As it's still holiday season I'm getting a bit behind in listening to all my podcasts, so I've only just heard this one from the Radio 4 Today show (don't know how long they keep their links active!). Their guest editor was Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, Archbishop of Westminster. As he is such an important person ( :-/ ), he was able to arrange an interview with Gordon Brown. During the interview, the Cardinal was suggesting to the PM that, after the recent problems, businesses should take on higher standards of morals and this would somehow protect the public in the future.
I think he is missing the point here. I don't think it is the position of businesses to be deliberately moral or immoral. Businesses should do whatever they need to do to survive in the long term. Without wanting to sound too Darwinian, natural selection will tend to favour those businesses that act in what most people consider to be a moral or ethical manner. Any business that consistently acted immorally or unethically would eventually get caught out, either through legal action or through a failure of their business model (e.g. the irresponsible lending of money that we have seen over the last few years).
Even though my politics tend to be on the liberal side, I could agree with the point of a economist I heard recently. He said that the problem with the banking industry was not that they were too capitalist, but that they weren't capitalist enough. In a pure capitalist system, each bank would be entirely responsible for its own actions, without any chance of a government bail-out. In this situation, they would not take so many dangerous risks and, almost by default, would have to act in a more reasonable, ethical, moral manner.
To me, this is probably how ethics and morality evolved generally. There is no need to impose a set of moral rules from on high. There are certain sets of behaviour that will allow a society to flourish and others that will only lead to a complete breakdown. Any society where murder and theft were acceptable would just fall apart very quickly. The only societies that would survive would be those that embraced a general sense of trust, but punished those who broke that trust.
In fact, for a long time I've felt that it just comes down to Game Theory. I studied Game Theory a little when I was working with Artificial Life and it relates to a lot of complex real world issues. There doesn't need to any grand supernatural theory as to why being good is good - it just works! Incidentally, when I looked up the Tit for Tat strategy that the argument above relies on, there was a link to a Richard Dawkins programme that discusses how this relates to the evolution of altruism, so maybe I'm on the right track!
Simon,
ReplyDeleteFirst, I’d like to remark about how impressed I am with how you showed the relationship between so many things: game theory, morality, religion, business, to name a few.
What this discussion reminds me of is the fact that the universe is not a moral one. I agree with you that morality and ethics cannot, or should not be legislated. I also agree that businesses are not in business to be models of anything; we cannot expect them to be moral. And, I agree that a business that is consistently unethical and immoral will probably have a tougher time succeeding.
As a non-believer, I do not believe in karma, the secret, or any morality in the universe. I think, as you so rightly put it, that this is as a result of a social Darwinism. Most of us, that is, want to do things the right way; and, we don’t want to work with people who don’t do them the right way.
I do think that businesses need to have their own internal watchfulness of the extent to which they are ethical. And I think ethics is the more operative concept in relation to business than is morality.
Finally, this makes me think of the whole notion of legally enforcing courtesy, which has been on my mind lately. When Rudolph Giuliani was the mayor of New York City, he tried to do this in many ways that either didn’t work, or just didn’t stick. For instance, he wanted to make taking up two seats on the subway a finable offense.
Decades ago, in NYC, the citizens drafted and voted a bill into law to make not picking up after one’s dog a finable offense. This is still law today, but no one seems to be getting fined for it in my neighborhood.
Hi Adam,
ReplyDeleteI first became aware of Game Theory when I was working with Artificial Life a few years back (http://www.hancockfamily.org.uk/?p=38). A number of people have looked at social simulations which basically boil down to Game Theory. If you spend any time looking into ALife, it becomes obvious how powerful evolutionary theory is in producing complex systems.