A week ago Monday, Robert J. Sternberg (more famous for his triarchictheory of intelligence) spoke at Teachers College on the relationship between wisdom, morality, and ethics.
Yesterday, the NYT reported that Governor Paterson seems to have engaged in behavior(s) that have been neither wise, moral, nor ethical...
On Thursday, Republican leaders reaffirmed their intention to protect record-breaking insurance company profits over people who desperately need health insurance.
That same day, NCrissieB published a diary on the Daily Kos that began with these lines:
We've all seen the comic office sign: The beatings will continue until morale improves.
The religious conservative version would be: The beatings will continue until you are morally improved.
All this got me to thinking...
"...Is there a better path to wisdom, morality, and ethics than having a "right to fail?"
Yes. It turns out there is.
"Wisdom, morality, and ethics" (the horse)
Definitions are important. But, I'm not going to start with them. This diary is, in part, a reflection of my own journey with these ideas this week. To attempt easy definitions of them up front would feel a little like putting the cart before the horse. The cart is coming, but first, some horse.
Practical Wisdom
Dr. Barry Schwartz is a psychologist who has written and lectured on practical wisdom (pdf), among other things.
Practical wisdom is a combination of two forces: moral will and moral skill. Will is "wanting to do the right things," skill is "in the right ways," and moral is "for the right reasons." He argues that practical wisdom is an increasingly difficult proposition because of our obsession with rules and incentives as regulators of behavior. Rules reduce our ability to improvise or adapt in the face of changing circumstances, a key component of moral skill (see U.S. Senate for procedural rule examples). In this TED talk (20 minutes long, and worth every second), hat-tip to NCrissieB for pointing it out, Schwartz gives excellent examples of improvisation-as-moral-skill by janitors, nurses, teachers, and administrators who all choose to do the right thing for the right reasons. It is a real shame that we can't say about all our senators what Schwartz says about hospital janitors.
Incentives damage moral will, because they switch the emphasis from a concern about the common good to being concerned for oneself. Once monetary incentives are in play, wanting to do the right thing takes a backseat to doing the right thing for me, often at the expense of others. (See Skilling, Lay, Blankfein, and many-Congresspeople-who-are-now-lobbyists for case studies.)
Schwartz observes that practical wisdom cannot be taught in ethics classes. It must be acquired through experience built on kindness, care, and empathy; the very things NCrissieB (and others) pointed out in the "Beatings Will Continue" miniseries. Things that are no longer on speaking terms with the Republican Party, and certainly not with the Tea Party. This requires time to develop, teachers and mentors to act as models, and organizations and rules that allow for empowered improvisation. Republicans and Teas are about rules, rules, and more rules. Strict hierarchical authority is not very conducive to empowered improvisation.
Therefore, one thing to do other than standing by the right to fail, is to transform our organizations to support moral will and moral skill.
Ethical Leadership
This is the title of the chapter Robert Sternberg presented at Teachers College. He agreed with Schwartz's criticism above that ethical behavior and outcomes are not the result of ethics courses. From that chapter:
"It is not enough to teach religion or values or ethics. One needs to teach children about the steps leading to ethical behavior. In this way, they will be able to recognize the challenges involved in behaving ethically...they need inoculation against the forces that are likely to lead them to fail to behave ethically."
He conveniently lists these steps:
- Recognize that there is an event to which to react. (Kitty Genovese would have benefited from this one.)
- Define the event as having an ethical dimension.
- Decide that the ethical dimension is significant.
- Take responsibility for generating an ethical solution to the problem.
- Figure out what abstract ethical rule(s) might apply to the problem.
- Decide how these abstract ethical rules actually apply to the problem so as to suggest a concrete solution.
- Enact the ethical solution, meanwhile possibly counteracting contextual forces [rules and incentives, Professor Schwartz?] that might lead one not to act in an ethical manner.
- Deal with possible repercussions of having acted in what one considers an ethical manner.
One could re-frame these steps through the lens of Schwartz's moral will and moral skill. While not the same thing(s), I find them to be supportive, if not examples, of that framework.
Sternberg, however, proposes additional obstacles, challenges, to the achievement and practice of wisdom through ethics and morality. These are the things children learning these steps would be inoculated against:
- One may believe one is above or beyond ethics. [I think of C St. and The Family]
- Egocentrism [the threat posed by incentives warned about by Schwartz]
- False Omnipotence [Sternberg cites Napoleon in Russia, though not all examples need be so historic nor grandiose]
- False Invulnerability [Spitzer in the Mayflower Hotel, neither as historic nor grandiose as Napoleon, but still a good example of the category. Unfortunately.]
Wisdom
Sternberg has a more eloquent and elegant definition of wisdom than I can do justice to here, but the short(ened) take is that wisdom is intelligence and creativity combined to identify and solve problems that threaten the common good. For Schwartz, wisdom is combined moral will and moral skill employed to promote the common good.
Therefore, my working theory of wisdom at this point is a combination of moral will, moral skill, intelligence, and creativity to identify and solve problems with kindness, caring, and empathy for the betterment of the common good.
Morality
I'm going with the definition I learned in my last class on Greek philosophy. Morality is the set of specific decisions and actions that can be defined as good or bad. Was that a good decision? Was it a bad decision? Running a red light can be a moral act, a good one if getting someone to a hospital in an emergency, a bad one if committed in the act of robbing a bank. Context and positionality matter, and complicate things as a result.
Ethics
Morality is the "what" in this discussion. What was decided, what action was taken, and whether it was "good" or "bad."
Ethics is the "how" and "why." How was that decision made? Why was that action taken? Ethics is the set of principles one accepts as guides, validations, and justifications for decision making and action. Ethics is a definition of the good life, and what guides our pursuit of it.
"The Right To Fail" (the cart)
Barry Schwartz, in that TED talk (around minute 4:40), references the importance of learning from failure, of being free to fail. But, that is not the only path to wisdom, nor is it even the preferred one. Placing kindness, caring, and empathy at the center of all human interaction is the goal for Schwartz. Promoting the common good is central to both thinkers.
I question whether that is a core principal for Glenn, the Republican Party, Fox News, or the Tea People. For me, promoting the common good means promoting the common good for all Americans, not just subsections of them.
I like Sternberg's appeal to explicit education in the series of decisions to be made in order to live a moral life, based on ethical principals, born of wisdom.
One can be free to fail and still fail to learn wisdom, morality, or ethics.
Glenn Beck is living proof of that assertion in my opinion. It is why we need a better way to wisdom, morality, and ethics; a better way than simply learning from our failures. We need more than that.
We need education, exemplary mentorship, and organizational support that recognizes more than rules and incentives. We need to refocus on the truly common good, and the will to apply our individual and collective intelligence and creativity to promote it.
TWLTW:
- New York City Govt. recently added 1924 aerial views to its website's city mapping service. This is the map for Columbia University/Teachers College in 1924. This is the map for the same location in 2008 (satellite imagery). Particularly noticeable is the main feature of the Columbia quad in 1924 was a baseball diamond with tiered seating, and today that same spot is Butler Library and a couple of small grassy spots in front of it. But, even more dramatic, and in more ways than one, is the difference between the World Trade Center site in 2008 and in 1924. Notice the docks and the size of ships on the Hudson River compared to the developments and condo buildings on that same spot today. I suspect anyone with an interest in New York City history would find these map features worth a glance. You can zoom in to street level and view all 5 boroughs. It's really kind of neat, if you like that sort of thing.
- 90% ofSWAT team engagements end without a SWAT-team bullet being fired. Every member of the LAPD SWAT response units are trained hostage negotiators certified to take over as lead negotiator at any moment. SWAT teams are barred by law from using .50 caliber rifles because the shells can pierce buildings and travel such distances that innocent bystanders blocks away could be killed or injured if caught in the way of one. Other than that, SWAT members largely choose their own weapons, sometimes acquiring them from evidence after trial (drug dealers apparently have especially attractive weaponry).
- Dick Cavett replaced Gail Collins for the weekly online "conversation" with David Brooks published by the NYTimes. In it, in Cavett's first paragraph, can be found this nugget of beauty and eloquence:
The mindless duplication around the dial of the current hot topic is appalling. You can tire of a sentence on one show, switch channels, and hear it completed on another.
And, later...
It’s lamented that the youth get their news from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. It’s lamentable that they get more from them than from the news. Both guys cover books on broad subjects. The “real” news gives Sarah Palin’s book as much time as if it were important. You could almost get the idea she had actually written it.
[He's not really decrying Stewart, as much as the current state of mainstream news media, as evidenced in the first quote. It's really quite a fun little read.]
- When I googled "right to fail," NCrissieB's diary from February 22nd was the 5th link in a list of more than 21,500,000. No, I did not click on all the links.
- And, this was just too good to pass up. As the husband of a trained music therapist who believes in nonverbal direction and the power of music to alter mood, I found it to be brilliant. I hope you enjoy it, too.
What Did You Learn This Week?