I met up with an old friend of mine, Robert Millard, who studied psychology with me in the doctoral program at Cornell. Back then, and still, I called him “Millard” and he called me “Schmitt.” Now you know where the “Schmitt” thing started.
Millard brought this nicely bound book titled "Experiments in Ethics," by Kwame Anthony Appiah, a Princeton University Professor and world authority on moral philosophy. The book is terrific; we debated it over scotch (Millard) and gin & tonic (me) till the wee hours. (If you care to find out my preferred brand of gin, read "Big Think Strategy").
The problem with ethics discourse, according to Appiah, is roughly that it views ethics and morality as a series of decision situations of the "trolley dilemma type" (a run-away trolley hurtling down the tracks is on course to kill five people on its way; you can save the five or hit a switch that directs the trolley to a side track and only kill one) or the “Asian flu type” (choosing between two policy options in preparation for an outbreak of the Asian flu; if we do nothing 600 people will die; if we choose option A, 200 will be saved; if we choose option B, 400 will die).
While such exercises somewhat inform us about how people think and behave, these studies all have a major shortcoming: they are about moral emergencies that rarely occur in real life. That is, when was the last time you decided alone in seconds with a clear set of well-defined options about an issue of great moral significance -- such as life and death? Because they are bereft of life, these models are ill-fit as normative models of ethical decision-making and behavior.
Instead, according to Appiah, ethics is about a good life: eudaimonia, as Greek philosophers called it. Eudaimonia is often translated as “happiness” (that is, a feeling); but is more appropriately viewed as a "good, flourishing life." The bottom line: without some sense of ethics, a happy life may not be a good life.
Now, precisely structuring decision situations and laying out their parameters is a favorite exercise of decision theorists at business schools. It’s called the "management science" approach. (The next day, in a talk by a business historian, I learned that this is the result of a re-education process sponsored by the Ford Foundation after World War II aimed to turn a prior generation of business school faculty into "management scientists.").
If Appiah is right, this approach to corporate ethics may be doomed to fail. Yet, the success of alternative approaches to moral re-education of our MBAs – such as scolding (“don’t cheat, don’t lie”) or using ex-cons to scare them straight - also remains to be seen.
So, what does Appiah recommend business educators do to prevent corporate scandals? I found the following quotes on a Princeton weekly bulletin page:
"I don’t think teaching morality or ethics in the classroom is going to stop people from doing bad things... And I don’t think that more moral philosophy in the business schools is going to help here...The role of those of us in the normative disciplines is not, in my judgment, to tell people what the right answers are to ethical questions: it’s to provide them with the tools for thinking about them themselves."
I'm in a state of existential despair. I am preparing a new session for my branding class this evening, which is starting in 10 minutes.
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