People like the old rules

Much to my surprise, the response to last week’s column set a record, both in terms of total e-mail volume and in the speed with which it arrived. I had printed a letter from a reader who was faced with a dilemma. He had one job offer on the table and was awaiting one he thought would be better. He wanted to know if it would be OK to take the first job and then switch if the other offer did come through.

I told him I thought it would be wrong to take the first offer, knowing that he was hoping for, and would take, the second. But I went on to question whether my position was defensible or whether I was clinging to an outdated set of values. After all, the corporate world has effectively changed the rules of the game.

Most readers, out of about 200 responses, agreed with me. Unfortunately, none of them convinced me of my own answer.

What is at issue here is what is required of the person, rather than what is permitted. When considering the morality of actions, we usually try to determine whether a particular act is required or permitted — or whether morality is neutral on it. In this case, being up-front with the first company is certainly permitted. It wouldn’t harm the company in any way, and it might even make the person feel better about himself or herself.

However, the crucial question is whether such action is required — and that’s a horse of a different color. It’s also how a lot of the readers walked themselves right into a logical trap.

The most common response was that a person who found himself in such a situation shouldn’t do “something wrong,” just because someone else had done something wrong. That has a certain appeal to it, but fails on several points.

First, it assumes that the act in question is “wrong,” when that was the exact thing we were trying to determine — whether or not it was wrong. This is what we call “begging the question,” a very common logical fallacy. In begging the question — or “petitio principii,” for those with a classical education — you appeal to the very question under discussion to prove your point. It’s a kind of circular logic that takes you into a philosophical infinite loop.

Some people tried to analogize it by saying something along the lines of “If you were stealing from me, it doesn’t mean I can steal from you.” As one of my philosophy professors used to bellow at me, when teachers were still allowed to bellow at students, “Vogt, you’re on the right track, but I’m afraid you’re on the wrong train of thought.”

The problem is that these ethical intuitions are grounded in interactions between individual persons, moral agents who are, for the most part, equal. When you’re operating in that arena, then the feelings hold. I can’t steal from people just because they are thieves. I can’t murder someone just because he’s a murderer.

But the introduction of the corporation changes things. Many people, including many who wrote to me, still can’t understand the concept of the corporation.

Legally, corporations are “persons,” and have all the legal rights that natural persons have — and then some. However, they have no moral motivation. They are not moral agents. That’s what I meant when I called them “amoral.” It’s not necessarily a disparaging statement, but merely a description of where they’re coming from.

Corporations, in and of themselves, have one function, one motivation, and one legal requirement — to make money for the stockholders. Any other obligation they have is imposed on them by law and regulation. This is what gives them a semblance of ethics, and it is why government regulation is a good thing. But government regulation does not transform them into moral agents.

Some readers advised me that corporations are “collectives of individuals.” Again, that’s wrong. The corporation exists as an entity completely apart from the individuals in its employ — from the CEO right down to the mailroom clerk. If every individual quit or died on a given morning, the corporation would still exist.

Some people fall back on the myth that the stockholders are the owners and therefore run the corporation. While that is technically true, the trend has been to divorce stockholders from any real operation of the corporation. This is especially true in large multi-nationals where a large number of the stockholders are themselves corporations and institutions.

In fact, the corporations themselves resist the idea that they are collectives. When bringing legal actions against corporations for wrongdoing, prosecutors often rely on a legal theory of “collective knowledge,” the notion that while no one person in the corporation may have been aware of all the elements of the wrongdoing, a collective of persons did know. Corporations say this is an inaccurate approach.

So, my question is whether things change when we consider our dealing with corporations vs. natural persons. When dealing with individuals — other moral agents — we introduce such things as sympathy (we don’t want them to feel bad) or empathy (how would you feel if someone did this to you?). The question is whether it even makes sense to have these sorts of feelings about entities that aren’t human, are not moral agents, and have no feelings.

The fly in the ointment, of course, is that in our dealings with corporations, we interact with their representatives, who are moral agents, who are human, and who do have feelings. But what if we could eliminate that?

Imagine that there were an AI (artificial intelligence) system so advanced that it could actually do the hiring for a company without any human intervention at all. It scanned incoming resumes, selected candidates, and screened applicants all by itself. Using available records, it checked applicant background, education, and experience. Then, again without human intervention, it selected candidates, made offers, and completed paperwork for those who accepted the offer. It then placed new hires on work schedules and assigned them to projects. On the first day of work, the supervisor received an e-mail saying that “Pat Smith begins work on your project today.”

Would that change anything? Would you now feel as bound by your acceptance of the offer as you would had you interacted with a human being? If you could simply log on to the system and cancel your acceptance — the same way you can log in and cancel a hotel reservation — would you feel you had “broken your word?”

After all, the AI system has no feelings. It would simply cancel the message to the project manager and switch to the routine for hiring someone else to replace you. I know I don’t feel bad for Holiday Inn when  I log on and tell them I’ve changed my mind, and I don’t feel I’ve done anything ethically wrong.

The crux of the matter is whether the corporations are playing by one set of rules — rules that they themselves set — and the rest of us are playing by rules that we’ve determined for dealing with each other and not necessarily for non-human entities. The corporations encourage that, of course, because the asymmetry benefits them.

Imagine if I were in a poker game and decided not to hold things back from my fellow players. So, I lay all my cards face-up on the table. That would delight the other players and I would be guaranteed to lose.

If there were a lot riding on this quirky move — feeding my family perhaps — some people would say it went past foolishness and had moved into imprudence, probably of the culpable variety. In the employment scenario, the rules have definitely changed, and it is the corporations — the 800-pound gorillas at the table — who have changed them. So, while our playing by the old rules may make us feel good, is it foolish and, when the stakes are high, is it imprudent or culpable?

For my part, I’ll stick to my original advice, but not necessarily because I think it’s the only answer. It’s my answer. The problem is that circumstances alter your viewpoint. It’s very easy to be heroic when you’re comfortable. When you’ve been out of work too long and the wolf is at the door — especially if you have a family whose welfare is at stake — your perspective changes. I don’t know what I’d do then. And I’d be lying if I said I did.