LDSP 442 Final Flashcards
Leadership exceptionalism and norm differentiation
Leadership exceptionalism
You’re special
Rooted in person or position
Norm differentiation
- Allowed to do things that other people can’t
Justifications for norm-differentiation
because he has his own morality. (leadership as norm-differentiating)
because she does not care about morality. (leadership as amoral or potentially instrumental)
because he could. (leadership as power-conferring)
because she is special. (leadership as trait-dependent)
because we said he could. (leadership as consensual, to a certain extent)
because she had to. (leadership as responsive to necessity)
because he has special obligations to his group. (leadership as partial)
because it was for a higher cause. (leadership as impartial*)
Immanuel Kant
Created Kantian Duties
working-class family
Utilitarianism
The ethical theory or argument that all action should be directed toward achieving the “greatest good for the greatest number of people.”
Mill v. Bentham
Foundational Principle of Morality
Bentham:
Principle of Utility:
approves or disapproves of an action on the basis of the amount of pain or pleasure brought about
Mill:
Greatest Happiness Principle:
Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.
Act and Rule
Bentham:
ACT UTILITARIAN: The principle of utility is applied directly to each alternative act in a situation of choice. The right act is then defined as the one which brings about the best results (or the least amount of bad results)
Mill:
RULE UTILITARIAN: By reason, we know there are rules for action that, in general, tend to produce the greatest good for the greatest number. Overall it works out that way. So maybe you don’t sit down and calculate the good for every action, but you follow these rules of conduct that support the greatest good for the greatest number, overall.
You use rules of conduct.
Kinds of pleasure
Mill
- intellectual/enlightening pleasures are better
Bentham
- no distinction
Rule versus act
RULE UTILITARIAN: By reason, we know there are rules for action that, in general, tend to produce the greatest good for the greatest number. Overall it works out that way. So maybe you don’t sit down and calculate the good for every action, but you follow these rules of conduct that support the greatest good for the greatest number, overall.
ACT UTILITARIAN: The principle of utility is applied directly to each alternative act in a situation of choice. The right act is then defined as the one which brings about the best results (or the least amount of bad results)
Principle of morality
Principle of Utility:
approves or disapproves of an action on the basis of the amount of pain or pleasure brought about
Greatest Happiness Principle:
Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.
Consequences of the theory
Difficulty of attaining a full knowledge and certainly of the consequences of our actions.
It is possible to justify immoral acts
Rule utilitarianism:
If the Rules take into account more and more exceptions, Rule Utilitarianism collapses into Act Utilitarianism.
It is possible to generate “unjust rules” according to the principle of utility.
John Stuart Mill
(1806-1873)
London, England (died in France)
Very severe parenting by James Mill - Greek by age 3; Plato at 10
Atheist, avoided university, British East India Company; depression
English philosopher, political economist, and civil servant
logic, epistemology, economics, social and political philosophy, ethics, metaphysics, religion, current affairs
classical liberalism
Henry Sidgwick: “I should say that from about 1860-65 or thereabouts [Mill] ruled England in the region of thought as very few men ever did: I do not expect to see anything like it again.”
Arguably the greatest nineteenth century British philosopher
*rule utilitarian
*quality of pleasures matters
Kant and To be able to place in conversation with Mill
both have rules
Mill has rule of conduct
- for the greatest good
Kant
- everyone abides by them; doesn’t matter if they are happy or not; must do it solely based on duty
Kant And to be able to talk about norm differentiation, leadership exceptionalism
Leadership is not norm-differentiating.
Leaders are not morally exceptional.
Their morality is not subjectively grounded (i.e. moral relativism is false).
Duties – obligations discoverable by reason
The implicature is that the leaders who engages in immoral behavior is being unreasonable.
Bernard Williams
If the math works out, justified through utilitarianism
–But it doesn’t work like that
—–Lose integrity of the person
our intuitions are foggy. We do consider the deontological view
George and Jim cases
George
(1) George, who has just taken his Ph.D. in chemistry, finds it extremely difficult to get a job. He is not very robust in health, which cuts down the number of jobs he might be able to do satisfactorily. His wife has to go out to work to keep them, which itself causes a great deal of strain, since they have small children and there are severe problems about looking after them. The results of all this, especially on the children, are damaging.
An older chemist, who knows about this situation, says that he can get George a decently paid job in a certain laboratory, which pursues research into chemical and biological warfare. George says that he cannot accept this, since he is opposed to chemical and biological warfare. The older man replies that he is not too keen on it himself, come to that, but after all George’s refusal is not going to make the job or the laboratory go away; what is more, he happens to know that if George refuses the job, it will certainly go to a contemporary of George’s who is not inhibited by any such scruples and is likely if appointed to push along the research with greater zeal than George would.
Indeed, it is not merely concern for George and his family, but (to speak frankly and in confidence) some alarm about this other man’s excess of zeal, which has led the older man to offer to use his influence to get George the job . . . George’s wife, to whom he is deeply attached, has views (the details of which need not concern us) from which it follows that at least there is nothing particularly wrong with research into CBW. What should he do?
Jim
(2) Jim finds himself in the central square of a small South American town. Tied up against the wall are a row of twenty Indians, most terrified, a few defiant, in front of them several armed men in uniform. A heavy man in a sweat-stained khaki shirt turns out to be the captain in charge and, after a good deal of questioning of Jim which establishes that he got there by accident while on a botanical expedition, explains that the Indians are a random group of the inhabitants who, after recent acts of protest against the government, are just about to be killed to remind other possible protestors of the advantages of not protesting.
However, since Jim is an honoured visitor from another land, the captain is happy to offer him a guest’s privilege of killing one of the Indians himself. If Jim accepts, then as a special mark of the occasion, the other Indians will be let off. Of course, if Jim refuses, then there is no special occasion, and Pedro here will do what he was about to do when Jim arrived, and kill them all.
Jim, with some desperate recollection of schoolboy fiction, wonders whether if he got hold of a gun, he could hold the captain, Pedro and the rest of the soldiers to threat, but it is quite clear from the set-up that nothing of that kind is going to work: any attempt at that sort of thing will mean that all the Indians will be killed, and himself. The men against the wall, and the other villagers, understand the situation, and are obviously begging him to accept. What should he do?
Remote, psychological, and precedent effects
Remote
Distant or long-term impacts or repercussions for a decision
How well can we know these repercussions if we do consider them? Many of these seem unlikely.
Psychological
The effects might be bad enough to cancel out the good done.
e.g. he might be wounded by thinking he did the bad thing
e.g. he might participate in a killing…
Precedent
One morally can do what someone has actually done, is a psychologically effective principle, if not a deontically valid one.
We tend to do what people before us have done. Actions should not set a precedent for future actions, since future actions are not the same as the original action. But they do. We can’t discount this.
Cosmopolitan versus communitarian theories
Cosmopolitanism
Acting for the many
Communitarianism
Acting for the few/a group
Epistemic concerns
(1) how do cosmopolitan leaders know which end can be identified with the greater good?
(2) how do cosmopolitan leaders know which means serve the greater good?
Cosmopolitan moral theories
Moral theory in which the particular ends to which group members are committed are ultimately subordinate to more general social ends such as human welfare
Mill and rule-breaking
(1) “In everyday life, overall utility is better served by a concern for the people we can directly affect. Because overall utility is not a practical guide for everyday action, we cannot use it to justify rule-breaking behavior.”
According to Mill, adopting a narrower scope of concern also implies respect for the “rights” of others
(2) “even if we assume that it is within the power of everyday leaders to have significant effects on overall utility, there is still substantial cause to worry about whether breaking the rules will positively or negatively affect overall utility.”
It’s likely leaders will mis-identify utility-maximizing opportunities for rule-breaking (p. 204).
Transformational leadership and Mill
Leading with a greater concern with end-values, such as liberty, justice, equality” than with “modal values, that is, values of means – honesty, responsibility, fairness, the honoring of commitments”
Burns says they are more concerned with cosmopolitan values than moral rules (although they care about both)
This is a kind of instrumental (or consequentialist) thinking.
Mill (we have already said) - LITTLE confidence that leaders can decide when the time is to break rules and act for greater utility (the common good)
**Aristotle
(384-322 BCE)
Born in Stagira, Greece
“He was born, he thought, he died.” – Heidegger
Plato’s star student
Academy to Speusippus
The Lyceum
Tutor of Alexander the Great
Key Ideas: virtue ethics, eudaimonism, 3 kinds of friendship, mixed regimes, cataloguing of the animals, soul types, hylomorphism, the 5 elements
We must start from the well known or familiar.
Reliance on common opinion (nomos) as a kind of collective imagination, then investigates those ideas
He does this often, paired with induction (specific observation and form general claim) and abduction (look at all possible answers and lean into the most probable answer)
Gary Yukl
Characteristics of Managerial Effectiveness
- Higher energy level and stress tolerance
- Higher self-confidence
- Internal locus of control
- Power motivation
High “power need” - Achievement orientation6. Low need for affiliation
- Greater emotional stability and maturity
- Greater personal integrity
Virtue, Hexis
The developmental process of acquiring virtue gives us insight into what a virtue is (a habit).
hexis – an active disposition.
Function argument
Function (Ergon) Argument: Virtues are those qualities that permit us to fulfill our function or purpose
For humans: to secure our greatest good or end (eudaimonia), which is distinctly rational – good reasons
Eudaimonia
Flourishing in accordance with virtue
It is rational, in accordance with our higher natures
A self-sufficient good
A kind of activity
