Class Session Ten REVIEW OF THE FIRST NINE CLASS SESSIONS.

Class Session Ten

REVIEW

OF THE FIRST NINE CLASS SESSIONS

In the first class session everybody had five minutes to respond to the pre-session

readings. The readings were:An annotated bibliography on ethics

An annotated bibliography on macroeconomics

Two pages on philosophical assumptions

Gavin Andersson, Looking Back to the Future: Conversations on Unbounded Organization

Blake Mycoskie, Start Something that Matters

Selections from Alexander Oesterwalder, The Business Model Ontology

A Power Point on Zero Unemployment

In the second class session we met the now famous box

The box is also known as

• The germ cell orientation basis.

The box is a germ, in other words a seed

• Germ because the box is a seed. The history of ethics and of economics will grow from the seed of the box.

• The box grows to become the principal institutions of modern society: businesses, individuals, markets, governments.

The box began where modern western civilization began

• in ancient Greece and Rome

• In 1688 the German jurist Samuel Pufendorf working in the Roman Law tradition that governed Europe added a fourth basic principle: 4. Pacta sunt servanda.

Translated into English and phrased to bring out their meaning

for our times

• 1. Freedom of the individual juridical subject.

• 2. There is a duty to refrain from harming others, but no duty to help others.

• 3. Respect property rights.

• 4. Human relationships organized by contracts.

In the third class session we traced the rise of the box taking a realist approach to ethics

• Being realist means that much of our material comes from the sciences

• In the third class session it came especially from the sociology of Emile Durkheim

• But first …. two definitions of “ethics”

In a first sense of the word “ethics”

• Ethics Morals

• Ethics comes from the Greek ethos

• Morals comes from the Latin mores

• Both refer to customs, rules, norms, and the character of the person who conforms to the customs, obeys the rules, complies with the norms

In a second sense of the word “ethics”

Ethics Morals

• Ethics is the branch of philosophy that studies the justification of morals

• Ethics asks “Why these morals and not some other morals?”

How does a sociologist like Durkheim explain the rise of the modern world?

• But what do you mean by “modern world?”

• And if there is a “modern world” then there must have been a pre-modern or non-modern or un-modern or traditional world.

Modern World Traditional World

What was the traditional world that people changed from when they changed to the modern world? What does Durkheim say about this?

Well,one thing Durkheim says is

that morals are a physical

NECESSITY.

No human group can survive without morals.

Every human group generates the rules it lives by.

According to Durkheim it all starts with religion

• In his terminology “archaic” societies (roughly equivalent to tribal societies)

• Take the form of extended families or kinship networks

• Held together by “social cement”

• The “social cement” is religion as described in his book THE ELEMENTARY FORMS OF THE RELIGIOUS LIFE (1895)

A sociological explanation of the rise of the box

• Modern society arose because of the division of labour. (according to Durkheim´s doctoral thesis of1893)

• Why did the division of labour arise?

• Because of the increase in population. Traditional society could not produce enough food to feed so many people.

The division of labour and the accumulation of capital make it possible to support a larger

population

• That means people make fewer things for themselves and their clan and make more things to sell or else they work for somebody who makes things to sell.

• In other words people move from an archaic society to a market society.

• And to organize a market society, Europe revived and “received” the old Roman “Law of Nations” which had been designed to organize commerce.

THE FREE INDIVIDUAL

PROPERTY CONTRACT

NO DUTY TO HELP

In the fourth class session we talked about something that is not a box

• COMMUNITY

• IN THE GERMAN OF FERDINAND TONNIES

• GEMEINSCHAFT

Some typical quotes from Tönnies on “community” (Gemeinschaft)

• “Community rests on harmony and is developed and ennobled by folkways, morals, and religion.”

• “Community is based on family life.”• “The divine will is interpreted by wise and

ruling men.”• “In a Gemeinschaft morality is an

expression of religious beliefs and forces, intertwined with family spirit and folkways.”

Community came first in time and society came later.

• In society (i.e. Gesellschaft

i.e. modernity):

-order is based on “a union

of rational wills” i.e. on contract

-most importantly sales (the market)

-backed up by law (the government)

For Tonnies as for Max Weber the typical institutions of modernity are capitalism and bureaucracy

Then in the same class we considered two founders of

modern ethics.

• Immanuel Kant 1724-1804

• Jeremy Bentham 1748-1832

According to Immanuel Kant

• All philosophies of ethics before his own were mistaken

• Because they assumed “heteronymy” i.e. the obedience of the human will to some outside power or influence, for example God or the desire to be happy.

• The true principle of ethics is “autonomy” i.e. the free rational being giving itself its own law.

• “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne.”

--Jeremy Bentham 1823

According to Jeremy Bentham

In the fifth class session we learned about non-western traditions

• We learned some facts about the history of work and livelihood

• And some of the theory of Unbounded Organization

Copyright Integra Terra (Chile) 27

•child bearing & care

•food preparation & processing

•Medicine – from plants

•homestead/ utensils

•Work animal skins/furs to make clothing

Gender Division of Labour

Women performed many jobs:

Copyright Integra Terra (Chile) 28

•hunting

•Making tools & weapons from sharpened flint stones

•group defence & diplomacy

Gender Division of LabourMen performed different ones:

In the sixth class we studied how economics grew out of the box

• WHAT IS ECONOMICS ABOUT?

• HOW DID IT START?

Economics as it started was about the causes of wealth

• Adam Smith draws a contrast between the “savages” who are poor

• …and the “civilized” who have wealth.

• The great cause of wealth is the division of labour. The “civilized” have it but the “savages” do not.

• The division of labour requires sales.

• Sales require markets.

Later Smith adds another cause of the wealth of nations

• It is the accumulation of capital.• When more capital is accumulated through

saving and the accumulation of profits, then

• --there is more money to hire workers and more workers are hired, and

• --there is more money to increase productivity through capital investments in what Smith calls “improvements”

More recent economists and philosophers agree with Smith that

capitalism needs a “Roman” legal “box”

The seventh class session looked at “post-modern management”

• And especially at Peter Drucker´s ideas for reviving traditional ethics in a society of organizations

• That is also a knowledge society

• Where managers have to take responsibility for the common good BECAUSE NO ONE ELSE CAN

A post-modern opinion

• “Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things.”

In the same class we did an exercise

• Based on the article CREATING SHARED VALUE in Harvard Business Review

In the eighth class session we applied all these ideas…

• …to three contemporary efforts to bring ethics and economics together

• CEMEX CORPORATION bringing affordable housing to the poor

• HINDUSTAN LEVER working to improve higiene and therefore health

• ARAVIND EYE CLINICS (a non-profit foundation)

In the ninth class we took a In the ninth class we took a farther stepfarther step

• Today in the twenty first century people all over the world are moving toward what we call UNBOUNDED ORGANIZATION

• …thinking simultaneously inside the box and outside the box

• …working simultaneously on two enterprise planes, the plane of one´s own organizaton and the plane of social responsibility to the wider community

Stand by for class sessions eleven through twenty !!