Leslie Pratch on Business, Culture, and the Economy

By Leslie Pratch

A friend recently, discussing the types of leadership crises facing companies, upheld GM as a model of ethics but one which suffered from bureaucratic inertia. British Petroleum, on the other hand, he believed, suffered from poor public relations: “The CEO has had his foot in his mouth the entire time.” At its root, however, he did concede that the crisis stemmed from aggressive risk taking. Chalk it up to capitalism, he would say. And Goldman, Sachs, though large, has not even profited during the recession. Its leadership crisis is the public perception of questionable ethics.

I respectfully disagree with my friend’s characterization of GM as a model of ethics. I would criticize all the car companies over the world with lack of ethics including their behavior with suppliers. The one leader in the industry who behaved ethically has been Tom Stallkamp who at Chrysler did NOT extract extract price concessions. (Stallkamp had been a director at Baxter and at BorgWarner and was an Industrial Partner at Ripplewood Holdings L.L.C., a New York private equity group, since 2004, the international auto parts supply sector. Ford was in between Chrysler and GM. If you were a supplier, Ford would wear you out. But if you hung in there, you could collect.

GM used to be one of the best companies in the world. When Ignacio Lopez, the former purchasing czar at GM, came into power the 1980s, GM became adversarial. It killed the goose that laid the golden egg; it killed the supply base. What really was out of whack at GM was its internal cost structure, which critics attributed to Lopez’ aggressive cost cutting. Honda was able to be profitable but did not try to cut a new deal once it entered into a supply agreement. By contrast, under Lopez, GM did a bait and switch, enraging the supply base. GM never went with the one company that had predominance on international bids.

In 1993, Volkswagen hired Lopez shortly before the CEO of GM would announce Lopez would be promoted to head the company’s North American operations. GM accused Lopez of misappropriating trade secrets. German investigators began to probe Lopez and Volkswagen after prosecutors linked Lopez to a cache of secret GM documents investigators found in the apartment of two associates of Lopez. Volkswagen, facing plummeting stock prices, forced Lopez to resign. GM and Volkswagen reached a civil settlement, in which Volkswagen agreed to pay GM $100 million and to buy $1 billion worth of parts from GM.

GM is changing and the changes are culturally pretty deep. It is getting rid of most of the executives who came up the system, and as a result, the culture is changing. GM had destroyed the relationships it had with the supply base, which enabled it to reduce prices while maintaining high internal costs.

The automotive and heavy truck industry has a used car dealership mentality, a mentality which permeates the entire industry-up to the CEO. What has been lacking is trust, which has forced both the suppliers and the car companies to talk out of both sides of their mouths.

But now that GM has led the way by hiring leaders from outside the industry, the United States may have a shot at a viable automotive industry. One can hope.
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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

The belief in that hard work and success were virtues as measured by socioeconomic status is certainly not unique to America as we have entered a global economy. What is unique to America is the believe that growth is sustainable. That belief must be challenged. New means to generate growth must be created in order to devise the most prudent, compassionate, and enduring civil liberties, communal well being, and social goods from which we all benefit.

The two dominant strains of thought in the United States have historically been Calvinist and Jeffersonian.  Niebuhr writes on the problem of the “resolution of potential conflicts of interest and power in the community, the strain of thought most perfectly expressed by James Madison combined Christian realism in the interpretation of human motives and desires with Jefferson’s passion for liberty.”  The difference between Madison and Jefferson “is symbolized in the distinction between the presuppositions of the Declaration of Independence and of the Constitution of the United States” (which Jefferson and Madison inspired).

Jefferson’s vision was of a harmonious society in which government would interfere as little as possible with the economic ambitions of the individual.  He presumed these ambitions would be moderate and that satisfying them without friction with the neighbor would be guaranteed by the wide opportunities of the new continent.

Madison feared the potential tyranny of government as much as Jefferson; but he understood the need for government much more.  The Constitution protects the citizen against abuses of government, not so much by keeping government weak as by introducing the principle of balance of power into government.

Madison’s most persuasive arguments for a federal union was that a wide community would so diffuse interests and passions as to prevent the welter of political strife that plagues small communities.

Some of our social peace must be accredited to the fluid class structure of American society.  I believe that the American class structure will become more fixed and the stratification of wealth will only increase as we move toward the final limits of an expanding economy.  The fluidity of the American class structure is primarily the consequence of a constantly expanding economy. How can Americans have the opportunity to jump levels of wealth if our government does not remain a democratic republic?

Common sense tells us that democracy itself prevents either the Jeffersonian or the Calvinist strategy from being carried through to its logical conclusion. The essence of each position contains a core truth; yet each position becomes false, precisely when it is carried through too consistently.

The element of truth in each creed is required to do full justice to human being’s real situation. Every basically healthy human being has the potential in theory to transcend the social and historical process sufficiently to make it possible to contrive, deliberately, common ends of life, particularly the end of justice. Inadvertence and the coincidence of private desires one their own will not achieve common ends.

On the other hand, we are simply and inevitably too immersed in the turbulence of interest and passion in history. If we survey the total process, it is is too short-term and limited to justify the endowment of any group or institution of “planners” with complete power.  The disinterest of their idealism and the pretensions of their science is suspect.  The controversy between those who plan justice and order and those who trust in freedom to establish is irresolvable (a theme to which I return again and again). This belief underscores the difficulties of achieving an integrated self, as each individual is pulled by self interest and concern and concern for an interest in others. Every healthy society will live with that tension and will prove its health by preventing either side from gaining complete victory.

The Puritan attitude toward the expanding opportunities of American life were historically three elements of the situation, of which two were derived from the creed of our Founding Fathers, and the third from the environment, gradually changed The third element was that once the first hardships had been endured it became obvious that the riches of the New Continent promised remarkably high standards of well-being.  These were accepted as “uncovenanted mercies.” As Niebuhr states in The Irony of American History:

“We live in a more comfortable and plentiful manner than ever we did expect.”  This confession exposes the lack of material motives among the first Puritans and their gratitude for the unexpected material favor of the new ecology.  From that day forward, it has remained one of the most difficult achievements for our nation to recognize the the good fortune upon which our situation rests.

If either moral pride or the spirit of rationalism tries to draw every element in an historic situation into rational coherence, and persuades us to establish a direct congruity between our good fortune and our virtue or skill we will inevitably claim more for our contribution to our prosperity that the facts warrant.  This has remained a source of moral confusion in American life.  For, from the later Puritans to the present day we have variously attributed American prosperity to our superior diligence, our greater skill or (more recently) to our more fervent devotion to the ideals of freedom.  We thereby have complicated our spiritual problem for the days of adversity which we are bound to experience.

In Calvinist thought prosperity as a mark of divine favor is closely related to the idea that it must be sought as part of a godly discipline of life.  The thesis of Max Weber and Talcott Parsons thesis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was that the “intra-mundane asceticism” of Calvinism was responsible for creating the standards of diligence, honesty and thrift which lie at the foundation of our capitalistic culture. The descent from Puritanism to Yankee in America was a rapid one.  Prosperity which had been sought in the service of God was now sought for its own sake.

Jeffersonians believed prosperity and well-being should be sought as the basis of virtue.  The Puritans regarded virtue as the basis of prosperity rather than prosperity as the basis of virtue.  The fusion of these two forces created a preoccupation with the material circumstances of life which expressed a more consistent bourgeois ethos than that of even the most advanced nations of Europe.

In 1835 De Tocqueville wrote “American preachers are constantly referring to the earth.  … To touch their congregations they always show them how favorable religious opinion is to freedom and public tranquility; and it is often difficult to ascertain from their discourses whether the principal object of religion is to obtain eternal felicity or prosperity in this world.”

De Tocqueville contrasted the extroverted activities of our “democracy” with the purer culture of the more traditional world. In ascribing preoccupation with the material basis of life to democracy de Tocqueville may not do justice to all aspects of the issue but he does put his finger on an unsolved problem of our democracy.

The character of our particular democracy was founded on a vast continent, expanding culturally with a seemingly-endless expanding frontier. Certainly this character created new frontiers of opportunity when former geographic frontiers ended. We used to believe, implicitly, ethical and social problem of a just distribution of the privileges of life would be solved by increasing the privileges that make an equitable distribution easier, or which render a lack of equity less noticeable. In this abundance the least privileged members of the community are still privileged, compared with less wealthy members.

Yet our culture has paid a considerable price for improving social tensions by constantly expanding production.  It has created illusions about the ease with which the optimization of interests of the individual and society can be made on a social basis.  These illusions make our religious, our secular, our social, and our political theories sentimental. They have also created a culture which makes “living standards” the final norm of the good life.

What do you think? Is growth sustainable?

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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

In The Irony of American History, Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that Lincoln’s “brooding sense of charity was derived from a religious awareness of another dimension of meaning than that of the immediate political conflict.”  “Both sides read the same Bible and pray to the same God.  The prayers of both could not be answered – that of neither has been answered fully.” His thinking reflect the psychological autonomy and integrative capacity so fundamental to the active coping style. Posts speaking to these twin characteristics will appear later this year. Niebuhr continues:

Lincoln’s awareness of the element of pretense in the idealism of both sides was rooted in his confidence in an over-arching providence whose purposes partly contradicted yet not irrelevant to the moral issues of the conflict.  “The Almighty has His own purposes.” Yet he also saw that such purposes could not annul the moral purposes of men who were “Firm in the right as God gives us to see the right.”  This combination of moral resoluteness about the immediate issues with a religious awareness of another dimension of meaning and judgment must be regarded as almost a perfect model of the difficult but not impossible task of remaining loyal and responsible toward the moral treasures of a free civilization on the one hand while yet having some religious vantage point over the struggle.  Surely it was this double attitude which made the spirit of Lincoln’s, “with malice toward none; with charity for all” possible.  There can be no other basis for true charity; for charity cannot be induced by lessons from copybook texts.  It can proceed only from a “broken spirit and a contrite heart.”

Good and evil are always intertwined in history.  Tragic choices and dilemmas abound.  The Christian (and perhaps the Jewish though I would want to check out this surmise with a Jewish scholar) faith does not regard the tragic as the final element in human existence.  Niebuhr believed that the tragic motif is subordinated to the ironic one because evil and destructiveness are not inevitable consequence of the exercise of human creativity.  He believed that always there exists the ideal possibility that man will break and transcend the harmonies and necessities of nature yet not destroy the human race.  For Niebuhr, the destructiveness in human life is primarily the consequence of exceeding, not the bounds of nature, but much more ultimate limits.  The God of the Bible is “jealous.”  Divine jealousy is aroused by man’s refusal to observe the limits of his freedom.  There are such limits, because man is a creature as well as creator.  The limits cannot be sharply defined.  Therefore, distinctions between good and evil cannot be made with absolute precision.  But it is clear that the great evils of history are caused by human pretensions which are not inherent in the gift of freedom.  They are a corruption of that gift.  These pretensions are the source of the ironic contrasts of strength leading to weakness, of wisdom issuing in foolishness.

Reinhold Niebuhr admonishes us that irony must be distinguished as sharply from pathos as from tragedy.  A pathetic situation is usually not as fully in the consciousness of those who are involved in it as a tragic one.  A tragic choice is purest when it is deliberate.  But pathos is constituted of essentially meaningless cross-purposes in life, of capricious confusions of fortune and painful frustrations.  Pathos, as such, does not bestow nobility, though it is possible to transmute pathos into beauty by the patience with which pain is borne or by a vicarious effort to share the burdens of another.  “The situation in a displaced persons camp may be essentially pathetic but it may be shot through with both tragedy and grace, through the nobility of victims of a common inhumanity in bearing each others’ sorrows.  One who is involved in a pathetic situation may be conscious of the pathos without thereby dissolving it since the participant does not bear responsibility for it.  He is the victim of untoward circumstances; or he has been caught in the web of mysterious and fateful forces in which no meaning can be discerned and from which no escape is possible.”

According to Reinhold Niebuhr, an ironic situation differs from a pathetic one by the fact that a person involved in it bears some responsibility for it.  The fact that the responsibility is not due to a conscious choice but to an unconscious weakness. “Don Quixote’s ironic espousal and refutation of the ideals of knight errantry may be detected by the reader whose imagination is guided by the artist-observer, Cervantes.”  But Don Quixote is as unconscious of the absurdity of his imitation of the ideals of chivalry as the knights are unconscious of the fraudulence of their ideals.

In this post I am indebted not only to Niebuhr and Murdoch but also to the collaboration of Anatol Lieven and John Huslman (2006), authors of Ethical Realism. Any paraphrasing is my own and if it distorts the meaning the authors noted intended, the error is mine and inadvertent. Please let me know and I will amend immediately.

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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

Privileged classes are maintained by the inheritance of privileges without regard to individual capacities for exploiting them for the common good. This view is most eloquently and subtly put forth by Reinhold Neibuhr in Moral Man and Immoral Society:

Classes become sharply distinguished when function is translated into privilege.  Inequalities of social privilege develop in every society and these inequalities become the basis of class divisions and class solidarity.

In modern capitalistic society the significant social power is the power which inheres in the ownership of the means of production; and it is that power which is able to arrogate special social privilege to itself.  Varying political convictions and social attitudes depend upon the degree of social power and economic privilege possessed by varying classes.  Naturally the chief difference will be between those who own property and those do not.

The social and ethical outlook of members of given classes is invariably colored, if not determined, by the unique economic circumstances which each class has as a common possession.  Economic interests are basic to class divisions.  The development of rational and moral resources may indeed qualify the social and ethical outlook, but it cannot destroy the selfishness of classes.  Moral idealism must express itself within the limits of the imagination by which men recognize the true character of their own motives and the validity of interests which compete with their own.  The imagination of very few men is acute enough to accomplish this so thoroughly that the selfish motive is adequately discounted and the interests of others are fully understood.

Dominant classes are always slowest to yield power because it is the source of privilege.  As long as they hold it, they may dispense and share privilege, enjoying the moral pleasure of giving what does not belong to them and the practical advantage of withholding enough to preserve their eminence and superiority in society.

Philanthropy combines genuine pity with the display of power and the latter explains why the powerful are more inclined to be generous than to grant social justice.

The religious conscience is sensitive not only because its imperfections are judged in the light of the absolute but because its obligations are felt to be obligations toward a person.  The holy will is a personal will.  The poetic imagination of religion uses the symbols derived from human personality to describe the absolute and it finds them morally potent.  Moral attitudes always develop most sensitively in person-to-person relationships.  That is one reason why more inclusive loyalties, naturally more abstract than immediate ones, lose some of their power over the human heart, and why a shrewd society attempts to restore that power by making a person the symbol of the community.  In religion all the higher moral obligations which are lost in abstractions on the historic level are felt as obligations toward the supreme person.  Thus both the personality and the holiness of God provide the religious man with a reinforcement of his moral will and a restraint upon his will-to-power.

The demand of religious moralists that nations subject themselves to “the law of Christ” is an unrealistic demand.  The spirit of love does not solve large and complex problems.  Even a nation composed of individuals who possessed the highest degree of religious goodwill would be less than loving in its relation to other nations.  It would fail, if for no other reason, because the individuals could not possibly think themselves into the position of the individuals of another nation in a degree sufficient to insure pure benevolence.  No nation in history has ever been known to be purely unselfish in its actions.  Selfish, brutal, and antisocial elements express themselves in all inter-group life.

Religion will always leaven the idea of justice with the ideal of love.  It will prevent the idea of justice, which is a politico-ethical ideal, from becoming a purely political one, with the ethical element washed out.  The ethical ideal, which threatens to become too purely religious, must save the ethical ideal which is in peril of becoming too political.  Without the ultra-rational hopes and passions of religion no society will ever have the courage to conquer despair and attempt the impossible; for the vision of a just society is an impossible one, which can be approximated only by those who do not regard it as impossible.  The truest visions of religion are illusions, which may be partially realized by being resolutely believed.  For what religion believes to be true is not wholly true but ought to be true; and may become true if its truth is not doubted.

The devotion of Christianity to the cross is an unconscious glorification of the individual moral ideal.  The cross is the symbol of love triumphant in its own integrity but not triumphant in the world and society.  Society, in fact, conspired to create the cross.  Both the state and the church were involved in it and probably will be so to the end.   The man on the cross turned defeat into victory and prophesied the day when love would be triumphant in the world.  But the triumph would have to come through the intervention of God.  The moral resources of men would not be sufficient to guarantee it.  A sentimental generation has destroyed this apocalyptic note in the vision of the Christ.  It thinks the kingdom of God is around the corner while he regarded it as impossible of realization except by God’s grace.

Practically every moral theory, whether utilitarian or institutional, insists on the goodness of benevolence, justice, kindness, and unselfishness.  For every moral thinker, the function of reason to support those impulses which carry life beyond itself and to extend the measure and degree of their sociability.  The measure of our rationality determines the degree of empathy, of vividness with which we appreciate the needs of other life (c.f., Murdoch), the extent to which we become conscious of the real character of our own motives and impulses, the ability to harmonize conflicting impulses in our own life and in society, and the capacity to choose adequate means for approved ends.  In each instance, Murdoch argues, a development of reason may increase the moral capacity.

The intelligent human being, who exploits available resources for knowledge of the needs and wants of his or her fellows human beings, will be more inclined to adjust his or her conduct to their needs than those who are less intelligent.  He or she will feel sympathy for misery, not only when it comes immediately into his field of vision, but when it is geographically remote. This speaks to the desirability of being fully open to one’s feelings and those of others. If you are interested, please see my post.

The ability to consider the interests of others to our own is not dependent upon the capacity for sympathy.  Harmonious social relations depend upon the sense of justice as much as or even more than upon the sentiment of benevolence.  This sense of justice is a product of the mind and not of the heart.  It is the result of reason’s insistence upon consistency.  One of Immanuel Kant’s two moral axioms:  “Act in conformity with that maxim and that maxim only which you can at the same time will to be universal” simply is the application to problems of conduct of reason’s desire for consistency.  The force of reason makes for justice not only by placing inner restraints upon the desires of the self in the interest of social harmony but by judging the claims and assertions of individuals from the perspective of the intelligence of the total community.

Normal human beings (i.e., not those suffering from psychosis or antisocial disorder) possess a sense of obligation toward the good.  Its general tendency is to support reason against impulse.  It may be strengthened and enlarged by discipline and may deteriorate by lack of use (Murdoch paraphrased again).

To cite the if not the word but the spirit of Reinhold Neibuhr:

Conscience is a moral resource in human life.  It is more potent when it supports one impulse against another than when it sets itself against the total force of the individual’s desires.  It is dubious whether the development of reason, though it increases the opportunities for the exercise of conscience, strengthens the force of conscience itself.  In that task religion is more potent than reason.  The force of egoistic impulse is much more powerful than any but the most astute psychological analysts and the most rigorous devotees of introspection realize.  If it is defeated on a lower or more obvious level, it will express itself in more subtle forms.  If it is defeated by social impulse it insinuates itself into the social impulse so that a man’s devotion to his community always means the expression of a transferred egoism as well as altruism.  Once the effort to gain significance beyond himself has succeeded, man fights for his social eminence and increased significance with the same fervor and with the same sense of justification with which he fights for his life.  This insinuation of the interests of the self into even the most ideal enterprises and most universal objectives, envisaged in moments of highest rationality, makes hypocrisy an inevitable by-product of all virtuous endeavors.  It is in a sense a tribute to the moral nature of man as well as proof of his moral limitations; for it is significant that men cannot pursue their own ends with the greatest devotion if they are unable to attribute universal values to their particular objectives.  But men are no more able to eliminate self-interest from their nobler pursuits than they are able to express it fully without hiding it behind and compounding it with honest efforts at or dishonest pretensions of universality.  Even a conscious attempt to eliminate dishonest and ambiguous motives is no perfect guarantee against hypocrisy; for there is no miracle by which men can achieve rationality high enough to give them as vivid an understanding of general interests as their own.

The family may still remains a means of self-aggrandizement.  The solicitous father wants his wife and children to have all possible advantages.  His greater solicitude for them than for others grows naturally out of the sympathy, which intimate relations prompt.  But it is also a projection of his own ego.  Families may be used to advertise a husband’s and father’s success and prosperity.  The truth is that every immediate loyalty is a potential danger to higher and more inclusive loyalties, and an opportunity for the expression of a sublimated egoism.

The larger social groups above the family, communities, classes, races, and nations all present men with the same twofold opportunity for self denial and self aggrandizement; and both possibilities are usually exploited.  Patriotism is a high form of altruism, when compared with lesser and more parochial loyalties; but from an absolute perspective it is simply another form of selfishness.  The larger the group the more certainly will it express itself selfishly in the total human community.  It will be more powerful and therefore more able to defy any social restraints which might be devised.  It will also be less subject to internal moral restraints. The larger the group the more difficult it is to achieve a common mind and purpose and the more inevitably will it be unified by momentary impulses and immediate and unreflective purposes.  The increasing size of the group increases the difficulties of achieving a group self consciousness except as it comes in conflict with other groups and is unified by perils and passions of war.  It is a rather pathetic aspect of human social life that conflict is a seemingly unavoidable prerequisite of group solidarity.

According to the prophets, moral evil lies at the juncture of nature and spirit.  The reality of moral guilt asserts itself because the forces and impulses of nature never move by absolute necessity, but under and in the freedom of the spirit (what I call the superego).

The omnipotence of God (with which Niebuhr quarrels) is the theologian’s symbol of the basic and ultimate unity and coherence of the world and runs parallel to the monistic tendencies in philosophy.  When it is unduly emphasized, moral realism and vigor are sacrificed to the ideas of unity and consistency.  Reason insists on a coherent world because it is its nature to relate all things to each other in one system of consistency and coherence.  Morality, on the other hand, maintains its vigor only if the conflict between good and evil is recognized as real and significant.  Luther, less philosophical than Calvin and more prophetic in temper, preserved the essential paradox successfully.  To him, the devil was “God’s devil.” God used him to his own ends.  “Devil thou art a murderer and a criminal but I will use thee for whatsoever I will.  Thou shalt be the dung with which I will fertilize my lovely vineyard.  I will and can use thee in my work on my vines. . . .  Therefore thou mayst hack, cut, and destroy, but no further than I permit.”  Luther significantly refused to develop the potential monism of such thought to a final and consistent conclusion.

The connotation of the myth of the fall is that sin lies at the juncture of spirit and nature in that the peculiar and unique characteristics of human spirituality in both its good and evil tendencies can be understood only by analyzing the relation of freedom and necessity, of finiteness and the yearning for the eternal.

Human finiteness stands under the perspective of the eternal and unconditioned. It explains why the contingencies of the natural order are subjected to comparison with the ideal world of freedom, and why human beings cannot accept their limitations without a sense of guilt.  The actions to which men are driven by necessities of the natural order are yet charged with guilt.  While there are moral theories which deny this element of guilt, it is nevertheless a constant experience of human life and even when it is explicitly denied it is usually covertly affirmed.  We never deal with our fellow human beings as if they were only the irresponsible victims and instruments of the forces of nature and history.

Prophetic religion attributes moral evil to an evil will rather than to the limitations of natural man.  The justification for this emphasis lies in the fact that human reason is actually able to envisage moral possibilities, more inclusive loyalties, and more adequate harmonies of impulse and life in every instance of moral choice than those which are actually chosen.  A perverse element lurks in practically every moral action. We make conscious choices regarding the lesser good. Sometimes, this perverse element dominates the action.

I will continue to develop these ideas in my next post. A caveat: In places, I may occasionally alter Niebuhr’s exact wording to make his prose more intelligible to today’s reader.

In this post I am indebted not only to Niebuhr and Murdoch but also to the authors of Ethical Realism, Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman (2006). Any paraphrasing is my own and if it distorts the meaning these authors intended, please let me know and I will amend immediately.

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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

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.

By Leslie Pratch

When researching integrity as the fourth dimension of the active coping style, I read some ethical philosophers, one of which was Reinhold Niebuhr. Among the works I read by Niebuhr was The Irony of American History. His views on international relations embody two virtues: humility and prudence. In international relations, for example, he advocates that the United States should when possible focus on possible results—not good intentions. As human beings we tend to rationalize what we do as good—even if it is not.

As I endeavored to come up with an operational definition of integrity, I turned to Niebuhr. Although he was not much help on that front, I plunged into his books seeing an understanding of how to treat the human tendency to rationalize what we do in terms of good intentions and to hide from ourselves the harmful ramifications of our actions. Niebuhr’s emphasis on prudence, humility, and realism is impressive! But how do we develop a universal definition of integrity that fits all times and places? We cannot, but acknowledging that limit (how humble) helps put our views on a level playing field with the views of others who have every reason to believe their views should trump mine.

We all want to believe we are good. One friend, David Friedman, told me in effect to lighten up on myself when I whined about my fruitless  effort to develop a universal definition of integrity: “Even Aristotle was stuck on that question.” That made me feel better but did little to solve the little social science superego pounded into me at the University of Chicago.

My first quarter in graduate school, Mihalyi  Csíkszentmihályi, one of the teachers of one of the core courses we all had to take, gave me some good advice. He told me that I needed to learn to think empirically. He was right.

Csíkszentmihályi’s admonition to learn to think empirically suck. 20 years later, I needed a rigorous conceptual and operational definition of the criterion variable, integrity because I wanted to differentiate high and low integrity executives in order to help my clients select executives to run their portfolio companies. For the first time, I read Iris Murdoch, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Plato (Book IV, The Republic). I will be referencing their ideas in subsequent posts.

What did Niebuhr have to say about ethics and international relations? His views are as relevant to interpersonal relations as to international ones. His emphasis was possible results, not good intentions. The implications of such a focus are that we should study the interests, views, and nature of other nations and accommodate those interests, views, and natures whenever possible. He believed we could “combine an awareness of the limits on American power and American goodness with a profound American patriotism.”

We should be modest. We should try to see ourselves as others do. We should have empathy. This is a central theme of my work. In Niebuhr’s words, “Nations, as individuals, who are completely innocent in their self-esteem, are insufferable in their human contacts.” “In international affairs, it is essential that we try to see ourselves as others do.” To insist that the rest of the world trust in our benevolence is profoundly arrogant. No nation can expect that it is in its best interest to allow the United States to exercise unrestrained power. Again, citing Niebuhr, “Nothing is so fatal to a nation as an extreme of self-partiality, and the total want of consideration of what others will naturally hope or fear.”

Yet what we Americans did in Vietnam, and what we Americans have done in Iraq, contradicts the wisdom of the Founders of our republic. Our Founders recognized the folly of placing unlimited powers in any hands.  Humility and prudence and a realistic view of human nature are responsible for the checks and balances on power that are integral to the Constitution and to a viable democracy in American.

It may be possible for individuals and groups to relate concern for the other with interest and concern for the self, for neither the individual nor the community can actualize itself except in relation to other individuals and groups. Like Murdoch, Niebuhr believed that a valid moral outlook had to recognize one’s selfishness.

Of course, these questions can never be fully or permanently answered because life changes.

I can foresee no definitive reconciliation between the demands of society and the demands of the self. That’s human nature.

In every separate case a new ethical decision will have to be made, depending on the special circumstances, and that in every case the possibility exists that this decision will be wrong either practically or ethically. We have to live with that possibility while trying to maintain a community of reason. We also have to admit to the reasonableness of wanting a society capable of  commitment to an immovable standard of behavior (Kant’s emphasis) in order not to be subject to the whim of fad.

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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.