The broken society / Morality in politics

 

    My favourite post in the bloggers circle so far is one on the Bleeding Heart Show: the ‘Broken Society’ vs ‘Back to Basics’.

Comparing David Cameron’s reflections on the ‘broken society’ with John Major’s earlier attempts to get ‘back to basics’, blogger Neil Robertson suggests Cameron’s strategy is likely to be more successful, given that it avoids the potential for the government being seen as hypocritical:

“Where Major’s rhetoric was fogged-over by vague moralising about returning to the ‘neighbourliness, decency & courtesy’ of the past, Cameron is more precise, identifying the specific symptoms of the ‘Broken Society’ and arguing that only by reducing them can we have a happier, more equitable future. Significantly, all of the social evils he lists (however indirectly) either costs the state money or causes harm to law-abiding people, and he is not asking for anything more from the British people than those things most of us already do…

Just as Major & Cameron’s ideas are framed very differently, I suspect the consequences of the two speeches will also be very different. Thanks to the fuzziness with which ‘Back to Basics’ was sold, Major unwittingly committed the Conservatives to leading the country to a kind of moral reformation. Unfortunately for him, by doing so it became fair game to scrutinise the character of his cabinet, and when a number of those ministers failed to stand up to that scrutiny, it fatally undermined the project he was trying to sell.”

 

However, Robertson also refers to an earlier post by Melanchon and suggests:

“By seeking to describe the ‘Broken Society’ only in terms of those ’social evils’ which intrude upon the law-abiding majority, Melanchon essentially argues that Cameron has ripped the morality out of his crusade, creating a campaign which is more transactional than it is rooted in the values of religious conservatism. For him, the party isn’t calling for social change because it is moral and good; merely because it will save the state money & make us a little safer.”

 

There are a number of great points in this.  The point about hypocrisy is definitely right and Cameron’s approach to societal renewal is definitely safer.  But I do wonder, given further deterioration of societal mores and connection since the early 1990s, whether this is now enough?

The debate takes me back a couple of week to the arguments expressed by Michael Sandel in the second of the BBC’s Reith lectures (also see my post on the first of these).

Reviewing two hotly contested contemporary issue: the question of surrogacy, and same sex marriage, Sandel suggests that moral and religious arguments should play a role in political discourse and in justifying laws.  He notes:

“Many people shudder at the prospect. ‘Isn’t it dangerous?’, they ask, ‘to bring morality and religion into politics? Isn’t it safer for a government to try to be neutral and avoid taking sides on the moral and religious convictions its citizens espouse?’ I say no, not necessarily, for two reasons. First, it’s often not possible for government to be neutral on substantive moral questions / it’s not always possible to decide questions of justice and rights without resolving substantive moral questions; and, second, the attempt to do so can make for an impoverished public discourse / even where it may be possible, it may not be desirable.”

 

Reith’s argues that we shouldn’t try to avoid morale issues but should take the opportunity to debate these factors publically.  So perhaps Cameron is being politically smart, but may also be missing an opportunity by stressing redistribution of power and the need for more personal responsibility, political transparency etc.

I still find John Major’s speech resonates strongly with me – and I think that introduced differently, with more focus on serious debate / richer discourse, it could have resulted in different conclusions too.

From my own perspective, the question that arises is whether we perhaps need to have some back to basics debates within our organisations as well – taking one topical issue for example, on what do managers and employees collectively believe is a justifiable salary differential?

These wouldn’t be easy debates to have, but implemented well, might result in more committed, aligned workforces.

 

Technorati Tags: Neil Robertson,the Bleeding Heart Show,David Cameron,broken society,John Major,back to basics,Melanchon,Michael Sandel,Reith lecture,#bloggerscircle

Photo credit: Adrian Pingstone

 

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Reith Lectures 2009: A New Politics of the Common Good

 

   Sandel’s last Reith lecture (also see my post on his first lecture) has dealt with how the government can mimick the market:

“It’s the idea that government should try to replicate the outcomes that competitive markets would produce if all goods and resources were properly priced.”

 

Sandel descrbed how trying to price goods that can’t be priced – accurately or morally – often results in dysfunctional outcomes::

“Consider environmental policy. If air and water are “free” - that is unpriced - then companies and consumers will produce too much pollution. So government’s job is to set regulations to correct for this market failure - through cap and trade, for example, or a carbon tax.

To do this, the policymakers have to ask how much pollution is too much. And to answer this question, they have to figure out what value to place on clean air, clean water, and the resulting health benefits. Here’s where “market-mimicking governance” comes into play. In order to make these calculations, regulators often use “cost-benefit analysis”: they place a monetary value on the benefits of clean air and water, compare them with the costs, and set regulations accordingly.”

It sounds perfectly sensible. What’s wrong with comparing the costs and benefits of government regulation? Nothing - if by comparing costs and benefits you simply mean assessing the advantages and disadvantages of a given policy.

But cost-benefit analysis aspires to scientific rigour. It tries to assign a monetary value to costs and benefits. It tries to mimic the market. And here’s where it goes wrong. Many of the benefits of public policy involve values that can’t be captured in monetary terms - most notably, the value of human life…

Monetising all costs and benefits makes for a spurious science that shifts decision-making from democratic politics to technocrats.”

 

As with Sandel’s first lecture, I’d make the point that these concerns apply within organisations too. There is always going to be a desire to value things like social capital – firstly, because they are so important, and secondly, as a result of the human need to manage and control (for example, as a result of the oft quoted but in my view, erroneous belief that ‘you can only manage what you can measure’).

But I don’t think this is appropriate. And I think Sandel has nicely expressed why.

 

Technorati Tags: Michael Sandel,Reith lecture,A New Politics of the Common Good

Photo credit: AntonyB

 

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Reith lectures 2009: A new citizenship

 

   The latest round of Reith Lectures are being presented by political philosopher Michael Sandel (apparently inspiration for Montgomery Burns in the Simpsons) and deal with the ‘politics of the common good’.

Sandel suggests that we need to develop a better kind of politics less oriented to the pursuit of individual self-interest and based more on deeper moral and spiritual values, and a more demanding idea of what it means to be a citizen.

In the first lecture, ‘Markets and Morals’, he deals with the moral limits of markets. There is now widespread recognition that markets have become detached from, and need to be reconnected to, our fundamental values in order to play a role in achieving the public good.

Sandel argues that the problem isn’t excess greed within markets, as there is no real difference between this and self-interest and markets have always run on self-interest. So rather that try to rein in greed by shoring up values of responsibility and trust, integrity and fair dealing, we simply need to re-think the reach of markets into spheres of life where they don’t belong – where we are dealing with things that money can’t buy and other things that money can buy but shouldn’t.

This includes things like or profit schools, hospitals and prisons; the outsourcing of war to private military contractors and the replacement of public police forces by private security firms. But these pseudo markets don’t always work.

So one suggestion by the father of the HCM movement, Gary Becker, to resolve the debate over US immigration is to simply set a price and sell American citizenship. But a market in refugee status changes our view about who refugees are and how they should be treated. “It encourages the participants - the buyers, the sellers and also those whose asylum is being haggled over - to think of refugees as burdens to be unloaded or as revenue sources rather than as human beings in peril.”

Or take the attempt by some New York City schools to improve academic performance by paying children 50 dollars if they get good scores on standardised tests. The problem is that monetary incentives like this can undermine intrinsic motivations for reading, habituating children to think of reading books as a way of making money, rather than something they can enjoy

Sandel summarises his argument by explaining: “Markets are not mere mechanisms. They presuppose, and also promote, certain ways of valuing the goods being exchanged. Markets leave their mark on social norms.”

I think Sandel makes some very sound and well argued points and perhaps the one disagreement I have with him is over the scope of his argument. He proposes that we need to think about limiting the application of markets, eg to health, education, national defence, criminal justice, environmental protection and so on - to guard against our market economies becoming market societies (although he does say that he wants all markets to be answerable to ethical principles and to principles of social justice).

I think we also need to consider the utility of real markets (eg to employment).

For example, Sandel’s arguments seem to me to help explain the recent public reaction to bankers’ bonuses as well as previously topical debates about non-doms etc.

These debates don’t just involve economic questions, they consist of social or political ones as well. Yes, we want an economy where entrepreneurship and enterprise are valued, but we also recognise that too much inequality is not an outcome that we want.

We’re happy to see people paid high rewards where these reflect real success, and where we can see that these rewards will ‘trickle down’ to the rest of the economy as well.  But when these people complain that they’ll leave the country when a 50% tax rate is introduced, or their non-UK income will become assessable for tax, it shows that they don’t share any ownership for the ‘common good’.

And I think it is then that the general population responds that it doesn’t want people rewarded in this way.  The economic argument no longer covers the moral compromise.

So there are “perils in reducing moral considerations to economic ones” within markets as well.

 

 

Technorati Tags: Michael Sandel,Reith lecture,‘Markets and Morals

 

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