Opportunism and Subjective Ethics
The ethics of opportunism is a
fascinating subject, and its one that I’ve been pondering, perhaps in a
different light, for quite a while now. Opportunism plays a key role in
understanding ethics and morality on the meta level. In my own study of ethics,
I’ve found that all people can be broken down into two camps of ethical
thinking: objective moralists and subjective moralists. To broadly define the
two, objective moralists tend to believe in absolute truth, and with that tend
to follow more traditional ideas of virtuous, or “good” behavior. Subjective
moralists believe that truth lies in the experience of an individual, creating
a system of loosely defined “good” and “bad”, “right” and “wrong”, favoring a
system around “dialogue, not debate” wherein all viewpoints are held as equally
ethical (so long as they’re within the Overton Window of polite society). Before I go any further, I would like to point
out that I place myself in the objectivist camp, and therefore my analysis
should be read with that bias in mind.
Anecdotally, I tend to find the
vast majority of people in the modern US to belong to the subjective moralist
category, where it has become a hallmark of left-leaning political ideologies,
as well as most centrist, or even near-right policy decisions. I’d argue that
the neo-reactionaries of today’s far-right are also subjective moralists,
wishing to simply replace a system which they deem undervalues them with one
that undervalues others. Here is where we can begin to see the opportunistic
thinking inherent to subjectively moral ideologies. When all points are equally
valid, the point or policy with the most backers becomes the one which is
eventually adopted—not the one which is necessarily the most efficient or
equitable. We can see that play out perhaps most simply in our political arena,
which has seen major turmoil in the past few years due to increased
fractionalization along lines of group identity. With a true subjectivist mindset both the
Alt-Right and the Culturally Marxist left are able to correctly claim moral
superiority (as they are each living “their truth”), it’s largely impossible
for the country as a whole to move forward.
In a less politicized example, we
could look at this from the standpoint of a public goods problem. Say a firm is
polluting above the socially optimum level of pollution, which causes
disastrous effects to the local environment and the people living in it. It
could easily be said that they’re engaging in an opportunistic behavior:
alleviating pollution is expensive and they’re cutting costs by not doing so,
which is good for their bottom line. Following a subjective line of ethical
reasoning, they could easily argue that this pollution is necessary for their
firm to stay productive, and for their workers to be continually employed. This
places them on somewhat of a different moral footing than had we been using an
objective lens that they’re polluting above optimum, and therefore should be
forced to correct.
Of course, people don’t always
behave in an opportunistic manner. Just because someone works on a subjective
belief system, that does not mean they will always behave unethically, or even
behave unethically often. It does; however, remove some of the moral incentive
to behave in a non-opportunistic manor. Nor does this mean that people in the
objectivist branch are wholly incapable in engaging in opportunistic behavior,
especially if they can convince themselves that the efficient choice just so
happens to be the one which aligns best with their own interests. In a world
with an imperfect level of knowledge and communication, it’s impossible to know
every variable which could impact a certain decision, which makes objective
truth hard to prove. Both systems of thought have drawbacks, and can lead to
opportunism when it suits them, and at the end of the day it is down to the
individual to behave in a virtuous, efficient, and ethical manner.
This was a different type of post than most other students make. It was very arm's length and didn't get into specific experiences of yours. I wonder why you chose to do that. So let me give a few pretty low level examples of opportunistic behavior in our class that you might comment on.
ReplyDeleteIn years past I haven't had any policy about electronic devices in class. Last year several students told me that they could see the computer screens of their classmates during the class session and they were clearly engaged in stuff that was not class related - Facebook, messaging, computer games, who knows what. I would call that being opportunistic and to the extent that it was clear to me that they weren't paying attention I found it disturbing. Yet I don't have any sense whether people with an objective morality or a subjective morality would be more inclined to do that. So I'm not sure it is the best lens to consider issues of this sort, particularly shirking at work.
Now let me tell a different story. I mentioned in class that I attended leadership training back in 2003 at the Frye Leadership Institute. It was very intensive. I was one of the older people in attendance. Those who were my junior by 10-15 years were much quicker. It was my first experience where I felt old mentally. In any event, on several occasions I found myself mulling what we had done 15 minutes ago or perhaps even a half hour ago and not be in the moment. I like to process ideas at my own pace. But the consequence was that I often wasn't paying attention in the moment. So to some extent I was like the students staring at their computer. But I wouldn't call what I was doing shirking. I was thinking hard about what we were considering. I was just doing that slowly. I should add that sometimes that was reward by producing a more in depth understanding of what was going on. My junior colleagues came to value that, so they didn't think I was shirking at all.
So I offer this up for you to react to. I will now try to turn this back to what you wrote. Suppose you are a manager of somebody and you get to know whether they have an objective morality or a subjective morality. (Let's leave for now how you get to know this.) Would you manage them differently as a consequence of this knowledge? Please consider the answer to that question when (a) this is the only person you are managing and (b) another case where you have several employees and don't want to be accused of playing favorites.
To respond to your specific questions, I suppose it provides in itself a certain moral conundrum. For one, objectively speaking you can have some employees who are better suited to certain tasks than others. Certain kinds of ethical systems probably aid in different areas of work; for example, an objectivist might make for a great analyst, and a subjectivist might work better in HR. In both a one-on-one scenario and a group setting, assigning them to a role which suits them better is efficient.
ReplyDeleteIn response to your query on shirking, especially in the classroom, I believe this could, in a theoretical sense, again tie into my topic. A student distracting others with non-class related computer use could be described as leading to an inefficient allocation of seats, or class time, wherein another student could be using that class time more effectively. It's certainly opportunistic behavior. Now, if the student were focused on the objective, they'd notice the inefficiency and self-correct, or at the very least feel somewhat guilty about their behavior. Since they don't, they're looking at the problem from the way that gives THEM the most satisfaction, regardless of what is efficient, what I have defined as acting subjectively.
I would hearken most arguments like this back to my point on public goods problems, as most cases of inefficient allocation are essentially derivations of this one. This is why I chose to stick on the superficial side of things-- I could've spent my time proving individual examples, but when many of the examples could all be described by one that is then tied to a larger point, it's somewhat of a repetitive exercise.
This post is really interesting. I also touched on the moral motivation behind people acting opportunistically. I have not read much about objective versus subjective moralists, but it seems like a very broad way to understand this subject. Like you said, it is hard to know people's true reasoning for the way they act. Also, I am not sure if you can assume people act in a reasonable or moral way all the time. These things make it difficult to prevent opportunistic behavior based on these two mindsets. Even if one were to try to allocate tasks to people based on their ethical system, it may take some time to know how they truly reason through things based on their repeated actions, which would create some transaction costs. However, it is still interesting to think about how these things play into economic situations.
ReplyDelete