Have you heard about the manager of a sales team in Provo, Utah who waterboarded
one of his employees as a motivational tool? He wanted to demonstrate
that they should be fighting for sales as hard as the employee was
fighting for air. The manager stated that he was inspired to do this by
reading a story about Socrates holding a student's head under water to
demonstrate that he should want knowledge as much as he wanted air.
That confused me somewhat since I've never heard or read this story and
it is so utterly unlike anything else Socrates is ever reported to have
said or done. So, I googled it. As I suspected, someone made it up,
passed it off as fact and it has since made the blog rounds as truth.
As you can imagine, the Socrates story makes me sadder than the
waterboarding incident.
The waterboarding incident is appalling
and deflating. The fact that anyone would think it allowable to do to
an employee, much less motivational is beyond belief. Then again, if
the United States government says it's not torture, or that it is
necessary, why shouldn't the citizens of that country think the same
thing? Bush has refused to answer
the question about waterboarding, but he has implied that it is an
acceptable behavior in order to get information from enemy combatants.
Well then, it must ok for the rest of us. Why wouldn't
the manager in Utah think it's acceptable if the highest authority in
our country refuses to denounce it? We are not allowed to ask our
government or its representatives to do things on our behalf that we do
not think are morally permissible. Oddly enough, that works both ways;
the government or its representatives is also not allowed to do things
on our behalf that they believe are not morally permissible. It's a
symbiotic relationship, this bond between government and citizen; a
representative acts for the citizens just as the citizens act for the
government. If one half of the equation is endorsing an action then the
other half of the equation must also be allowed to endorse that action.
Since our highest authority has made a direct implication of
endorsement of this technique it is utterly permissible for that
manager to waterboard his employee.
Are you as disgusted by that
last sentence as I am? It begs the question, of course, of how it is
possible that a representative of the people of the United States would
even consider the use of waterboarding an acceptable practice. It is obviously a morally reprehensible act and no one
could successfully mount a moral argument for the necessity or
rightness of the it. It goes back to the good old "Euthyphro dilemma."
Is a thing moral because God says it is so, or is it moral simply
because it is? Is a thing moral and allowed simply because our highest
government authority says it is so, or is it moral simply because it
is? Obviously, this analogy falls a bit short since we are comparing
something infallible to something fallible; however, the basic premise
remains, what or whom decides the morality of an act?
I would
hesitate to invest that much power in something as fallible as a person
in authority. Not only does authority come with its own detractions,
the person in authority is not always static. If we have invested all
of our morality in the person in charge, does it then change with each
new change of authority? What, then, would our foundation for deciding
a thing's morality be? Getting back to Euthyphro: how can an act be
deemed moral or immoral unless it actually is
immoral or moral? The morality has to be a part of the thing itself,
rather than an arbitrary label. If we're only finding morality in the
way we perceive a thing or in the way we describe it, we're only giving
lip service to whether or not morality exists. That cannot be!
Otherwise, the morality of an act would be separate from the act
itself. The rape of a child would be separate from the wrongness of it.
No. The wrongness of the act is as much a part of the act as the base
act itself. You cannot divorce action from morality unless you assert
that morality does not exist. And if you cannot divorce the two then
the morality is an intrinsic part of the action. The waterboarding
psycho of a manager has no basis for the contention that a thing is
permissible, even if it is deemed so by authority.
Back to the
Socrates question. I wonder where the story started? I decided to
google one of Socrates' most famous lines, "The unexamined life is not
worth living." The first page that popped up was an article for someone
promoting a way to success in personal and professional life. I find it
rather interesting that people are co-opting philosophy and trying to
force it into a role it should not and cannot have, the role of nothing
more than anecdotal importance. In other words, using philosophy in
little snippets and stories to demonstrate your point or world view,
rather than arriving at your point or world view from
philosophy. It would be easy to take little things written (or said, in
the case of Socrates) out of context and force them into the neat boxes
of life lessons we think we've learned or are attempting to teach
others. The waterboarding manager is the prime example of this
thinking: he read a story about a famous philosopher and used the idea
from the story to justify action taken. The problem is, you have to
have examined the action, the cause, the logic, the morality, the
nature of the thing before you can attempt it. Using philosophy in the
former way puts all of the emphasis on what happens after a thing is
done, rather than on what came before.
Let's assume for the
moment that the Socrates story is true. The purpose of the action taken
by Socrates is to teach his student or students that knowledge is as
necessary as air, as necessary as life. It is, in other words,
intrinsically bound to life itself. So, how do we get from that idea to
waterboarding an employee? Obviously, Socrates would have been making a
far subtler point than the manager was attempting to make; pursuing
sales is not the same thing as pursuing knowledge. I don't even mean
that in the superficial way of sales being less than knowledge and
somehow not quite on the up and up; what I mean is that sales are
tangible, knowledge is not. With that in mind, how can you possibly
apply the Socratic story to the idea that you should waterboard an
employee to get him to recognize the importance of sales? Are sales
intrinsic to life? Of course not. The comparison can't be made. If the
manager had done the mental heavy lifting necessary for philosophy and
understanding our action through philosophy, he would have seen this to
be the case. Instead, he read a story, thought hey! that can work for
me! and implemented it without thought, only desire. He wanted the outcome of the story, not the idea behind it. Again, it puts the emphasis on what comes after, not on how you got there.
Philosophy
is all about the way you get there. Some of my students struggle with
this idea in their papers because we are so used to making a choice or
statement and then thinking about the ideas behind it after the
consequences are manifest. The question in our minds isn't "why," but
"how." How can I get from A to B, not why should I get from A to B.
Using philosophy as a tool for marketing a self help or professional
success strategy is against the very idea
of philosophy. Anyone who tries to use it that way is only seeking to
justify something they think they already know and refusing to
recognize that the why behind it is more important than the how. It's
taking things backward; it is starting with an idea and then finding
things to justify the idea without the rigorous process of examination.
In other words, it's saying, "abortion is wrong," before you understand
what that means. We should always start with an "I don't know," before
we make any categorical statements or decisions. How can you know that
abortion is wrong unless you gotten to that conclusion through reason,
through a progression of examination? We can't start out
knowing; it must come from examination and we must start from a
position of uncertainty. In other words, we know nothing that we did
not first not know. The conclusion (the assertion of truth) is the
result, not the foundation.
Another famous Socratic quote is, "I
know that I know nothing." This was related by Diogenes after the
Delphic Oracle stated that Socrates was the wisest man. People are
often confused by the above quote but it makes perfect sense if you
understand that the process of knowledge is far more important than the
knowledge itself. Hell, you may not get to knowledge! We tend to ignore
why we believe a thing to be true and only believe it because we think
it must be so. This is the worst form of ignorance and the one most
prevalent in our society of separation. Unless we get back to a
fundamental understanding of the "why" of things, the examination of
things, we are doomed to turn into unthinking people who act without
thought. It's very disheartening.
Socrates would be pissed.
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