Leslie Pratch on Business, Culture, and the Economy

By Leslie Pratch

As Reinhold Niebuhr points out in Moral Man and Immoral Society, a realistic analysis of the problems of human society reveals a constant, seemingly irreconcilable conflict between the needs of society and the imperatives of conscience.  This conflict can be defined as the conflict between ethics and politics. It is made inevitable by the double focus of the moral life.  One focus is in the inner life of the individual, and the other in the necessities of man’s social life.

From the perspective of society the highest moral ideal is justice (see my previous post on Plato). From the perspective of the individual the highest ideal is unselfishness (see my posts on Murdoch). This conundrum remains unless we accept that society must strive for justice even if it is forced to use means, such as self-assertion, resistance, coercion and other means, non of which can  gain the moral sanction of the most sensitive moral spirit.  The individual must strive to realize his or her life by losing and finding himself in something greater than himself. (The sense of belonging, in my view and among self-psychologists, is a fundamental, biological human need; see also the work of Martha McClintock.)

These two moral perspectives are not mutually exclusive;the contradiction between them is not absolute. But neither are they are easily harmonized.  The most perfect justice cannot be established if the moral imagination of the individual does not seek to comprehend the needs and interests of his fellows.  This moral imagine is what I call empathy. The necessity and possibility of fusing moral and political insights does not completely eliminate certain irreconcilable elements in the two types of morality, internal and external, individual and social.  These elements make for constant confusion but they also add to the richness of human life.  We may best bring our study of ethics and politics to a close by giving them some further consideration.

From the internal perspective the most moral act is one which is actuated by disinterested motives (for more, see my entries on integrity, especially this post and this post.).  From the viewpoint of the author of an action, unselfishness must remain the criterion of the highest morality (a view developed by Iris Murdoch).  For only the agent of an action knows to what degree self-seeking corrupts his socially approved actions.  Society on the other hand makes justice rather than unselfishness its highest moral ideal.  Its aim must be to seek equality of opportunity for all life.  If equality and justice cannot be achieved without the assertion of interest against interest, and without restraint upon the self-assertion of those who infringe upon the rights of their neighbors, then society is compelled to sanction self-assertion and restraint.

Historically, the internal perspective has usually been cultivated by religion.  That follows, according to Niebuhr, because religion proceeds from profound introspection and in the minds of believers, naturally makes good motives the criteria of good conduct.  It may define good motives either in terms of love or of duty but the emphasis is upon the inner springs of action.  Political morality is in the most uncompromising antithesis to religious morality.  Rational morality usually holds an intermediary position between the two.  Rationalism in morals tends to some kind of utilitarianism.  Reason, according to Aristotle, establishes control over all the impulses, egoistic and altruistic, and justifies them both if we avoid excess and observe the golden rule.

Social consequences are not considered in the moral strategy of certain Christian sects. Redemptive social consequences may result in redemptive social consequences, at least within the area of individual and personal relationships. Murdoch states (and I paraphrase):

Forgiveness may not always prompt the wrongdoer to repentance; but yet it may. Loving the enemy may not soften the enemy’s heart; but there are possibilities that it will.  Refusal to assert your own interests against another may not shame him into unselfishness; but on occasion it has done so.  Love and benevolence may not lead to complete mutuality; but it does have that tendency, particularly within the area of intimate relationships.  Human life would, in fact, be intolerable if justice could be established in all relationships only by self-assertion and counter-assertion, or only by a shrewd calculation of claims and counter-claims.  The fact is that love, disinterestedness, and benevolence do have a strong social and utilitarian value, and the place they hold in the hierarchy of virtues is really established by that value, though religion may view them finally from an inner or transcendent perspective.  Where human relations are intimate the way of love may be the only way to justice.  Where rights and interests are closely interwoven, it is impossible to engage in a shrewd and prudent calculation of comparative rights.  Where lives are closely intertwined, happiness is destroyed if it is not shared.  Justice by assertion and counter-assertion therefore becomes impossible.  The friction involved in the process destroys mutual happiness.  Justice by a careful calculation of competing rights is equally difficult, if not impossible.  Interests and rights are too mutual to allow for their precise definition in individual terms.  The very effort to do so is a proof of the destruction of the spirit of mutuality by which alone intimate relations may be adjusted.  The spirit of mutuality can be maintained only by a passion which does not estimate the personal advantages which are derived from mutuality too carefully.  Love must strive for something purer than justice if it would attain justice. Egoistic impulses are so much more powerful than altruistic ones that if the latter are not given stronger than ordinary support, the justice which even good men design is partial to those who design it.

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Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist who trained at Northwestern Medical School with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors and private equity investors to select and develop executives. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919 or email her at leslie@pratchco.com or visit www.pratchco.com.

By Leslie Pratch

Sissela Bok is formally a sociologist and a philosopher but calls herself a field practical ethicist. She certainly comes from good stock: she is the daughter of two Nobel Laureates: the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal and the politician and diplomat Alva Myrdal. She also happened to marry the former Dean of the Harvard Law School, the much loved Derek Bok. To avoid confusion with her husband, I will refer to her with her first and last name.

In the middle portion of Sissela Bok’s career she started her inquiry into lying among medical doctors. Like Niebuhr, the subject of my previous posts, she maintains that good intentions on their own usually do not create good results.

Sissela Bok wrote her first book in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam. At the time, she noted that trust in public officials had gone down since Eisenhower. Oliver North who was open about why he thought it had been a good idea to lie opened up the debate in philosophy–and to some extent social science–as to whether there is more lying than meets the eye that goes on among public officials. She hesitates to estimate the prevalence of lying because a successful lie is one that is never found out. (This is the same problem I face in my research: how do my clients and I know if an executive I recommend against hiring would have been successful had he been hired?) How do you know if someone is lying if the lie is not discovered?

Sissela Bok then started to ask how public officials justify lies. One rationalization is “national security”–one vast umbrella. When exactly does national security justify lying? In war, lying to enemies may be necessary to survive, but that does not make it necessary always to lie to adversaries and citizens.

Another rationalization is that lying serves the greater good. If it helps a politician get elected, the end justifies the means. (Tell that to Elizabeth Edwards.) And some politicians justify their lies because they believe their knowledge is superior and the public is ignorant. (Great: Let’s ruin democracy and save a few jobs.)

Another category is the white lie. A white lie has no harmful effect. It is a huge category that has nothing to do with public service but is widespread in general life.

But Sissela Bok believes we lie far more often than justified though there are some exceptional categories where saying what you don’t mean to mislead others is indeed for the good but these exceptions must be very narrow. We must temper the  impulse to expand the realm of “it is not harming others,” to think of oneself as exceptional.

She cites Kant who said (and I paraphrase), “What do you say to an official who is coming intending to kill your friend who is hiding in your house, and your friend is an innocent person?” In more recent times, it might be a Nazi hunting a Jew. (Recall Kant was born April 22, 1724). Kant said that even then you must not lie. Bok thinks that one can lie under those circumstances. Saving the life of an innocent person is more important than not lying.

But it would be better if you could do something besides lie. You could bore or distract the official so that he forgot about his reason for coming to get your friend. She imagined that the brilliant, articulate Kant would have managed to detain the murderer long enough for the friend to escape but most of us are not capable of that kind of delay tactic.

Another exceptional circumstance is games where lying is expected because those are the rules. But that kind of lying is not deceptive. Finally, a third category is where there is literally nothing at stake–a truly white lie but even there we should use our imagination to say things that are not deceptive. As an example, if your spouse asks how do you like my tie, one might say “I think the brown tie goes better with the blue suit.” She doesn’t have to lie. The three exceptional circumstances are saving the life of an innocent fruebd: the second is a game; the third is an innocuous white lie.

What’s the big deal about lying? In my book, it boils down to the Golden Rule and treating others as you would want to be treated yourself. To lie is to set up a bifurcated self, one that lives by a duplicitous set of standards, two (0r more) sets of books).

For Sissela Bok, lying is harmful for two reasons. One, the liar assumes a power over the person to whom he lies. When someone you trusted to tell you the truth lies it feels bad. It harms the relationship. Another person who is harmed is the person who is telling the lie. We know that person cannot be trusted, and that person will have difficulty retaining a team around him or her. In Kant’s last book, The Anthology, he wrote that the only way we know whether we have character is if we know we are trying as hard as we can to be honest with other people and with ourselves. The liar is injured by lying as is the person who is deceived.

Larger considerations also loom, which pertain to trust in general. It is hard to work with individuals you don’t trust. That might be the largest danger of all. We have seen so many scandals in government and on Wall Street. Since Eisenhower, many Americans have lost trust in the institutions originally created to engender social stability, transparency, free markets, a social safety net including access to health care, and democracy in general. That loss of trust makes it harder to work together toward common goals.

Lying erodes the safety and well-being of the community. If you are interested in learning more, see my blog on integrity and its development.

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Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist from the Northwestern Medical School with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance from Chicago Booth and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors of public companies as well as private equity investors to assess and develop executives. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919 or leslie@pratchco.com or www.pratchco.com.

By Leslie Pratch

As I showed in my previous entry, Book 1 of The Republic, presents three different definitions of justice by each of the three speakers. Each definition amounts to locating justice in a different place. What’s interesting is that in Book 2 of The Republic, the two young men, Glaucon who is with Socrates, and his brother Adimantis, start Book 2 by saying in effect, “We weren’t convinced by your argument with Thracymicus, you shut him up but didn’t explain your position so we are going to play the Devil’s advocate and give arguments for tyranny.” They then give two brilliant speeches about the pleasures of injustice (and are a little too convincing in defending tyranny). In effect, they say,

If I were a tyrant, if I didn’t have to get people to agree with me, I would behave without restraint or recognition of the rights of others.

Glaucon defines tyranny in the form of a story. He describes a man, a shepherd, who finds a cave. In the cave he finds a tomb. In the tomb is a mummy with a ring on one of its fingers. Glaucon tales the ring off, he puts it on, and joins the other shepherds. In playing with the ring he suddenly becomes invisible. He then goes to the city, murders the king, and marries the king’s wife. He becomes a tyrant. The moral is if you could do what you want to do with impunity, nobody would be just (transparency).

In Book 4 of The Republic, Socrates gives a fourth definition of justice.  It is to mind your own business but to mind your own business is to be yourself. Justice is the same as being integral and that means coming to terms with your own desires, to come to terms with things of which you are ashamed.  He tells a story, where outside the city walls were the bodies who have been executed. The man in this story wants to see the bodies. He is really torn to see and to look but he is embarrassed by his own impulse.

All of these difficulties are internal difficulties.  It is only after that that Socrates can talk about justice as coming to terms with your own impulses and integrating all your impulses.

My understanding of Book 1 of The Republic is that each of the definitions of justice defines a particular region.  The first one is pay your debts and tell the truth, you can go to the other world with a clean conscience, Cephalus doesn’t want to owe anything to man or to god, if you die you can’t pay them back so you better pay your debts before you die. Socrates asks, is the only debt you can occur a money debt, can you incur debts of obligation, does having children incur debt, he introduces a broader sense of what you owe to others, and the text moves to a broader sense of relating to others. If you care about the friend who gave you a dagger who asks for it back in a deranged state, you would not give back something you took. Cephalus’ son says you are supposed to give to each what is due to them, so that means you are good to friends and do harm to enemies, so he has expanded the notion of what a debt could be and that means you think of people as other than friends or enemies. But this definition too breaks down.

All executives are competing with other companies. They are not looking out for the bottom line of a competing CEO; they are competitors. They have to compete within the law but it’s perfectly reasonable to compete.  You may be peers and even friends; nevertheless if you are CEO of GM, you are going to go after Ford’s business. What’s wrong is if you do it unjustly but if done justly, competition is reasonable, so at that point, friends and enemies turn into communities and the defense of the community and that community has rules and regulations. The question then becomes, on what basis are the rules made and on whose benefit, and if they are made for the benefit of the person on top and to the detriment of the people who are working for him, then that man has no friends at all. That is what happens when you die, that sense that you are on your own out there, alone in the universe, we die alone, which prompts the notion you don’t want  to dies without any sense that those you have dealt with have been dealt with properly and we are back to Chephalus. Every person is in relation to other discrete individuals and is in relation to a community, a collective whole, and in that context you get the definition of integrity, a full operating whole.

Give back what you have taken is the first one; the next one is dealing with others, and the third is how do members of the community relate to each other, what is the basis by which they relate to each other?  It is by law, but the law prevents you from doing some things and encourages you to do other things; the law may require you to do things that are against the self-interests of the citizens, and that means that the rulers are a friend to nobody and the enemy of everybody.  What do you owe to others?  To a friend?  To an enemy?  To someone with whom you are engaged in a productive enterprise?  What is to the good of the enterprise?  What is the good of your relations to others in the enterprise?  The three dimensions, individual, interpersonal, and state, lead to the other, giving rise to the sense of integrity as entailing relationships to a community, and for executives, as entailing relations to a ruler, being in charge, who has power to make the rules, to head policy, to enforce the rules.

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Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist from the Northwestern Medical School with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance from Chicago Booth and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors of public companies as well as private equity investors to assess and develop executives. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919 or leslie@pratchco.com or www.pratchco.com.

By Leslie Pratch

In the next few entries I want to take the reader through my reading of  Books I, II, and IV of The Republic as a means of showing how I applied Socrates reasoning to coming up with a definition of integrity.

When Socrates presents his own account of justice in books II-IV, he does so by explicitly locating it in both the individual and the city-state; but what about interpersonal relationships? This dimension is a crucial dimension expressed through relationships with friends. Although each definition of justice in Book I may be itself inadequate, I think the three definitions do succeed as an integrated whole.

For example, the sophist Protagoras says honesty is the best policy because it pays. The trouble with such calculated prudence is that if it doesn’t pay, there is no reason to be honest.

Socrates points out that whatever promotes the consensus of the community and in such a way increases communal security and well-being effects progress in the moral order. But there is no reason to suppose that what works for one community will work for another; each community defines the virtues in terms of its own particular social needs.

Truth, beauty, and goodness were the three highest human values in ancient Greek philosophy, the fundamental and ultimate goals of human action and aspiration.

In matters of morality we cannot live comfortably with ethical relativity. This is a constant theme of my work. I cannot tolerate it emotionally when you call heroism what I call terrorism. Because we are dealing with sentiments, with feelings, moral judgment is an immediate, direct response to the situation.  When you and I radically disagree in our moral judgments and I become uncertain about the rightness of my judgment, I have an emotional conflict.  At the very moment that I assert my moral judgment, my awareness that you disagree with me makes me doubt my judgment. I may be right or I may be wrong but I cannot be both at the same time.  I must at least attempt to escape this situation by finding a moral standard. That is why I emphasize the need to come up with an immovable moral standard, even if Aristotle deemed the task impossible.

The problem is getting rid of prejudice. If that is not possible, we can have no standard of taste or virtue, merely a plurality of tastes and a multiplicity of standards, each of which is essentially a set of prejudices. Hume claims that some works of art are not addressed to particular audiences; they are addressed to the public, to anyone, no matter where or when or under what cultural conditions that person lives. Each of us can stand in that position; any of us can respond to a work not from the perspective of a man or woman in general.

In Book 1 of The Republic, Socrates moves from speaker to speaker.  Cephalus says justice is to tell the truth and pay debts. Polemarchus says it is to help friends and harm enemies. Thrasymachus says it is the interest of the stronger. Each definition posits two major undefined terms or pairs of terms: “Truth” and “debt” for Cephalus; “friends” and “enemies” and “helping” and “harming” for Polemarchus, and “interest” and “strength” for Thrasymachus.

When Socrates exposes the limitations of Cephalus’ definition, Polemarchus tries to help Cephalus by redefining debt to mean helping and harming rather than a specific sum of money, and in the process he shifts the locus of justice from the individual human being, where Cephalus has put it, to interpersonal relationships. Cephalus speaks of individuals as just or unjust in character. Polemarchus speaks of acting justly or unjustly toward others. Polemarchus simply ignores Cephalus’ concern for the truth.

Enter Thrasymachus. He redefines what is helpful or harmful to mean what is in one’s own interest or against it. He ignores Polemarchus’ concern with friends and enemies. In the process he shifts the locus of justice again, this time from interpersonal relationships to the political, to the relationship between the rulers and subjects in a community.

In each case, the shift in the locus of justice arises initially from a difficulty in the previous speaker’s understanding of justice. Cephalus is centrally concerned with whether or not an individual is just, but that very concern leads to difficulty with a friend. Polemarchus’ concern with interpersonal relationships leads to the conclusion that we should never harm anyone, a conclusion which, if taken seriously, would make all war unjust, making it impossible for any community to defend itself.  Thracymicus finds such a position enraging. His  concern for self-interest is expressed in communal (political) terms. But by focusing centrally and exclusively on the political meaning of justice and its locus in the city-state, Thracymicus brings us to the image of the perfectly unjust man, at war with everyone, including himself, wretched in the extreme. That brings us full circle by the end of Book 1, back to the concern of Cephalus with the quality of the life of the individual.

In terms of content, Book 1 is circular in structure: Each definition of justice tries to restrict justice to a particular area – the individual, interpersonal relationships, or the city-state. But each notion of justice meets a difficulty precisely where it needs to expand beyond the restriction. Because the movement is circular, all one can conclude at the end of Book 1 is that despite the differences all three definitions of justice, they all suffer from the same fundamental weakness. Each unsuccessfully attempts to limit justice to one specific area of human life.

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Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist from the Northwestern Medical School with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance from Chicago Booth and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors of public companies as well as private equity investors to assess and develop executives. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919 or leslie@pratchco.com or www.pratchco.com.

By Leslie Pratch

Iris Murdoch was a philosopher and novelist. The most notable of her essays in philosophy is the second of three in The Sovereignty of Good. Here, she illuminates the study of ethics through art. The problem, as she sees it, is that there “is no metaphysical unity in human life: all is subject to mortality and chance. Yet we continue to dream of unity. Art is our most ardent dream.”

For Murdoch, morality shows a particular kind of unity best understood by seeing what is going on. In this way, her philosophy resembles that of John Dewey, Jonathan Edwards, and H. Richard Niebuhr. For Murdoch, the Good cannot be defined owing to the “unsystematic and inexhaustible variety of the world and the pointlessness of virtue.” Here, she is simply expressing a deontological view rather than a teleological one. She judges the morality of an action based on the action’s adherence to a rule or duty. In so doing, she follows the tradition of Immanuel Kant

“A genuine sense of mortality enables us to see virtue as the only thing of worth; and it is impossible to limit and foresee the ways in which it will be required of us.” She continues, “We are largely mechanical creatures, the slaves of relentlessly strong selfish forces the nature of which we scarcely comprehend. At best, we behave well in areas where this can be done fairly easily and let other areas of possible virtue remain undeveloped. There are perhaps in the case of every human being insuperable psychological barriers to goodness. The self is a divided thing and the whole of it cannot be redeemed any more than it can be known.”

Freud would certainly agree. The project of psychoanalysis is to learn what we have repressed, to come to terms with our complete humanity. In such a way, we liberate ourselves to a greater or lesser extent from the compulsions that drive us. This relative autonomy allows us to see reality clearly. Like Freud, however, Murdoch recognizes the impossibility of this task: the only closure possible is in death.

“As moral agents we have to try to see justly, to overcome prejudice, to avoid temptation, to control and curb imagination, to direct reflection.” The discipline involved in being moral is a continual exercise to see reality. “To silence and expel self, to contemplate and delineate nature with a clear eye, is not easy and demands a moral discipline.”

Like Plato, Murdoch believes that good exists but it is impossible to define its essence. And like Freud, Murdoch assumes that it is better to know what is real than to be in a state of fantasy or illusion.

But human beings cannot bear much reality. The appreciation of beauty is the easiest available spiritual exercise and an adequate entry into the good life because “it is the checking of selfishness in the interest of seeing the real.”

“Ignorance, muddle, fear, wishful thinking, lack of tests often make us feel that moral choice is something arbitrary, a matter for personal will rather than for attentive study. Our attachments tend to be selfish and strong, and the transformation of our loves from selfishness to unselfishness is sometimes hard even to conceive of. Yet is the situation really so different?  Should an unhappy marriage be continued for the same of the children? The love which brings the right answer is an exercise of justice and realism and really looking. The difficulty is to keep the attention fixed upon the real situation and to prevent it from returning surreptitiously to the self with consolations of self-pity, resentment, fantasy and despair. The background condition of virtue, good habit, and dutiful action, is a just mode of vision and a good quality of consciousness. It is a task to come to see the world as it is. A philosophy which leaves duty without a context and exalts the idea of freedom and power as a separate top level value ignores this task and obscures the relation between virtue and reality. We act rightly when the time comes not out of strength of will but out of the quality of our usual attachments and with the kind of energy and discernment which we have available. And to this the whole activity of our consciousness is relevant.”

This is what Murdoch means by the “pointlessness of virtue.”

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Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist from Northwestern University Medical School with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors and private equity investors to select and develop executives. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919 or email her at leslie@pratchco.com or visit www.pratchco.com.