Results tagged “ethics” from Eccentric Eclectica

From John Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology by Larry A. Hickman

“What, in Dewey’s view, constitutes responsible technology? This book is an attempt to suggest some answers to that question. By way of review and conclusion, it may be said that Dewey rejected what I have called “straight-line instrumentalism,” or the view that neutral tools are brought to bear on ends that are valued for reasons external to the situations within which those tools have been developed. Drawing on the metaphors that accompanied Darwinian evolutionary theory, Dewey argued that human beings are organisms within nature and that their tool use is one of the developmental edges of natural activity. Tools and artifacts are no more neutral that are plants, nonhuman animals, or human beings themselves: they are interactive within situations that teem with values.

Responsible technology involves for Dewey the choice, the implementation, and the testing of goals that arise from those situations. There is no need of divine intervention to point the way, and the quest for absolute truth constitutes an impediment. Values arise out of inquiry, and once they are refined by inquiry they are brought back to the situations from which they originated in order to ascertain whether they are appropriate. Tools that are utilized in choosing, implement, and testing enter into the articulation of ends, or things to be done, modifying those ends as the need arises. Evolving ends demand the modification of existing tools. Responsible technology thus remains flexible because it must accommodate changing situations. In addition to being resilient, responsible technology is redundant: it does not allow undue risk, and it backs itself up, both in terms of parallel development and in terms of the establishment of plateaus as possible fallback positions. Responsible technology is not so much radical as regenerative.” (202)

Back in March there was a brief media flurry over a libertarian rant by Rick Santelli. I was struck at the time by the persistently moral language used by the right to describe economics and capitalism. Making money has become a moral obligation for the right and a reflection of the moral worth of a person. If you’re poor then you are a moral failure, if you are rich then you are an angel.

The language of morality pervades the discussion of economics and may be a cause of so much of the regular debate about economic policies that occurs. Economic decisions, for all the pontificating about rational man, are always moral decisions as much as they are rational decisions.

I recently heard an acquaintance talking about the difficulty of knowing whether the recent economic stimulus is working. Not even the putative experts can agree about whether it is working. A scientific controversy, like global warming or dark matter, is much easier to adjudicate because the moral dimension is reduced or non-existent.

At the New Republic Jonathan Chait reviewed two books on Ayn Rand and found her writings to be a major source for the moralistic tone of right-wing capitalists.

In these disparate comments we can see the outlines of a coherent view of society. It expresses its opposition to redistribution not in practical terms—that taking from the rich harms the economy—but in moral absolutes, that taking from the rich is wrong. It likewise glorifies selfishness as a virtue. It denies any basis, other than raw force, for using government to reduce economic inequality. It holds people completely responsible for their own success or failure, and thus concludes that when government helps the disadvantaged, it consequently punishes virtue and rewards sloth. And it indulges the hopeful prospect that the rich will revolt against their ill treatment by going on strike, simultaneously punishing the inferiors who have exploited them while teaching them the folly of their ways.

There is another way to describe this conservative idea. It is the ideology of Ayn Rand. Some, though not all, of the conservatives protesting against redistribution and conferring the highest moral prestige upon material success explicitly identify themselves as acolytes of Rand. (As Santelli later explained, “I know this may not sound very humanitarian, but at the end of the day I’m an Ayn Rand-er.”) Rand is everywhere in this right-wing mood. Her novels are enjoying a huge boost in sales. Popular conservative talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck have touted her vision as a prophetic analysis of the present crisis…..

Rand’s most enduring accomplishment was to infuse laissez-faire economics with the sort of moralistic passion that had once been found only on the left. Prior to Rand’s time, two theories undergirded economic conservatism. The first was Social Darwinism, the notion that the advancement of the human race, like other natural species, relied on the propagation of successful traits from one generation to the next, and that the free market served as the equivalent of natural selection, in which government interference would retard progress. The second was neoclassical economics, which, in its most simplistic form, described the marketplace as a perfectly self-correcting
instrument. These two theories had in common a practical quality. They described a laissez-faire system that worked to the benefit of all, and warned that intervention would bring harmful consequences. But Rand, by contrast, argued for laissez-faire capitalism as an ethical system. She did believe that the rich pulled forward society for the benefit of one and all, but beyond that, she portrayed the act of taxing the rich to aid the poor as a moral offense.

Countless conservatives and libertarians have adopted this premise as an ideological foundation for the promotion of their own interests. They may believe the consequentialist arguments against redistribution—that Bill Clinton’s move to render the tax code slightly more progressive would induce economic calamity, or that George W. Bush’s making the tax code somewhat less progressive would usher in a boom; but the utter failure of those predictions to come to pass provoked no re-thinking whatever on the economic right. For it harbored a deeper belief in the immorality of redistribution, a righteous sense that the federal tax code and budget represent a form of organized looting aimed at society’s most virtuous—and this sense, which remains unshakeable, was owed in good measure to Ayn Rand.

I started a series on language and money last spring which I should return to. Once you start listening you realize that all of our talk about money is filled with moral judgments. My first post of the series talked about the difference between borrowing and leveraging, two terms for the same action but one used by the poor and the other by the rich. Some other terms that need pondering: angel investor, consume/invest, save/debt. Accounting also has a rich vocabulary for examination: asset, liability, appreciation, depreciation, balance sheet, double-entry, etc.

It’s been ten years since Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris stormed Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colorado, and killed thirteen people. Dave Cullen has just published the definitive book on the crime titled simply "Columbine". I read through it in less than a day.

Ten years after an event the key part of any retelling of a story is often a reevaluation of facts that we thought we knew: that Harris and Klebold were outsiders, that they targeted jocks and popular kids, that they were part of the trenchcoat mafia, that Cassie Bernall said she believed in God before being shot. Cullen’s task is to deconstruct those myths, most of which were planted by the instant media that surrounded the event, and try to triangulate toward the truth.

Cullen argues forcefully for the thesis that Harris was a psychopath and Klebold was mostly a follower when it came to the actual planning and killing. Klebold was definitely disturbed and depressive but he was more confused by life than actively hating everyone. Klebold’s journals show a painfully shy young man trying to find understanding and love in the world, being rejected and then fatally falling into the orbit of Harris who truly did want to destroy as many people as he could. All of this is supported by the journals and diaries Cullen reviewed.

I already had some inkling that Harris and Klebold were disturbed but I was surprised by the initial plans Harris had made to explode two large bombs in the cafeteria commons in the hope of killing the maximum number of people and then setting two more bombs to explode in the parking lot after the police and paramedics had arrived to kill another wave of victims. Harris was seriously disturbed.

There are some who see the hand of Satan at work in the Columbine killings. Colorado was, and continues to be a hotbed of evangelical Christianity, where the story of Cassie Bernall affirming her faith before death was just too good to pass up. To others it is a case of a psychopath and his companion going on a rampage of death. I think the latter explanation is a bit more comforting, but it still leaves a hole.

I noticed a couple of reports over the last two weeks about the Morgan Stanley report by a 15-year-old intern about social media use among teenagers. I clicked through to the news article, read it quickly, and then just as quickly dismissed it.

Last week I read a post by Kent Anderson at The Scholarly Kitchen on the same story. Anderson contends that the incident is an example of a gate-keeping failure at Morgan Stanley.

For instance, they published the report “[w]ithout claiming representation or statistical accuracy,” yet felt it provided “one of the clearest and most thought provoking insights we have seen.”

How can it be non-representative and inaccurate, yet clear and thought-provoking?

Kent linked to a U.K. newspaper story at the Times Online that reveals how Matthew Robson got the job at Morgan Stanley.

Gaining a place at Morgan Stanley to explain teenage media consumption to the world required a little luck. It was not just what Matthew knew, but whom he knew, or rather, whom his dog, Rudolph, knew.

In January Rudolph, a three-year-old whippet, was being walked by Matthew’s mother in Greenwich Park when he became friendly with the dog of Patrick Wellington, a senior financial analyst at Morgan Stanley. His mother and Mr Wellington began chatting about her son’s struggles to get a work experience placement.

“We had tried many places, mainly in the local area,” said his mother. Matthew had written to local businesses, solicitors and banks including Lloyds TSB and all had turned him down.

So he wrote to Morgan Stanley, which offered him a two-week internship and two weeks ago on Monday he set off for the bank’s offices in Canary Wharf.

I don’t begrudge Matthew his chance to work at Morgan Stanley but the background on how he got the job makes me even less likely to credit anything he, or by extension Morgan Stanley, say about how the internet or social media really work. The whole story begins to smell link link-baiting or trolling from the start.

The problem is that it is these types of media hype stories that force me to reconsider all media stories. I can think of three possible explanations for the this story at Morgan Stanley

1. The analysts at Morgan Stanley were truly surprised by the things Robson said and wanted to publish them. From this I conclude that the analysts don’t know much about their subject if they are so easily amazed.
2. The folks and Morgan Stanley just wanted to give some props to a plucky teenager who displayed a bit of talent and drive. This is probably the most flattering interpretation of MS behavior, because then the media frenzy is not their fault.
3. Or the Morgan Stanley people deliberately promoted the story because they knew it had all the media hooks that would get it wide publicity: a young teenager telling his confused elders where to stick their vaunted expertise.

Morgan Stanley comes off looking poorly under all of these scenarios.

The media problem may be even more serious. The media moves so quickly from Michael Jackson to Walter Cronkite, and controls so much of our mental space for respect and reputation, so that the only lesson to be learned is to make a big splash with some confidently asserted thoughts and hope that the fame machine picks you up for a day or two.

It’s a crazy world and it just seems to grind talent up faster and faster.

Watch this:

I found this video at Presentation Zen. It’s one of the 34,000 60-second video applications that people all over the world submitted to the Queensland Tourism Board for the “best job in the world”, working as an island caretaker on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.

Here’s another video, one of 50 that has been put on the short list:

After watching these videos I realized something about the paradox of talent in the contemporary world. All of the finalists are talented, any one of them could do the job of island caretaker very well. But only one of them can get a job and that’s the heart of the problem in today’s winner-take-all world.

Back in 1995 Robert Frank and Philip Cook wrote a book called The winner-take-all society : how more and more Americans compete for ever fewer and bigger prizes, encouraging economic waste, income inequality, and an impoverished cultural life. They convincingly argued that a society with huge winners and a mass of middle-of-the-road losers is destined for conflict and inequality.

In 1997 Pierre Levy wrote Collective intelligence : mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace. He argued that we have a severe talent problem in the modern world; there are an incredible number of people who could contribute to the productive future of humanity but they are held back because of politics, access, or other circumstances.

There is really no significant difference in talent between the 50 people on the short list. The Queensland Tourism Board is faced with the same choice that faces any manager making a hiring decision or an admissions committee choosing who to accept for college — at a certain point a choice must be made and it will be made based on inexpressible qualities, the first impressions and other ineffable qualities that human resource professionals base their careers on. Once someone has met the minimum requirements for a job there is not much more to make a hiring choice on except for gut instinct.

Trying to eliminate this instinct is a fool’s errand. Working together is always about getting along with other people and often the fluffy qualities of personality are much more important than the skills list shown on a resume.

But for every job that opens there are always some people who are rejected. Some are rejected for good reasons, such as missing skills. But among the finalists there are always people who could do the job but just don’t make it. How do we deal with these people — the people who are still talented but didn’t have the right connections, the right network, the right clothes, the right accent, the right skin color, the right family?

This is the justice problem that faces our world today. And the continuing development of social technologies on the internet and elsewhere are going to make the problem worse. In the past we might have been able to ignore all of the others who are shut out. Today that ignorance will kill us.

And the ignorance will grow before it begins to shrink. Our multiple mediums of information exchange will make it easier than ever for the have-nots to see the lives of the haves and vice versa.

If talent is equally distributed throughout the world, and there seems little reason not to suppose that it is, then the world will need to change. We can’t just give access to the talented. We need to grow the total number of opportunities available to all. The current economic system isn’t up to the job. So we will need to build something better.

A question that’s been kicking around my head for the past few days. This is just the start of a rough outline.

Determining what is excellent:

1. Judgment based on history. The “time will tell” adage. What is good and beautiful is sieved by history and reveals itself over time. This is also the base for the quantitative approach that Charles Murray takes in "Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950"
2. Judgment based on peers. The basic mode of scientific research. Good research is research that meets the criteria set by a group of peers.
3. Judgment based on the market. Whatever sells is what is good. This is the dominant defense is discussions about contemporary culture. People who reject “coarse” elements of culture, especially entertainment such as video games or movies, are dismissed as being ignorant of how the market works. The “if people didn’t want this stuff, then they wouldn’t buy it.” No?
4. Excellence is its own reward. The extreme result of the intrinsic reward viewpoint mentioned below. If people are more motivated by intrinsic rewards then why worry about external rewards. This view runs into some obvious problems when dealing with groups of people instead of individuals. Groups and societies influence how resources are distributed, and this distribution influences excellence.

Rewarding excellence:

1. Intrinsic motivation is the key to sustained excellence. See the work of Alfre Kohn and Teresa Amabile.
2. Extrinsic motivation is key. Market dogmatists, intellectual property law. Any system that talks about incentives or incentivizing for certain behavior.

Other questions:

1. How should we reward the best cat burglar or bank robber? Why shouldn’t they be rewarded for their skill?
2. Are there time limits for the effectiveness of rewards? What is the function of posthumous awards? The awardee seems unable to derive any benefit. Posthumous awards may help the judgment based on history through the creation and support of canons or classic works.

There are two extreme answers to the question of what we are responsible for?

The maximalist position is that we are responsible for everything. When we act, whether consciously or not, something happens in the world. A series of effects propagates outward from our actions, and that series may be endless.

For the want of a nail the shoe was lost, for the want of a shoe the horse was lost… and on, and on.

We rarely glimpse the long-term, distant outcomes of our actions because our perceptions are limited. My presence at tonight’s Socrates Cafe meeting may lead to another person reading a book I shared with her. That book could change her life but I may never know it.

From the maximalist perspective we arrive at the ideas of globalism and environmentalism. My choice to drive to the library releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and leads to global warming. Everything I do becomes significant.

The other extreme in this debate is the minimalist. We are responsible for our actions and nothing more. Each of us is surrounded by sphere of agency. Sometimes these spheres may touch but they never overlap.

I always have a choice about how to respond to a situation. Someone cuts me off in traffic. Do I become angry? Do I ignore the situation? Do I try to run them off the road?

The emphasis is on freedom and choice. Even under the extremes of distress there is always a choice. It’s an existential view of the world.

My friend Eric invited me to come to an Isaiah meeting at Westwood Luthern church last night. He’s been working with the group for the past few years on a bunch of different issues, including affordable housing.

The meeting began with two introductory presentations about the problem of affordable housing. The message is pretty simple to state: the current median home price in Minnesota and the nation is significantly higher than the 30% of income that is the threshold for affordability. Anyone working in a service job - nurse, teacher, retail clerk, janitor, food services - makes, on average, less than needed to afford a home or, in some cases, an apartment rental. The only way for a contemporary family to continue to afford housing is for them to have dual incomes, and even then it’s not easy. No wonder so many people feel harried by work and the constant struggle to achieve that modern euphemism of work/life balance.

After the presentations we broke for 30-minutes of small-group discussion. I was at a table with a couple of city staffers, a woman who works for a local land trust, and two people from Isaiah.

I listened to the discussion and was struck by how it wondered in circles around the “complexity” of the problem. Someone would throw out a potential solution to the problem and then another person would say that it’s all more complicated than that. The person who proposed the solution would agree that it really is complicated and then move onto another thread in the discussion.

I tried to steer the question to ask what the barriers to action were. The responses were simple: people’s attitude, money, recalcitrant contractors, and lack of political will. Again the specter of “complexity” was raised.

As a sometimes complexity scholar I have to wonder whether this is really a true description of the problem or a subtle cop-out. To me the problem doesn’t seem that complex at all. The market fails to provide housing. Local governments can act to alleviate this by altering their building codes and requirements. We can all agree on the nature of the problem and the most likely solution. So what is the real problem here?

One suggestions was money. At a deeper level I agree, greed is always a problem in a market economy. But the requirements for affordable housing that set the model across the nation are not onerous. They’re only onerous to those who have been brainwashed to believe that all government action is bad. If you believe that the government can intervene for a collective benefit then the argument should be practically won.

So what stops us from acting?

I am a strong proponent of complexity. A lot of major problems and issues in the world are complex. But this isn’t one of them. It’s pretty simple and straightforward microeconomics. Give builders an incentive, through regulation, and they will build affordable housing. Builders are already regulated so this shouldn’t be hard. We just have to actually do it.

A recent forum on information ethics for the Minnesota Special Libraries Association prompted me to think about privacy.

Assume that individual privacy is undergoing a massive shift because of the advent of large aggregate databases, technical innovations like the web, and, perhaps, a changing attitude among younger generations. The discussion at the meeting centered on social web applications like Facebook, Google, and LibraryThing. A lot of people are sacrificing privacy for the perceived value of a service like GMail, LinkedIn, or Facebook. Librarians have long defended the privacy of patrons by destroying circulation records as soon as possible but in the new social web world patrons are sharing the information librarians protected by posting it on LibraryThing or elsewhere. In order to compete on services libraries may have to reconsider the bedrock ethical principles surrounding the analysis and storage of patron information.

But the even bigger question I wonder about is how organizations will respond in this brave new privacy world. So far most of the erosion of privacy has taken place on the part of individuals. But the organizations and institutions that we all interact with continue to profit from that data and zealously guardt data from being used openly by others.

From a commons perspective this might be another form of enclosure. Individuals choose to contribute to the public commons and then that information is enclosed and “monetized” by companies. Leading to ideas like digital sharecropping and crowdsourcing.

A countervailing trend for public companies are the securities regulations promulgated by the SEC. Here the explicit bargain is in exchange for access to capital markets the company must disclose a certain amount of information to the public. After the Enron scandals the Sarbanes-Oxley bill increased the requirements for public disclosure. But there was, and continues to be, a lot of opposition to that.

It seems we may be headed into a world where privacy becomes more and more a matter of financial resources. Companies can afford to pay the lawyers and technicians needed to keep information locked up behind closed doors. Individuals don’t have that luxury.

When it comes to professional responsibility SLA and other organizations are in a bind. A lot of professional ethics statements protect the privacy of the organizations where people work. Should this continue to be the case? If a significant part of the public gives up its privacy to organizations then why can’t we expect the same openness in return?