Bad Motives for Good Actions

Business Ethics

Something that I have found particularly interesting in Baird's textbook is the notion of "deontological" ethics. (Baird 151). This is the idea that "right" behavior or "good" behavior is about playing by the rules. However what I find really interesting about the idea is that, in some sense, it is the only way we have of getting a glimpse into the motivations of others. In some sense, a full account of the ethics of any given situation must in some way take into account someone's motives -- especially motives for compliance. Ethical behavior shouldn't be something that we adopt out of a sense of compulsion. Instead, with deontology, we are talking more about the concept of duty.

I suppose what is most interesting to me about this is the notion that there can be different reasons, good and bad, for adopting the same set of ethical principles. I'm also fascinated by the fact that sometimes a seemingly good principle can be made bad -- either because it is adopted shallowly, or because it is taken to an extreme. However, I think this is useful because deontology is, in some way, a good way to guard against only judging actions by their results, which I think is a serious error, especially in the business world. In any case, these are current ways in which Baird's approach has expanded by own ethical imagination.

Perhaps I can give a personal example. A number of years ago, I recall sitting with my grandmother and watching an interview program on the Catholic cable television network (EWTN) which was broadcasting an interview with the Catholic ethical thinker and retired philosophy professor Alice von Hildebrand. There was one example that Von Hildebrand gave which really stood out in my mind. She was discussing the importance of integrating emotion into one's moral choices, but noted that an excess of emotion could be as dangerous as the opposite. The example she gave was from an Austrian play, where a rich man discovers a poor beggar on the front steps of his palace. The rich man says to his servants "Throw this beggar down the steps -- his misery breaks my heart."

Now obviously from the standpoint of basic ethics there is not much complexity here -- the idea of a wealthy person having a poor one treated with violence is pretty instinctively repellent to most people. Although it is a sign of the coarsened ethical times in which we are currently living that there has been a glut of examples of the equivalent of the rich man here in what is currently America's liveliest business sector, Silicon Valley. It has seemed like 2013 and 2014 have been years in which the technological elite keep saying insensitive things about homeless people in the Silicon Valley area, and a quick Google search will reveal that the worldview Von Hildebrand was trying to capture with her example of the rich man is actually not far off from something that really gets expressed among today's business elite.

However, what made Von Hildebrand's illustration so memorable -- besides the fact that she made it clear that it was a joke that also proved a deep ethical point -- is of course the way it uses irony to demonstrate a certain kind of ethical failing. Von Hildebrand notes that the simple fact is that the rich man in this scenario is actually not immune to the sight of suffering. He is being forced to confront something about which he has a natural ethically-motivated reaction -- the sight of a poor and miserable person has an instinctive effect on the rich man, who is not hardened, and in this case has no option to look away or ignore what he sees, because it is on his own front doorstep. The joke of the example is that we are witnessing someone who is genuinely contradictory within the space of one sentence -- his capacity for being moved to pity is very real, and so is his capacity for demanding violence. For Von Hildebrand, the story here is one about too much emotional indulgence -- the term for what the rich man experiences in this scenario is "sentimentality," because he has a shallow reaction to the poverty that focuses mostly on his own response, and he does not think twice about responding in the most brutal and territorial fashion, as though to guard himself from his own instinctive response to the suffering. Suffering has an effect on his stomach, perhaps, but not on his brain.

I dwell at such length on this example because, when I think about my own ethical learning curve, I can remember first being exposed to this particular idea while watching an interview with Alice Von Hildebrand, and realizing that it really did take some serious thought on my part to understand the point. (I will also be honest, I was not expecting something that is essentially told as a joke to be part of a televised interview about Catholic ethics.) The simplistic way of making the point would be to see it about hypocrisy -- someone who makes a show of caring about the poor, and says the right things, while has actions that directly undercut this lip-service. But that was not the more complicated point that Von Hildebrand was trying to address: the concept she was trying to elucidate was sentimentality and its ethical problems. In reality, I don't think I really fully understood it until I was watching a different television program and saw the same principle illustrated a different way: on "The Sopranos," the crime boss Tony Soprano has a sentimental reaction to hearing about animals suffering (like when a horse is killed in an arson incident done for insurance purposes) but will shoot a human being without a second thought.

What this represents, of course, is a redirection of priorities, or possible a virtue carried over into the excess of a vice. This is something that Baird captures in his text fairly well, as when he presents various four-part grids, which demonstrate that there can be a "higher" or a "lower" version of the same ethical response. Baird presents "Wilber's matrix," for example, which basically maps these realms of ethical response in terms of how much distance they go outside the self (Baird 149). In Wilber's model, the lower version is the one that restricts human behavior inside the self (rather than extending it out into action) and that looks at human interaction on the smallest possible level (the individual in one-on-one relationships rather than the individual at the level of society or culture). It is no accident that for Wilber the ethically "descended" or inferior stance is the one that is focused on the "exterior side of development." In other words, it is possible to keep up appearances while being rotten to the core.