind us to actions that we would otherwise find unethical? Precisely. The authors point out that “ethical fading” occurs at the moment of decision and not before or after. They distinguish between our “should self,” which is active before and after a decision, and our “want self,” which activates and takes command precisely at the decision point. In other words, at the precise moment of decision, our thoughts are dominated by what we want, not by what we think we should or should not do. Thus, our “should self” predicts we will be ethical and recollects, through unconscious memory revision and shifting standards, that we actually were ethical, but at the actual moment of our decision the “want self,” which does not cognize ethical requirements or
- 24. This sounds like making excuses for misbehavior. It may sound like that but that is not what it is. Again, the authors’ point is that these ethical “blind spots” are the result of how we function cognitively. Another of their points is how our focus in making a decision can blind us to readily available and ethically relevant information. Perhaps you have seen the video of two groups of differently clad people tossing a basketball back and forth. The viewer is asked to count the number of times someone wearing a white shirt touches the basketball. It is difficult but not impossible to keep track of the touches, and it requires focusing on the ball. While the ball is being bounced back and forth among this group of people, someone in a gorilla outfit walks back and forth. Most viewers simply do not see the gorilla! Once revealed, however, it is almost impossible to imagine how one did not see the gorilla. Something
- 25. It sounds too simple. It is more complicated, to be sure. Given that ethical blindness is often rooted in structural biases in our cognition, there is also such a thing as “motivated blindness.” This was likely involved in the Penn State example. Many in the athletic department can claim truthfully they did not know, but also there was a strong motivation for them NOT to know! Also, there is the tendency in our culture to value outcomes over processes, which makes blindness increasingly believable. After all, Paterno was a winner, and it is hard to imagine he would have become
- 26. It seems clear that we need more and harsher punishments for ethical infractions. The authors do not recommend this. Again, the assumption is that people who commit ethical infractions are aware of what they are doing. But this is rarely the case because of “bounded ethicality” and “ethical fading.” In addition, an organization’s formal ethics and compliance programs only represent the tip of the organization’s ethical infrastructure. The informal norms, patterns, and pressures in an organization exert far more influence on employee behavior than any formal efforts could. In the case of Penn State, Joe Paterno’s reputation for integrity made it correspondingly more difficult for anyone in the athletic department to question what was being
- 27. Are you suggesting that the high ethical quality of the football program made a scandal like this more likely? Yes. It is often the case “…behavioral ethics research in that doing good can subtly the areas of moral compensation become a license to and moral equilibrium suggests misbehave. This is that organizational efforts to probably true with respect promote ethical behavior can to Jerry Sandusky. The actually be associated with an authentic good, charitable work he did made his increase in unethical behavior. scandalous, immoral According to these theories, we behavior more feasible, not each maintain a moral identity that less. Also, the stellar we keep in balance by engaging in reputation of the Penn State minor, compensatory moral football program, especially behaviors. Because our moral with regard to compliance behavior is dynamic, when we with often Byzantine NCAA engage in a moral act, we may requirements, made it feel licensed to engage in immoral easier to think that nothing behavior in the future.
- 28. What can be done? The best thing to do is to change yourself, but how? Here are some hints. First, begin to lead an examined life. Cultivate and increase ethical awareness by practicing a regular pattern of introspection. Second, we each operate with what you might call an intuitive system and a rational system. These are often seen in opposition, but they work best in alignment. Books like Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink,” are valuable in validating the intuitive system and bringing it into the light, but they are damaging when they promote intuition over reason. Yes, intuition is fast where reasoning is slow, but our intuitive system is also more likely to be immoral. If your gut reaction differs from the decision you reach after conscious, rational processing, this indicates that something is not right. Don’t simply choose one over the other but work to reconcile the inconsistency. Rehearse ethical challenges ahead of time. For example, imagine someone offers to pay you to lie. “Imagine” how you will respond. Work to become aware of your ethical “defaults.” With this awareness (and with great effort) you can change them. Lacking this awareness, you will be stuck where you are. Finally, stop identifying with your ideas. Allow things (and yourself) to evolve, to change, to move. Be the larger awareness of the process and stop holding on to markers along the way.
- 29. Endeavor always to be kind, caring, compassionate, and loving, reminding yourself that the greatest joy and happiness comes from deep connections to others, not from possessions and material accomplishments (as cool as they may well be!).