Professor O'Hara's Ruminations on Week 5's Class

Abridged Disclaimer: As always, my commentary here is not a substitute for students reading assigned material, answering syllabus questions, and completing required exercises, including the math-related exercises. Nothing I write below can substitute for your readings as the basis for an acceptable test answer, or as the definitive interpretation of what we have discussed in class. My comments should be seen as another perspective on what you, the students, have read and interpreted.

ETHICS

As I said in class, nothing is more personal than ethics. Each of us will confront ethical dilemmas in the course of our professional and personal lives. Ethical dilemmas, in my view, occur in one of two broad circumstances. Circumstance one is when some aspect of our foundation morality (The Commandment against lying, the Koran's prohibition against alcohol consumption, the Torah's injunction against eating pork) clashes with real-life pressures for behaviors that would violate that morality (lying to protect a colleague at work, drinking a wine toast to avoid being a show-stopper at an important diplomatic affair, etc.). Circumstance two occurs when the ethical standards of the job (you should report any wrongdoing, you should not accept any item of value offered by the public) clash with the day to day realities of the job (your partner routinely accepts coffee and doughnuts from the local deli-owner).

People who find themselves frequently in circumstance one dilemmas often have very strong MORAL VALUES that they are quite reluctant to compromise. At the most extreme, such individuals can reject and depart from their job, their organization or the very regime that employs them. Serpico faced a circumstance one dilemma, and walked from the NYPD--all the way to Switzerland, which indicates some dissatisfaction with the U.S. political regime as well. Religious-right types may want to have nothing to do with government employment because the U.S. regime sanctions abortion. Similarly, radical left-wingers might reject government employment, and all else the government does, because the regime's policies sustain immoral class and racial distinctions. True-believers aren't only in churches.

By far what most of us face are circumstance two ethical dilemmas--the clash between the organization's codification of ethics and the behaviors that we encounter in our day to day work. Most of us are pragmatic with respect to the degree to which the foundation morality of our personal lives governs our behavior on the job. We are not, for the most part, Serpicos. But that doesn't mean that we are immune from very difficult ethical dilemmas. Two successive Attorneys General resigned within the space of a day when President Richard Nixon ordered them to fire a Special Prosecutor who had "gotten the goods" on Nixon's crimes. (The day's third Attorney General did what the President wanted.) Their dilemma: Do I fire a lawfully appointed official, who is faithfully carrying out his charge to investigate fully and is operating under official promises of non-interference? Or do I do what my boss, the President, is ordering me, under pain of dismissal, to do?

The Attorney Generals faced a circumstance two dilemma because most of the ethical conflict involved rules and forces arising out of the legal and organizational context of the job. Yes, the Attorney General's may have thought about what they had been taught in Sunday School, but the real "horns of the dilemma," on both sides, were the operational realities of the U.S. government, the Department of Justice, and organizational management.

The "seriously assess the relative roles played by moral development, etc." question was designed to stimulate YOUR self-reflection. When I think of my moral development, I see a Roman Catholic, parochial school up-bringing surrounded by an Irish culture. I thus came to young adulthood inclined towards respect for rules, yet with an Irish cynicism about the rules being bent frequently, particularly by those who made the rules. I certainly have became more of a pragmatist as I progressed through adulthood. I pick my battles more carefully than I once did. I have not the energy to fight on every front (or moral affront?) nor have all-fronts wars made much sense in terms of my career. I, for instance, did a dissertation on the biological bases of male behavior in organizational hierarchies. When I finished in 1980, going on the stump with biological explanations of any human behaviors was like walking into a shooting gallery. So I didn't. My dissertation was, and is still, on point as far as I am concerned. But I didn't need to play Don Quixote with the matter back then, so I left it on the shelf.

I am utilitarian about public policy, and for that matter, organizational management. I think we should look for public policies that achieve the greatest benefit for the greatest number. And I think that utilitarian policies generally fall between the extremes of complete equity--to all equally--and complete efficiency--to each according to his/her productivity. I also think that organizations should be managed to optimize customer outcomes (which is another way of saying effectiveness) and to minimize employee (including management) leverage to turn organizational policies to their own individual or group benefit at the expense of customers. When some teachers give finals in the last scheduled class, instead of during exam week, student benefit is not likely their primary concern. At least that's not the way I view wrapping up one's work semester a week early by cutting out a class students have already paid for.

I also think our society's policy makers and our organizational employees could each do a better job by more frequently utilizing Rawl's Rule. When almost of the legislators who pass a 25% capital gains tax cut are among the small minority of Americans to whom substantial capital gains flow, a blindfold seems in order. When corporate and governmental executives make sure that everything for them is first class, and that their golden parachute clauses and disability escapes are intact, methinks they think mainly of themselves and not the stockholders, employees or citizens.

Anyway, the kind of self-reflection I just went through above is the kind of thinking I want each student to do for herself or himself. As I said in class, this kind of introspection is not just an empty exercise. Thinking through where your values have come from, and what they have become, makes you better prepared to confront ethical dilemmas when they come your way.

By the way, your gut reaction to the "personal phone" call issue presented in question 3 may be a measure of your own need to apply Rawls' Rule, or at least evidence that Rawls had his finger on something. In two semesters, the personal phone call question has elicited, to an extent greater than any other question in the syllabus, passionate answers rooted in the student's personal experience with phone calling at work. Individuals who would never think of stealing a paper clip characterize organizational crackdowns on personal phone calls as tyrannical and cheap. Others have written "Well, when can we make these phone calls other than at work." Some have taken the position that personal phone calls on the company line and on company time keep employees at their desk and happy. I've wondered what these students would say if they could put on a Rawls blindfold. On the other hand, perhaps our reading entitled "Have Ethics Laws Gone Too Far" had a point. What do you think?

Finally, we have the lottery articles, and your correlation exercise. The correlation figures had the least to do with ethics of anything in this week's material. But we wanted to introduce you to, or reacquaint you with, the correlation concept. The two articles, however, do relate to the issue of ethics in policy-making. The issue addressed by "It's Not a Miracle, It's a Mirage" is the misrepresentation of the benefits of a policy, in this case state-run lotteries. While misrepresentation in policy analysis is frequent (e.g., the "Moving Yankee Stadium to Manhattan" controversy), what graduate MPA programs try to produce are individuals who either (a) are ethically disinclined to "cook the figures," or (b) can shoot down the fabricated "proof" for a proposed public policy.

The "Gambling Away Our Moral Capital" article hits the issue of the VALUES that underlie public policy. One thing the article does is present lottery revenues (the gross) as a TAX. If you look at the lottery as a tax, the question then becomes "who is taxed?" And the answer is "The poor and lower-middle classes to a much greater extent than those of higher income." One measure of a tax's goodness is "equity." And the most important of the two concepts of "equity" has to do with imposing higher taxes on those who can afford to contribute more than on those who can afford to contribute less.

Lotteries stand this concept of equity on its head. The poor simply gamble a bigger hunk of their income on lotteries than the rich do. For every poor winner there are hundreds of poor losers (taxpayers via the lottery). And the distribution of lottery proceeds tends to go to school children and/or the elderly from all classes. The net effect is a distribution from the worst off to those who are better off. To go back to an earlier term, this is NOT utilitarian. We will do more on taxing thepoor in next week's class.

That's all, folks!!!!!!

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