The Myth of the Amoral Institution

There was an excellent article in the February 24 issue of Inside Higher Education. The article is “The Fiction of the Amoral University.” The author, Brian Rosenberg, quotes John J. Mearsheimer’s observation in an address he gave to students at the University of Chicago back in 1997 that Chicago, and indeed all major colleges and universities in the U.S. were “remarkably amoral.” Mearsheimer was careful to make clear, however, that he did not mean to suggest that Chicago, “or any of its peer competitors,” was actually “immoral,” but only that they were “essentially amoral.”

I teach critical reasoning, and one of the most pervasive informal fallacies, to which I endeavor to sensitize my students, is the “false dichotomy” It can be easy, I fear, for those of us who like to think of ourselves as intellectually sophisticated, to fall prey to the view that all dichotomies are false. They aren’t. William James pointed out, for example, in “The Will to Believe” that there’s really no third option with respect to whether one believes in a transcendent good. That is, atheisim and agnosticism are what philosophers call “functionally equivalent.” Neither the atheist nor the agnostic believes in the existence of a transcendent good and so both miss out on what James argues are the benefits of such belief. The agnostic may rightly feel that his position is more intellectually defensible, but it is effectively the same as that of the atheist.

The situation is the same with claims to moral neutrality. Human beings are mammals and mammals are social animals, which is to say that they are inherently moral beings in that they cannot help but care about how their behavior affects other. It isn’t possible to be an amoral human being without also being an immoral human being. There are degrees of immorality, of course. That is, to contribute directly to human suffering is arguably worse than to contribute indirectly to it through inaction or indifference. Both are wrong, though, as is obvious to everyone who has not had his thinking corrupted by the two dogmas of modernism: The purported fact/value distinction and the view of human nature as a tabula rasa, or blank slate on which experience can write anything and everything depending on a person’s environment and social conditioning.

Classical philosophers saw things differently. Plato argues, for example, in the Republic, that until one has a grasp of the eternal, unchanging form of the Good, one can’t really understand anything else properly, that this understanding of the Good is the font of all knowledge (503e–518b). Unfortunately, this insight was somehow lost during the Enlightenment.

Plato was right, though. Human beings are not blank slates. They are mammals, and as such, they are inherently social. They are naturally sympathetic and empathetic, they have an innate sense of reciprocity and inclination towards fairness and honesty in their dealings with others. Crises can mess with these aspects of human nature. History has taught us that. People who feel threatened for their very survival will turn not simply on neighbors, but even on family members. That isn’t how human beings, ceteris paribus, or all other things being equal, behave, though. It’s only how they behave when they feel threatened. And remarkably, many people manage to preserve their humanity, even when they arethreatened, even at the expense of their own survival.

To say that human beings are mammals is to say that they have values built into them. There may be value-neutral situations, but I’m hard-pressed right now to think of any. Many, if not all, apparently value-neutral situations have values subtly built into them. Decisions about what to eat and how to dress, what books to read, and what programs to watch can have subtle moral implications. Do such decisions support factory farming, sweatshop labor, escapism versus moral engagement with the important social-political issues of the day?

And what’s true of individuals is also true of institutions because institutions are ultimately reducible to the individuals who run them. Businesses, contra Milton Friedman, cannot be morally neutral and neither can educational institutions. Both have profound impacts on the individuals who are directly involved with them as either employees or customers, and on the larger societies of which they are a part.

A university, for example, as Rosenberg observes

is many things: an employer, a nonprofit enterprise, a place where students live, a part of a community that extends beyond its campus. In all these roles, it regularly functions as a “unitary moral actor” in the absence of “substantive moral agreement” among its many people and parts. When deciding upon working conditions and remuneration, when deciding how far to encroach into surrounding neighborhoods, when deciding where to cut budgets and positions, when deciding how to invest its assets, even when deciding which applicants to admit, it often makes decisions as an entity that have clear moral valence—that are about not merely what can be done, but what should be done. The university does not get excused from moral responsibility for its actions because it happens to be a place where people teach and conduct research.

Nor, one should add, does a business get excused from moral responsibility for its actions because it happens to be a place where people are concerned with making money.

Institutions are not moral agents in the same sense that individuals are moral agents, but their cultures and the actions that are expressions of these cultures have moral significance and hence need to be rigorously policed and the individuals behind them held accountable. I’m not arguing that morality can be positively legislated into morally recalcitrant institutions. I don’t believe it can be. I do believe, however, that it can be negatively legislated into them in that rules and laws can reinforce a commitment to values that are inherent in human nature by systematically punishing institutions, or more correctly, individuals within institutions whose behavior violates those values.

I used to be skeptical about the moral value of laws. It seemed to me that properly socialized, emotionally mature human beings didn’t need laws to keep them from lying and stealing, etc., and that people who were not properly socialized, or not emotionally mature would be contemptuous of laws and would inevitably find some way to get around them. What I didn’t understand, until I taught business ethics, was the tendency of collections of individuals to become irrational, “amoral” mobs and the strongly positive effect that the rigorous enforcement of laws against immoral behavior could have on that dynamic. My business ethics students used to tell me that the values I was endeavoring to teach them were fine for their lives outside of work but that they literally could not afford to conform their behavior to them in a business context because that would inevitably mean they’d be out competed by someone who was not averse to a little lying and cheating. That is, their view of the business world was that it was like the fictitious Hobbesian state of nature, or a war of all against all, where one could not afford to be queasy about engaging in behavior one would otherwise be naturally averse to engaging in.

It was then that I realized the problem was the one pointed out so forcefully in Jed Rakoff’s article “Getting Away With Murder,” about the failure of enforcement of what few laws we have against white-collar crime. The issue isn’t so much that rigorous enforcement of these laws is necessary to positively eradicate white-collar crime. The issue is that such enforcement is necessary to send the message to the overwhelming majority of people in business that that environment is one where it is safe to be moral, where being moral will not necessarily mean one will inevitably be out-competed by someone less moral than oneself. That is, we need to rigorously enforce laws against white-collar crime not to deter people who are inclined to engage in it, but to encourage people who are inclined not to engage in it.

Absolutely everything we human beings do in our relations to one another has moral significance, independently of whether our actions are in some official capacity or are merely private. In fact, if I’m right in what I said above, then it should be clear that there are no relationships that are merely professional; we never engage with another human being in a purely abstract role. All our interactions with others are irreducibly personal and what is required of us in those interactions is actually hard-wired into us. You can call that a neurological fact, or you can call it conscience. Whatever you all it, though, it is the place where facts and values are inseparable.

The post The Myth of the Amoral Institution appeared first on CounterPunch.org.