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Interview with Michael Scriven
MISHLOVE: You know, as we're talking it strikes me that a traditional religious perspective might say that if you are very religious, then you will be ethical, so that what you should do is become very pious, very religious. And what I think I hear you saying is almost the converse, which is you can give up religion if you are very ethical. It seems to me that you're being led back to a kind of genuine spirituality. SCRIVEN: Yes, I think you are, because if your problem with having to go the religious route is that you have to accept these other allegedly factual claims about the divinity of this being and so on, the eternity of life after death and so on, which you well find unacceptable and which I find simply as lacking evidence -- then it's got to come back to the ultimate commitment by you. You've got to transcend the religious crutch if you possibly can. The problem with the religious crutch is it brings in all sorts of things, doctrines, which become the basis for wars. So it's not a very attractive alternative. It's an expedient one sometimes, but it shouldn't be the ideal one for us. MISHLOVE: In other words, really if we want to be ethical, we have to think this out. In psychology there's the famous Kohlberg work dealing with levels of moral development. He suggests that it starts from a simple level, which is following instructions, to a level where people are really able to think for themselves and reason out ethical problems. SCRIVEN: And act that way, the altruistic
level. And that is the top level, and my interpretation of this is that
as you mature and you come to think
MISHLOVE: Dealing with practical problems in the world of work, the world of business, do you think that the guideline that you've just expressed about the basic equality of rights is a sufficient guideline to handle the kinds of problems that occur in business? SCRIVEN: No, it's like the axioms of
Euclid. You've got to spell out the details of the applications. You've
got to get down and look at the
What we've done is to treat affirmative- action legislation as if it's an imposition from without, just like ethics, and not put our heart into it. I listen all the time in these seminars to people explaining how the quality of labor has gone down because we now have to appoint these wretched people whom Uncle Sam is pushing. Now of course that's a very superficial reaction. The question you have to ask yourself is, what's job relevant? If you're dealing with the public, and the public comprises twenty percent blacks and twenty-five percent Chicanos, then it's really not very smart of you to constantly produce only white people who can't speak Spanish to deal with them. You just don't get a good police force in Atlanta, Georgia when it's all white. So the move to integrating the police force in Atlanta was not an imposition by Uncle Sam, it was a move towards getting an effective police force. It was no longer Whitey's police force; you couldn't use that excuse if you were a black. And that was a big step forward in efficiency. Affirmative action is not a sort of dumb imposition of some politically motivated requirement; it's in fact thought out properly, an intelligent use of human resources. MISHLOVE: But isn't it a little naive, Michael, to think that in every case being more ethical is actually going to lead to greater efficiency? SCRIVEN: Of course, because this is only a probability. It's only a strategy. So it's like paying insurance on your house. Of course you go through your life having paid insurance, huge quantities of insurance, and never collected anything. Does that make you silly? Not all. You do it on the expectancies. The same with the ethics. So there are times when you take a licking for it, and there are times when you don't. All we can do for you is to point out that it's much the best strategy, but it won't always win. MISHLOVE: Now, you've discussed the situation where an American corporation might go to a foreign country where customs are different, and where what we call bribery is considered a way of life. What about here, in our own culture, where it seems as if our mores and values are somehow in conflict with ethical principles? In fact that seems to be continually the case. SCRIVEN: You mean our practices? And we do in fact use bribes here, and have for thirty years of major business cases, for examples. Yes, I mean, they clearly are. So you must ask yourself, why was it that it seemed important for these senior executives to go that way, and the answer they give you, of course, is, "We wouldn't have gotten the contracts without it; the pressure was on us to get the contracts; that was what our job was worth." And you've got to be able to answer in their terms, and in their terms you must be able to say that at that point you must go for either public support or peer support, and you must say no. And if you can't go to public support or peer support, you must go to another job. There is no cheap way out of this. You can't in the end win everything by following all the rules. In the end you have to decide which set of rules to follow. MISHLOVE: Is there some kind of relationship here between ethical behavior and avoiding behavior that you need to keep secret? I often tend to think that when people feel that they have to hide what they're doing, that almost inevitably implies that something unethical is going on. SCRIVEN: Perhaps, or else something that they feel others will see as unethical, though it isn't -- for example, some interest or hobby or commitment. MISHLOVE: National security. SCRIVEN: National security, gun legislation, whatever it is. But often that's the case. I mean, living with yourself is one of the things that ethics helps with a good deal. I think, though, that the thing that you're pointing to -- the problem of our American way of life leading to these dominant, major role models behaving unethically -- is something we must take much more seriously. We must ask ourselves, what was the game strategy that -- well, let me tell you how unseriously we take it. If I ask you this question, what can you say: Do you know of a resource which consists of a short history of all the really significant cases of leading executives and politicans in America in the last twenty-five years who behaved unethically and got caught for it? Could you put your hands on that? Could anybody, thinking about whether to use bribery, take a quick look at some resource like that and get jolted very heavily? I mean, we don't even bother to put it together. MISHLOVE: No, but I suppose a computer search of any newspaper would call it up. SCRIVEN: Oh, sure. MISHLOVE: But it's always in the background. SCRIVEN: In the background. It's easy to forget the background when the crunch comes in. MISHLOVE: And is it not the case that Machiavelli, who wrote his whole system, The Prince, in which he suggested that it's good to appear to be very ethical and very liberal without necessarily being that way, was actually and is still today admired by philosophers as being a very rational man, an enlightened thinker? SCRIVEN: He was halfway enlightened. I mean, he was willing to be very rational about everything except the first premise. Why was it that he found it rewarding to break the ethical rules? Answer: because he worshiped money and power so much that it was worth the risk. But why worship money and power so much? Why not examine your own commitment to those values, along with all this critical examination of the emptiness of the mores? MISHLOVE: Because it's often the case, I think, that when people have made a commitment, let's say, to drug dealing, what difference does it make that we give a death sentence to drug dealers when they're risking their life every day on the street? They've already made the commitment that they're going to seek the thrill, even if it costs them their life. SCRIVEN: The thrill, or perhaps just
the payoffs. So you don't get a solution by giving them an admonition or
ten years in jail. I was working in San
And he said, "Well, A, there's nothing else I can do; and B, it pays very well." I said, "Well, how are you going to reestablish your contacts? You've been in here." He said, "I'll use the prisons as a source. I'll get the drugs from San Quentin." An interesting thought -- that San Quentin becomes the supplier to the ex-cons going out. Now, you can't solve that guy's problem by saying, "Gee, that's very naughty," or, "We'll put you in jail," or something. You've got to find an alternative for him. We don't bother with that. We just think that the barriers and the penalties will create the alternatives. MISHLOVE: Do you have an answer for that dilemma? SCRIVEN: Oh, of course. I mean, this is a man that had a great capacity for managing a quite heavy business, with danger involved, and large sums of money involved. There's all sorts of ways in which somebody could do that in an appropriate context, where you're going to make sure that they're not going to sign all the checks. MISHLOVE: I'm not quite sure I see. It sounds like you're saying put this guy in the National Security Agency, or something. SCRIVEN: No, just put this guy into a business where there isn't a security problem, because he will be rewarded by good pay, and -- MISHLOVE: In other words, it seems like it's a question of social engineering -- that we've created a situation where the available options for a large segment of our population point them in a direction which is unethical. SCRIVEN: Exactly, and we don't bother to go that second level in looking at what we're doing. We say, build up the enforcement of the drug laws, build up the enforcement of whatever, and that isn't enough. MISHLOVE: Michael Scriven, it's been a pleasure thinking through some very thorny issues with you today. Thanks so much for being with me. SCRIVEN: It's a pleasure to be here, Jeffrey. END
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