Beware of Corporate Psychopaths

Brian Basham in The Independent

Thursday, 29 December 2011

Outlook Over the years I've met my fair share of monsters – rogue individuals, for the most part. But as regulation in the UK and the US has loosened its restraints, the monsters have proliferated.

In a paper recently published in the Journal of Business Ethics entitled "The Corporate Psychopaths: Theory of the Global Financial Crisis", Clive R Boddy identifies these people as psychopaths.

"They are," he says, "simply the 1 per cent of people who have no conscience or empathy." And he argues: "Psychopaths, rising to key senior positions within modern financial corporations, where they are able to influence the moral climate of the whole organisation and yield considerable power, have largely caused the [banking] crisis'.

And Mr Boddy is not alone. In Jon Ronson's widely acclaimed book The Psychopath Test, Professor Robert Hare told the author: "I should have spent some time inside the Stock Exchange as well. Serial killer psychopaths ruin families. Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies."

Cut to a pleasantly warm evening in Bahrain. My companion, a senior UK investment banker and I, are discussing the most successful banking types we know and what makes them tick. I argue that they often conform to the characteristics displayed by social psychopaths. To my surprise, my friend agrees.

He then makes an astonishing confession: "At one major investment bank for which I worked, we used psychometric testing to recruit social psychopaths because their characteristics exactly suited them to senior corporate finance roles."

Here was one of the biggest investment banks in the world seeking psychopaths as recruits.
Mr Ronson spoke to scores of psychologists about their understanding of the damage that psychopaths could do to society. None of those psychologists could have imagined, I'm sure, the existence of a bank that used the science of spotting them as a recruiting mechanism.

I've never met Dick Fuld, the former CEO of Lehman Brothers and the architect of its downfall, but I've seen him on video and it's terrifying. He snarled to Lehman staff that he wanted to "rip out their [his competitors] hearts and eat them before they died". So how did someone like Mr Fuld get to the top of Lehman? You don't need to see the video to conclude he was weird; you could take a little more time and read a 2,200-page report by Anton Valukas, the Chicago-based lawyer hired by a US court to investigate Lehman's failure. Mr Valukas revealed systemic chicanery within the bank; he described management failures and a destructive, internal culture of reckless risk-taking worthy of any psychopath.

So why wasn't Mr Fuld spotted and stopped? I've concluded it's the good old question of nature and nurture but with a new interpretation. As I see it, in its search for never-ending growth, the financial services sector has actively sought out monsters with natures like Mr Fuld and nurtured them with bonuses and praise.

We all understand that sometimes businesses have to be cut back to ensure their survival, and where those cuts should fall is as relevant to a company as it is, today, to the UK economy; should it bear down upon the rich or the poor?

Making those cuts doesn't make psychopaths of the cutters, but the financial sector's lack of remorse for the pain it encourages people to inflict is purely psychopathic. Surely the action of cutting should be a matter for sorrow and regret? People's lives are damaged, even destroyed. However, that's not how the financial sector sees it.

Take Sir Fred Goodwin of RBS, for example. Before he racked up a corporate loss of £24.1bn, the highest in UK history, he was idolised by the City. In recognition of his work in ruthlessly cutting costs at Clydesdale Bank he got the nickname "Fred the Shred", and he played that for all it was worth. He was later described as "a corporate Attila", a title of which any psychopath would be proud.

Mr Ronson reports: "Justice departments and parole boards all over the world have accepted Hare's contention that psychopaths are quite simply incurable and everyone should concentrate their energies instead on learning how to root them out."

But, far from being rooted out, they are still in place and often in positions of even greater power.
As Mr Boddy warns: "The very same corporate psychopaths, who probably caused the crisis by their self-seeking greed and avarice, are now advising governments on how to get out of the crisis. Further, if the corporate psychopaths theory of the global financial crisis is correct, then we are now far from the end of the crisis. Indeed, it is only the end of the beginning."

I became familiar with psychopaths early in life. They were the hard men who terrorised south-east London when I was growing up. People like "Mad" Frankie Fraser and the Richardson brothers. They were what we used to call "red haze" men, and they were frightening because they attacked with neither fear, mercy nor remorse.

Regarding Messrs Hare, Ronson, Boddy and others, I've realised that some psychopaths "forge careers in corporations. The group is called Corporate Psychopaths". They are polished and plausible, but that doesn't make them any less dangerous.

In attempting to understand the complexities of what went wrong in the years leading to 2008, I've developed a rule: "In an unregulated world, the least-principled people rise to the top." And there are none who are less principled than corporate psychopaths.

Brian Basham is a veteran City PR man, entrepreneur and journalist

Just because you're an atheist doesn't make you rational

Once you make it your primary aim to refute the existence of God, you miss what's really fundamental

Mark Steel

Thursday, 29 December 2011

Having followed the latest debate about religion, I'd say the conclusion is obvious that the only thing as disturbing as the religious is the modern atheist. I'd noticed this before, after I was slightly critical of Richard Dawkins and received piles of fuming replies, that made me think that what his followers would like is to scientifically create an eternity in laboratory conditions so that they could burn me there for all of it.

It's not the rationality that's alarming, it's the smugness. Instead of trying to understand religion, if the modern atheist met a peasant in a village in Namibia, he'd shriek: "Of course, GOD didn't create light, it's a mixture of waves and particles you idiot, it's OBVIOUS."

The connection between the religious and the modern atheist was illustrated after the death of Christopher Hitchens, when it was reported that "tributes were led by Tony Blair". I know you can't dictate who leads your tributes, and it's probable that when Blair's press office suggested that he made one to someone who'd passed on, he said: "Oh, which dictator I used to go on holiday with has died NOW?"

But the commendation was partly Hitchens's fault. Because the difference between the modern atheist and the Enlightenment thinkers who fought the church in the 18th century is that back then they didn't make opposition to religion itself their driving ideology. They opposed the lack of democracy justified by the idea that a king was God's envoy on earth, and they wished for a rational understanding of the solar system, rather than one based on an order ordained by God that matched the view that everyone in society was born into a fixed status.

But once you make it your primary aim to refute the existence of God, you can miss what's really fundamental. For example, the ex-canon of St Paul's, presumably a believer unless he managed to fudge the issue in the interview, was on the radio this week expressing why he resigned in support of the protesters outside his old cathedral. He spoke with inspiring compassion, but was interrupted by an atheist who declared the Christian project is doomed because we're scientifically programmed to look after ourselves at the expense of anyone else. So the only humane rational scientific thought to have was "GO Christian, GO, Big up for the Jesus posse."

Similarly, Hitchens appears to have become obsessed with defying religion, so made himself one of the most enthusiastic supporters for a war he saw as being against the craziness of Islam. But the war wasn't about God or Allah, it was about more earthly matters, which the people conducting that war understood. And, as that war became predictably disastrous, they were grateful for whatever support they could find. And so a man dedicated to disproving GOD was praised in his death by the soppiest, sickliest, most, irrational, hypocritical Christian of them all.

So the only thing I know for certain is that I would become a Christian, if I could just get round the fact that there is no GOD.

Umpiring errors are part of the game

By Michael Jeh 11 hours, 8 minutes ago in Michael Jeh

 

Everyone, including Hussey, knew the rules of engagement before that match started © AFP

Here we go again - another Border Gavaskar Trophy on the line and it starts to get "tasty" after just one day. The Internet era merely serves to heighten the tensions because unlike the old-fashioned 'Letters to the Editor' which were usually written with more eloquence and vetted by editors, online blogs are much more raw and unfettered in both passion and vitriol. It's a classic Beauty and the Beast situation where we get to see what people are really thinking, protected by anonymity and distance, unhindered by rules about grammar and spelling, unafraid to vent opinions that range from sincere passion to patriotic fervour gone mad. I've seen some of that already this morning with reference to the DRS controversy. Some of it has been entertaining and illuminative whilst some of it has been just plain idiotic. That's the world wide web for you.

From what I've read this morning, it seems to me that some bloggers have just lost their sense of balance and perspective, blinded by their bias for or against the two countries involved. Here's my attempt to bring some common-sense and logic back to the debate, arguing from a neutral position of indifference as to who wins but with a strong desire to see the Indian and Australians fans not rip each other to pieces with emotive arguments that go beyond mere cricketing matters. Many incidents over the last few years have unnecessarily damaged relations between us, starting with the infamous Sydney Test when Harbajhan Singh and Andrew Symonds clashed and extending off the field to more serious incidents involving student bashings and loose talk on both sides of the Indian Ocean.

Let's start with the silly comments being bandied regarding the DRS not being used because it allows the Indians to cheat. It's not the ICC who are necessarily to blame, neither are the Indian cricketers themselves culpable. It was a decision agreed to at board level. Regardless of whether the BCCI has too much power or not, a topic for another debate altogether, the cricketers themselves are simply playing by the rules that were agreed before the series began. It's not like the Indian players suddenly introduced the playing condition when Michael Hussey walked out to bat. Everyone, including Hussey, knew the rules of engagement before that match started.

Umpires make mistakes. That happens. Disappointed as Hussey may have been, surely he is not suggesting that he has never benefited from similar decisions going in his favour, either as individual or as a team. The accidental fact that it was a first-ball duck when his career is on the line shouldn't change anything. I'm not even sure if Hussey is complaining too much, apart from that initial show of frustration for which a man of his calibre and disciplinary record can surely be forgiven. It's the irrational fools with short memories who are quick to start labelling the opposition players as cheats who are the real cheats in my opinion.

Short memories? Anyone remember when these teams last met during the New Year’s Test? Symonds smashed the cover off the ball and chose to stand his ground. He was simply playing by the rules and any Indian fan who called him a cheat should be similarly embarrassed today. Symonds' innings defined the course of that Test match but the bottom line is that he was simply playing by the rules of the day. He was no more or less of a cheat than anybody was yesterday (unless Symonds himself is one of those mystery bloggers hiding behind a ridiculous pseudonym, venting irrational spleen to fuel tension).

What about the Peter Siddle no-ball incident today when he castled Rahul Dravid? The replay reprieved Dravid, just like it did for Michael Clarke at the Gabba a few weeks ago. Dravid didn't ask for the replay - the umpire called for it himself because he was unsure, just like he did for Clarke who went on to score a big hundred. Both teams were aware that the umpires had this option available to them. It's not like Marais Erasmus made it up on the spot just to try and favour India. The only person at fault was Siddle for not keeping his foot behind the line.

Australian supporters are entitled to be disappointed with the Hussey dismissal yesterday but if you hail from a cricketing culture that has always played by the code where batsmen do not walk and leave all decisions to the umpires, surely you have to accept that you take the rough with the smooth. How does yesterday's chain of events make the Indians cheats? Does that also make the Aussies cheats when they nick one and don't walk?

I find it particularly amusing when Australian fans complain about genuine umpiring mistakes. As far back as I can recall, from junior cricket ranks upwards, our kids have been brought up on the notion that you only walk when your car has broken down. Leave all decisions to the umpires and if it's your lucky day, that's cricket. That system is fraught with hypocrisy because I've seen many batsmen scream like stuck pigs when they get a bad one, I've seen many fielding teams happily accept decisions when they acknowledge amongst themselves in the team huddle that the umpire clearly got it wrong and most amusingly, I've seen fielders who give the batsman an absolute gobful for not walking when he nicks it! If that's not hypocrisy, what is? Surely a system that is built around living with the umpire's verdict is inherently in danger of choking on its own words if they abuse batsmen for not walking when he gets away with one? Under these rules, the only ones who are cheats are the ones who want the rules to work both ways. And they accuse the BCCI of opportunism?

Everyone's so busy accusing each other of dastardly deeds that they forget that it was a genuine mistake by the umpires. That happens. It works both ways. I read some ridiculous comments overnight that seemed to insinuate that the Indians opted against using DRS because it would allow them (the Indians) to get away with cheating. Where's the logic in that comment? That logic only holds true if the BCCI can somehow exert enough influence to infiltrate the game with crooked umpires. If that's the accusation, it is a very serious one indeed and completely destroys the fabric of the game. It's also a gross insult to the umpiring fraternity who clearly make mistakes on the field (as do the players) but would be appalled to think that the some cricket fans actually believe this is so. Any serious cricket follower who has watched the actual on-field umpiring incidents could not possibly think that there is a corrupt system in place that favours India more than other teams. It's just plain ridiculous.

The long-term solutions lie in getting the respective governing bodies to agree on a system that is acceptable to all stakeholders, cricketers, fans, umpires and cricket boards alike. There's a much bigger debate to be had as to whether the technology is reliable enough to be used universally and whether the BCCI should be allowed veto rights based on their power alone. That's a political debate though and one that doesn't really figure in some of the blog comments from all fans who seem hell-bent on accusing each other of racist bias.
What's new about a system that is controlled by the most powerful? We live in a world that runs entirely along those principles where the major industrial nations write the rules and everyone is forced to play by those rules. Those who choose to play by different rules get bombed into submission. One man's terrorist is another man's liberator. The debate about whether the BCCI has too much power or not is a worthy cause to contribute to but it has nothing whatsoever to do with whether players or umpires are cheats. All parties agreed to the system before the first ball was bowled. Just because yesterday's decisions may have come at the start of Ed Cowan's career and the end of Hussey's doesn't make it an act of foul play. By the end of the summer, I am sure the Indian batsmen too will cop some poor decisions so let's hope we don't see a repeat of the sanctimonious hand-wringing and ugly accusations against the umpires or the team who dare to appeal for a nick. Even if it involves Sachin Tendulkar. If he doesn't want to risk a poor decision, tell him not to make a mistake then! Clearly that's what we expect of umpires these days.

So to those vitriolic and irrational bloggers out there who seem to thrive on cowardly insults across a forum where daft nicknames hide their true identity, try not to confuse on-field decisions with agreements made by cricket boards and the ICC. Those are systemic decisions that are as much about politics and power as it is about what is best for the game. I'm certainly not one of those who believes that any governing body, BCCI and Cricket Australia included, necessarily act in the best interests of the game. They act in the best interests of themselves. But let's divorce the players and umpires from some of the grubby individuals who skulk in the corridors of power. Some men are still honourable. Some men still make mistakes. They make honourable mistakes. That's not cheating.

Why should I love this country?

The New Chauvinism

 By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 9th August 2005

Out of the bombings a national consensus has emerged: what we need in Britain is a renewed sense of patriotism. The rightwing papers have been making their usual noises about old maids and warm beer, but in the past 10 days they’ve been joined by Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian, Tristram Hunt in the New Statesman, the New Statesman itself and just about everyone who has opened his mouth on the subject of terrorism and national identity. Emboldened by this consensus, the Sun now insists that anyone who isn’t loyal to this country should leave it.(1) The way things are going, it can’t be long before I’m deported.

The argument runs as follows: patriotic people don’t turn on each other. If there are codes of citizenship and a general belief in Britain’s virtues, acts of domestic terrorism are unlikely to happen. As Jonathan Freedland points out, the United States, in which “loyalty is instilled constantly” has never “had a brush with home-grown Islamist terrorism”.(2)

This may be true (though there have been plenty of attacks by non-Muslim terrorists in the US). But while patriotism might make citizens less inclined to attack each other, it makes the state more inclined to attack other countries, for it knows it is likely to command the support of its people. If patriotism were not such a powerful force in the US, could Bush have invaded Iraq?

To argue that national allegiance reduces human suffering, you must assert that acts of domestic terrorism cause more grievous harm than all the territorial and colonial wars, ethnic cleansing and holocausts pursued in the name of national interest. To believe this, you need be not just a patriot, but a chauvinist.

Freedland and Hunt and the leader writers of the New Statesman, of course, are nothing of the kind. Hunt argues that Britishness should be about “values rather than institutions”: Britain has “a superb record of political liberalism and intellectual inquiry, giving us a public sphere open to ideas, religions and philosophy from across the world”.(3) This is true, but these values are not peculiar to Britain, and it is hard to see why we have to become patriots in order to invoke them. Britain also has an appalling record of imperialism and pig-headed jingoism, and when you wave the flag, no one can be sure which record you are celebrating. If you want to defend liberalism, then defend it, but why conflate your love for certain values with love for a certain country?

And what, exactly, would a liberal patriotism look like? When confronted with a conflict between the interests of your country and those of another, patriotism, by definition, demands that you should choose those of your own. Internationalism, by contrast, means choosing the option which delivers most good or least harm to people, regardless of where they live. It tells us that someone living in Kinshasa is of no less worth than someone living in Kensington, and that a policy which favours the interests of 100 British people at the expense of 101 Congolese is one we should not pursue. Patriotism, if it means anything, tells us we should favour the interests of the 100 British people. How do you reconcile this choice with liberalism? How, for that matter, do you distinguish it from racism?

This is the point at which every right-thinking person in Britain scrambles for his Orwell. Did not the sage assert that “patriotism has nothing to do with conservatism”,(4) and complain that “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality”?(5) He did. But he wrote this during the Second World War. There was no question that we had a duty to fight Hitler and, in so doing, to take sides. And the sides were organised along national lines. If you failed to support Britain, you were assisting the enemy. But today the people trying to kill us are British citizens. They are divided from most of those who live here by ideology, not nationality. To the extent that it was the invasion of Iraq that motivated the terrorists, and to the extent that it was patriotism that made Britain’s participation in the invasion possible, it was patriotism that got us into this mess.

The allegiance which most enthusiasts ask us to demonstrate is a selective one. The rightwing press, owned by the grandson of a Nazi sympathiser, a pair of tax exiles and an Australian with American citizenship, is fiercely nationalistic when defending our institutions from Europe, but seeks to surrender the lot of us to the US. It loves the Cotswolds and hates Wales. It loves gaunt, aristocratic women and second homes, and hates oiks, gypsies, council estates and caravan parks.

Two weeks ago, the Telegraph published a list of “ten core values of the British identity” whose adoption, it argued, would help to prevent another terrorist attack.(6) These were not values we might choose to embrace, but “non-negotiable components of our identity”. Among them were “the sovereignty of the Crown in Parliament” (“the Lords, the Commons and the monarch constitute the supreme authority in the land”), “private property”, “the family”, “history” (“British children inherit … a stupendous series of national achievements”) and “the English-speaking world” (“the atrocities of September 11, 2001, were not simply an attack on a foreign nation; they were an attack on the anglosphere”). These non-negotiable demands are not so different to those of the terrorists. Instead of an eternal caliphate, an eternal monarchy. Instead of an Islamic vision of history, a Etonian one. Instead of the Ummah, the anglosphere.

If there is one thing that could make me hate this country, it is the Telegraph and its “non-negotiable components”. If there is one thing that could make me hate America, it was the sight of the crowds at the Republican convention standing up and shouting “USA, USA “, while Zell Miller informed them that “nothing makes this Marine madder than someone calling American troops occupiers rather than liberators.”(7) As usual, we are being asked to do the job of the terrorists, by making this country ugly on their behalf.

I don’t hate Britain, and I am not ashamed of my nationality, but I have no idea why I should love this country more than any other. There are some things I like about it and some things I don’t, and the same goes for everywhere else I’ve visited. To become a patriot is to lie to yourself, to tell yourself that whatever good you might perceive abroad, your own country is, on balance, better than the others. It is impossible to reconcile this with either the evidence of your own eyes or a belief in the equality of humankind. Patriotism of the kind Orwell demanded in 1940 is necessary only to confront the patriotism of other people: the Second World War, which demanded that the British close ranks, could not have happened if Hitler hadn’t exploited the national allegiance of the Germans. The world will be a happier and safer place when we stop putting our own countries first.

Conflict - the path to Growth and Renewal

by Pritish Nandy

Call it conflict. Call it confrontation. Or call it simply the dialectic of growth. Whatever you call it, clashes take the world ahead. We may talk endlessly about peace and stability, how crucial continuity is. But what brings about change and opens up new ideas, new markets, new opportunities is always conflict. It breaks the status quo, creates the momentum for change. In the process, the world transforms.

Yes, every time a person, a brand or an institution comes under threat, the world changes. It forces us to think afresh. The classic example is when Pepsi challenged Coke, we all recognised for the first time the amazing elasticity of demand for a fizzy drink. Or when Penthouse challenged Playboy and converted what was till then a niche business into one of the world’s biggest industries. To take a recent example, when Anil and Mukesh fought, it appeared self defeating and long dirges were written about the demise of the great Ambani empire. Two years later, we found just the opposite had happened. The conflict had quadrupled their collective wealth. Similarly, if there is one thing that can resuscitate our moribund politics, it is Anna’s aggressive campaign that has woken up a lazy, corrupt Government to its responsibilities. As indeed it has woken up an equally lazy, corrupt Opposition to its opportunities. 

So, if conflict is the catalyst for change, why do we constantly enshrine the importance of harmony, reconciliation, freedom from strife? Every spiritual guru talks about it. So do political leaders. Even businessmen claim that stability is the only way for the world to progress and prosper. If stability goes, we are warned, the markets would collapse. So would the world. Actually, the contrary is true. Even though it appear to be bloody and unseemly, conflict is good for business, politics and, often, even human rights. The status quo invariably represents exploitation, corruption, the perpetuation of wrong. It also represents the lack of free thought. If we did not have enough conflicts, the world would rot.

Great religions grew from conflict. Every emerging sect and sub sect may have drawn blood during its birth and baptism but eventually they grew the size of the following and gave these faiths their cutting edge, to see them through difficult times. So, even as religions denounce violence, the truth is that it is violence that enlarged their domain. The benign perish, unsung. The gentle leader remains enshrined in our hearts but no longer relevant in a world we have created for ourselves where only strife moves us ahead. If Osama did not exist, we would have had to create him. (And some say we did.)

Godse kept Gandhi alive by assassinating him. Or else, we would have forgotten him even in his lifetime. Like the world forgot Mikhail Gorbachev. Violence, anger, bloodshed are the highpoints we celebrate as history. Our wars are what define us as nations, as the map of the world is being constantly redrawn. Empires are shrinking. New nations are being born.

New instruments of conflict keep being discovered. These are the new change agents. So when Sibal protests against social networking sites he is doing exactly what every Government wants to do: Preserve the status quo. For in the status quo lies their only hope of clinging onto power. That is why every re-election campaign starts with the promise of stability. It is the perpetuation of the myth that what exists is perfect. What could follow may be dangerous. 

But the modern world exists because it flirts with danger. Conflict creates markets. Conflict brings us change. Conflict opens up new opportunities, redefines existing social structures, gives hope to the underprivileged, the trampled upon. It teaches us the importance of constant change. Sun Tzu is the philosopher of our times. He teaches us that we must not run away from conflict but win it artfully and use it to change our lives.

The Tomsk court is not wrong. The Bhagawad Gita teaches us exactly this, and more. It teaches us that it is our moral duty to fight every war and win it instead of whimpering about peace and stability, right and wrong. In that sense, it is indeed extremist literature for our extremist times. It is that rare manual for survival in the age of bloody, bare knuckled fights. To ban it would be stupid. To learn from it would be apt.

Good Minus God

By LOUISE M. ANTONY

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.

Tags:

Atheism, Ethics, God, morality, Philosophy, religion and belief

I was heartened to learn recently that atheists are no longer the most reviled group in the United States: according to the political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell, we’ve been overtaken by the Tea Party.  But even as I was high-fiving my fellow apostates (“We’re number two!  We’re number two!”), I was wondering anew: why do so many people dislike atheists?

Atheism does not entail that anything goes. Quite the opposite.

I gather that many people believe that atheism implies nihilism — that rejecting God means rejecting morality.  A person who denies God, they reason, must be, if not actively evil, at least indifferent to considerations of right and wrong.  After all, doesn’t the dictionary list “wicked” as a synonym for “godless?”  And isn’t it true, as Dostoevsky said, that “if God is dead, everything is permitted”?
Well, actually — no, it’s not.  (And for the record, Dostoevsky never said it was.)   Atheism does not entail that anything goes.

Admittedly, some atheists are nihilists.  (Unfortunately, they’re the ones who get the most press.)  But such atheists’ repudiation of morality stems more from an antecedent cynicism about ethics than from any philosophical view about the divine.  According to these nihilistic atheists, “morality” is just part of a fairy tale we tell each other in order to keep our innate, bestial selfishness (mostly) under control.  Belief in objective “oughts” and “ought nots,” they say, must fall away once we realize that there is no universal enforcer to dish out rewards and punishments in the afterlife.  We’re left with pure self-interest, more or less enlightened.

This is a Hobbesian view: in the state of nature “[t]he notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have no place.  Where there is no common power, there is no law: where no law, no injustice.”  But no atheist has to agree with this account of morality, and lots of us do not.  We “moralistic atheists” do not see right and wrong as artifacts of a divine protection racket.  Rather, we find moral value to be immanent in the natural world, arising from the vulnerabilities of sentient beings and from the capacities of rational beings to recognize and to respond to those vulnerabilities and capacities in others.

 

Leif Parsons

This view of the basis of morality is hardly incompatible with religious belief.  Indeed, anyone who believes that God made human beings in His image believes something like this — that there is a moral dimension of things, and that it is in our ability to apprehend it that we resemble the divine.  Accordingly, many theists, like many atheists, believe that moral value is inherent in morally valuable things.  Things don’t become morally valuable because God prefers them; God prefers them because they are morally valuable. At least this is what I was taught as a girl, growing up Catholic: that we could see that God was good because of the things He commands us to do.  If helping the poor were not a good thing on its own, it wouldn’t be much to God’s credit that He makes charity a duty.

It may surprise some people to learn that theists ever take this position, but it shouldn’t.  This position is not only consistent with belief in God, it is, I contend, a more pious position than its opposite.  It is only if morality is independent of God that we can make moral sense out of religious worship.  It is only if morality is independent of God that any person can have a moral basis for adhering to God’s commands.
Let me explain why.  First let’s take a cold hard look at the consequences of pinning morality to the existence of God.  Consider the following moral judgments — judgments that seem to me to be obviously true:
•            It is wrong to drive people from their homes or to kill them because you want their land.
•            It is wrong to enslave people.
•            It is wrong to torture prisoners of war.
•            Anyone who witnesses genocide, or enslavement, or torture, is morally required
to try to stop it.

To say that morality depends on the existence of God is to say that none of these specific moral judgments is true unless God exists.  That seems to me to be a remarkable claim.  If God turned out not to exist — then slavery would be O.K.?  There’d be nothing wrong with torture?  The pain of another human being would mean nothing?

Think now about our personal relations — how we love our parents, our children, our life partners, our friends.  To say that the moral worth of these individuals depends on the existence of God is to say that these people are, in themselves, worth nothing — that the concern we feel for their well being has no more ethical significance than the concern some people feel for their boats or their cars.  It is to say that the historical connections we value, the traits of character and personality that we love — all count for nothing in themselves.  Other people warrant our concern only because they are valued by someone else — in this case, God.  (Imagine telling a child: “You are not inherently lovable.  I love you only because I love your father, and it is my duty to love anything he loves.”)

What could make anyone think such things?  Ironically, I think the answer is: the same picture of morality that lies behind atheistic nihilism.  It’s the view that the only kind of “obligation” there could possibly be is the kind that is disciplined by promise of reward or threat of punishment.  Such a view cannot find or comprehend any value inherent in the nature of things, value that could warrant particular attitudes and behavior on the part of anyone who can apprehend it.  For someone who thinks that another being’s pain is not in itself a reason to give aid, or that the welfare of a loved one is not on its own enough to justify sacrifice, it is only the Divine Sovereign that stands between us and — as Hobbes put it — the war of “all against all.”

This will seem a harsh judgment on the many theists who subscribe to what is called Divine Command Theory — the view that what is morally good is constituted by what God commands.  Defenders of D.C.T. will say that their theory explains a variety of things about morality that non-theistic accounts of moral value cannot, and that it should be preferred for that reason.  For example, they will say that atheists cannot explain the objectivity of morality — how there could be moral truths that are independent of any human being’s attitudes, will or knowledge, and how moral truths could hold universally.  It is true that D.C.T. would explain these things.  If God exists, then He exists independently of human beings and their attitudes, and so His commands do, too.  If we didn’t invent God, then we didn’t invent His commands, and hence didn’t invent morality.  We can be ignorant of God’s will, and hence mistaken about what is morally good.  Because God is omnipresent, His commands apply to all people at all times and in all places.

Whatever the gods love — bingo! — that’s pious. But what if they change their minds?

That’s all fine.  It would follow from D.C.T. that moral facts are objective.  The problem is that it wouldn’t follow that they are moral.  Commands issued by a tyrant would have all the same features.  For D.C.T. to explain morality, it must also explain what makes God good.

The problem I’m pointing to is an ancient one, discussed by Plato.  In his dialogue “Euthyphro,” the eponymous character tries to explain his conception of piety to Socrates: “the pious acts,” Euthyphro says, are those which are loved by the gods.”  But Socrates finds this definition ambiguous, and asks Euthyphro: “are the pious acts pious because they are loved by the gods, or are the pious acts loved by the gods because they are pious?”

What’s the difference?  Well, if the first reading is correct, then it’s the gods’ loving those particular acts that makes them count as pious acts, that grounds their piousness.   “Pious,” on this alternative, is just shorthand for “something the gods love.”  Whatever the gods happen to love — bingo! — that’s pious.  If the gods change their preferences on a whim — and they did, if Homer knew his stuff — then the things that are pious change right along with them.  In contrast, on the second reading, pious acts are presumed to have a distinctive, substantive property in common, a property in virtue of which the gods love them, a property that explains why the gods love them.

Translated into contemporary terms, the question Socrates is asking is this: are morally good actions morally good simply in virtue of God’s favoring them?  Or does God favor them because they are — independently of His favoring them — morally good?  D.C.T. picks the first option; it says that it’s the mere fact that God favors them that makes morally good things morally good.

Theories that endorse the second option — let’s call any such theory a “Divine Independence Theory” (D.I.T.) — contend, on the contrary, that the goodness of an action is a feature that is independent of, and antecedent to God’s willing it.  God could have commanded either this action or its opposite, but in fact, He commands only the good one.

Both D.C.T. and D.I.T. entail a perfect correspondence between the class of actions God commands and the class of actions that are good (or rather, they do so on the assumption that God is perfectly benevolent).  The two theories differ, however, on what accounts for this congruence.  D.C.T. says that it is God’s command that explains why the good acts are “good” — it becomes true merely by definition that God commands “good” actions.  “Goodness,” on this view, becomes an empty honorific, with no independent content.  To say that God chooses the good is like saying that the Prime Meridian is at zero degrees longitude, or that in baseball, three strikes makes an out.  D.I.T., on the other hand, says that it is a substantive property of the acts — their goodness — that explains why God commanded them. Indeed, it says that God’s goodness consists in His choosing all and only the good.  D.I.T. presumes that we have an independent grasp of moral goodness, and that it is because of that that we can properly appreciate the goodness of God.

D.C.T. is arguably even more radical and bizarre than the Hobbesian nihilism I discussed earlier.  On the nihilistic view, there is no pretense that a sovereign’s power would generate moral obligation — the view is rather that “morality” is an illusion.  But D.C.T. insists both that there is such a thing as moral goodness, and that it is defined by what God commands. This makes for really appalling consequences, from an intuitive, moral point of view.  D.C.T. entails that anything at all could be “good” or “right” or “wrong.”  If God were to command you to eat your children, then it would be “right” to eat your children.  The consequences are also appalling from a religious point of view.  If all “moral” means is “commanded by God,” then we cannot have what we would otherwise have thought of as moral reasons for obeying Him.  We might have prudential reasons for doing so, self-interested reasons for doing so.  God is extremely powerful, and so can make us suffer if we disobey Him, but the same can be said of tyrants, and we have no moral obligation (speaking now in ordinary terms) to obey tyrants.  (We might even have a moral obligation to disobey tyrants.)  The same goes for worshipping God.  We might find it in our interest to flatter or placate such a powerful person, but there could be no way in which God was deserving of praise or tribute.

This is the sense in which I think that it is a more pious position to hold that morality is independent of the existence of God. If the term “good” is not just an empty epithet that we attach to the Creator, who or whatever that turns out to be, then it must be that the facts about what is good are independent of the other facts about God.  If “good” is to have normative force, it must be something that we can understand independently of what is commanded by a powerful omnipresent being.

So what about atheism?  What I think all this means is that the capacity to be moved by the moral dimension of things has nothing to do with one’s theological beliefs.  The most reliable allies in any moral struggle will be those who respond to the ethically significant aspects of life, whether or not they conceive these things in religious terms.  You do not lose morality by giving up God; neither do you necessarily find it by finding Him.
I want to close by conceding that there are things one loses in giving up God, and they are not insignificant.  Most importantly, you lose the guarantee of redemption.  Suppose that you do something morally terrible, something for which you cannot make amends, something, perhaps, for which no human being could ever be expected to forgive you.  I imagine that the promise made by many religions, that God will forgive you if you are truly sorry, is a thought would that bring enormous comfort and relief.  You cannot have that if you are an atheist.  In consequence, you must live your life, and make your choices with the knowledge that every choice you make contributes, in one way or another, to the only value your life can have.

Some people think that if atheism were true, human choices would be insignificant.  I think just the opposite — they would become surpassingly important.


Louise M. Antony teaches philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She writes on a variety of philosophical topics, including knowledge gender, the mind and, most recently, the philosophy of religion. She is the editor of the 2007 book “Philosophers Without Gods,” a collection of essays by atheist philosophers.

Europe's gutless collapse

By Reuven Brenner

The US and European financial crises have this in common: too much credit was advanced at too low prices to households in the United States and to governments in Europe. In the US, the recipients did not have either the collateral or the prospect of revenues to pay back creditors. In Europe, the governments, with their present institutions, cannot create enough taxed wealth to pay back the debt with their current institutions, taxes and regulations.

In both cases, the recipients of the loans either lied through their teeth or deluded themselves (and delusions can be powerful when they serve one's interests). In the case of mortgage recipients in the US, few did any due diligence about their future ability to pay or about the mortgage-backed bonds.

In Europe, the move toward the European Community and the euro started with lies (or delusions of German rescues). Recall that the Italians called 1987 the year of il sorpasso, since suddenly 18% was added to their gross domestic product (GDP). The politicians claimed that this number reflected part of their undeclared, unmeasured incomes.

Why 18%? Because this was the number that allowed Italy to conform to the European Community requirement of debt/GDP ratios. The European bureaucrats were aware of much undeclared incomes in Greece too. Eventually they sued the Greek government for the false national statistics.

The result? To this day in both countries some 30% of incomes are undeclared in a variety of imaginative ways, often hidden by these countries' intricate customs, traditions and systems of patronage.

The national governments will not have an easy time changing such deeply rooted arrangements. Too many complex taxes, too many regulations, and too much corruption "on the top" resulted in ingrained perceptions that governments are wasting the money and that the courts are unreliable, rationalizing the culture of tax evasion. Why should hard-working people pay taxes when politicians and the rich get away with murder?

As it is in private life, start relationships with lies and they are unlikely to last or to end well. No trust, no finance; diminished trust, finance at a higher price. It is not rocket science.

But if all this was known, why were lenders willing to advance massive amounts of loans to these irresponsible, unaccountable entities?

Whereas in the US the case can be made that it took some time until it dawned on some that things were going awry, in Europe's case the issues surrounding Italy and Greece were well known. It was no secret that the continent was divided into "junk countries" and others where the tribe - the German one - could be called on for sacrifices and fulfilling duties, as was the case after the reunification.

Who made the mistakes that led to offering the loans to these profligate entities, aggravating mispricing of credit around the world and failing to correct the errors?

After all, the rationale for capital markets is simple: when all parties are held accountable, they correct mispricing faster than any other institutions that supply capital. There are only two other main entities that supply capital in every society: families and governments. The first is unlikely to correct mistaken allocation faster because of emotions. The second is unlikely to correct mistakes faster than arms-length financial intermediaries because a wide variety of political considerations get in the way.

So what went wrong in the presumably accountable financial institutions? Improper fiscal, regulatory and monetary policies. When combined with political considerations, however, none were considered "mistakes" by large segments of academics, central bankers, and politicians.

China illustrates in an extreme way the main difficulty with the finding solutions, but it is not dissimilar to what now confronts Europe too.

Most people agree that communism, as once practiced in the Soviet Union and China, was a colossal mistake. Tens of millions of people were killed, generations were made miserable, and talents and resources became severely mismatched. How do you correct for such mistakes? What is the path from totalitarian societies to more open ones backed by rule of law and equality?

There are no unique answers. There are no theories, no models, since the countries do not have either the legal precedents or the personnel to create, interpret and enforce them. Governments may emulate a successful country, but that too can take a generation or two.

China bet on a strategy of keeping the monopoly of the communist party, but allowing part of its population to integrate with the West. To achieve this integration, they pegged their currency to the US dollar, thus allowing dollar prices to guide the drastic restructuring. What was the alternative? Since accounting, balance sheets, prices, costs under communism were all fiction, the new government needed an anchor, and dollar prices served as such anchor.

Since wages in China were much lower than in the US, employment and exports expanded quickly. The country rapidly accumulated trillions of dollar assets. The Fed's low interest rate policy from 2004 and on distorted China's massive flow of trade to the US and its purchasing of Treasuries.

One could make the point that if the Chinese Communist Party opened up its domestic financial markets more rapidly, dispersing power and allowing entrepreneurship to thrive, the financing of the housing bubble could have been significantly mitigated, if not avoided, even with the pegged currency. Was the US able to use its negotiating powers at the time to force China to open its domestic markets more quickly? I believe so - though this option wasn't pursued.

The main point though of the above example is not to regret some foregone opportunity but to show that there are no models describing either how exactly countries should correct their political mistakes or how other countries should react while countries go through such transitions. There are no roadmaps and general theories for successful transformation: using negotiating power matters.

The European crisis
The financing of profligate, unaccountable governments, sanctioned by rating agencies and the Bank of International Settlement in Basel as being "riskless", brought us to the present situation. The solution for the eurozone required a drastic change in domestic policies cajoled by the European Union. After all, the EU knew all along about the extensive black and grey markets and the intricate patronage. Solutions were known too: simplified taxes, simplified regulations, more accountable governments.

Note that these solutions have very little to do with financial markets. They are a matter of political leadership. The political and financial institutions of China, Italy, Greece, and so forth shaped intricate institutions and habits and will not be altered because some economist or politician disapproves of it or devises some new technical models. Changing these is a matter of political leadership.

Unfortunately, such leadership is today nowhere in sight. If it does not emerge, bankruptcy, a distant second best, will bring about the changes. It is a distant second best because it could involve an extremely disorganized process, whose political outcome is unpredictable. What could then be done now while we wait for the Club Med countries to put their houses in order?

Since the European banks are at the center of the present crises, the best solution would be to emulate what happened in the US banking system in the 1990s. Namely, let them raise money by selling their loan book.

Banks would be much smaller. Ownership of non-investment grade loans would be much more dispersed. If the US banks could diminish their ownership of such loans from 80% in 1994 of their assets to 20% by 2009 (the balance distributed in a variety of collateralized loan obligations), there is no particular reason why Europe cannot achieve the same in much shorter time.

No need to implement a myriad of regulations. Disgorging debts from the zombie banks would also mitigate the much discussed "too large" or "too interconnected" to fail issue. Pension funds, insurance companies, and sovereign funds could offer the capital for such purchases.

But this takes guts, which are lacking in both Europe and the US. Yet again, I sound like Machiavelli waiting for his prince who never came.

Let's hope that he will emerge in 2012.

Reuven Brenner holds the Repap Chair at McGill University's Desautels Faculty of Management. The article draws on his books Labyrinths of Prosperity and Force of Finance.