1.2 - A little history of Evil

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Del curso dictado por University of Lausanne

Unethical Decision Making in Organizations

175 calificaciones

University of Lausanne

Unethical Decision Making in Organizations

175 calificaciones

This course 'Unethical decision making in organizations : A seminar on the dark side of the force' will teach you how strong organizational contexts push good people towards unethical decisions. You will also learn how to protect yourself and your organization against such forces lurking in the dark. About the Course This course teaches how narrow frames and strong contexts can push good people towards unethical decisions and how they can protect themselves and their organization against ethical blindness. The goal of this course is to empower the participants to analyze the risks of unethical or illegal behavior that might be triggered by powerful contexts. It draws from various disciplines such as management, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and literature, in order to learn what these disciplines contribute to a better understanding of unethical behavior. The course also analyzes some of the most prominent organizational scandals of the recent decades through the lenses of these disciplines. Whenever we hear about ethical scandals, we tend to believe that unethical or illegal behaviour in organizations is driven by character deficiencies of individual actors. Put differently, we simply assume that bad things are done by bad people. However, numerous corporate scandals have demonstrated that even people with a high level of integrity can break the rules if they are put into a strong context. A better understanding of why and under what conditions good people make bad ethical decisions will enable us to better protect individuals as well as their respective organizations against the potentially overwhelming power of the context. It will also enable us to cure societies from problems like corruption. At the end of the course, you are able to: 1. Explain the impact of social context on individual decision making using various theories (from Management, Sociology, Psychology, and Philosophy) 2. Apply these theories to the analysis of some of the most eminent organizational scandals of the recent decades 3. Assess risks of ethical blindness in your own organizational context 4. Design interventions to reduce such risks for yourself and your organization Recommended Background No background expertise is required. The course is open for interested layperson as well as experts who work on related topics, be it as researchers or practitioners (e.g., compliance managers in corporations). Why is this course important for me? Currently, the understanding of why good people make unethical decisions is rather limited, related research is rather fragmented, and the management of such problems in organizations is overly simplistic, legalistic, and inadequate. Understanding contexts, including the dangers of routines, the mindlessness of our daily decisions, and the healing power of mindful decision-making routines is of increasing importance. In this course, you will learn the latest knowledge and the appropriate tool box for dealing with ethical challenges that you will face throughout your life! What do I need to follow this course? We build bridges between various scientific disciplines and will familiarize you with those disciplines smoothly. You need no expertise, just come and share your own real-world experiences about unethical decisions. After all, we are all experts in making decisions—some more ethically, some less ethically—aren’t we?

De la lección

Week 1- Ethical and unethical decision making

Have you ever asked yourself the following questions ? Why do human beings act in an illegal and unethical way? Why and under what conditions do we become evil? What motivates harm doing and what is the explanatory power of human nature and human culture? What is the evil anyway? And why is this relevant for us in our daily life? The first week will give you an introduction to the historic evolution of our modern understanding of evil, looking at how evil has been discussed in different times and cultural contexts. Furthermore, in this first week, we will discuss how you can deal with situation in which you have to make ethical decisions and how the theories of philosophers such as Immanuel Kant provide us a tool box for such situations.

1.1 - Introduction to the course 5:59

1.2 - A little history of Evil 10:36

1.3 - Dilemma - How to make ethical decisions13:49

Conoce a los instructores

Guido Palazzo
Professor of Business Ethics
Faculty of Business and Economics (HEC-Lausanne)
Ulrich Hoffrage
Professor of Decision Theory
Faculty of Business and Economics (HEC-Lausanne)

[MUSIC]

Welcome to the second video of the first week of our course on

unethical decision making.

We would like to start our course on unethical decision making

by sharing some reflections on the history of evil with you.

In this session, you will learn how philosophers explained evil throughout

history and you will see how our current understanding of evil developed over time.

This is a course on unethical decision making.

It is based on one central argument.

When making decisions, we are embedded in contexts.

These contexts can be so strong that you might move to the dark side of

the force despite our good intentions and values.

We might do the wrong thing without even realizing that what we do is wrong.

We become blinded for the ethical dimension of our decisions.

How does this dark side of the force look like?

What is evil?

Where does it come from?

Here, we can deliver only a rough sketch of this very big

debate that is lasting since at least 2,000 years.

Let me take a look at these questions from my own cultural perspective,

the context of Europe and its history.

If we start with the premodern perspective, we will see

that the world-view of the Middle Ages was a combination of Christianity and

ancient Greek philosophy.

Human beings were perceived as being born into a world with two distinct orders,

the order of nature called cosmos, the order of society called polis.

Cosmos and polis were perceived as being in harmony.

Simply spoken, polis followed cosmos.

The structure of nature reinforced a rational social order.

So the premodern perception of evil discussed by the philosopher Augustine,

for instance, followed this logic.

His argument can be summarized as follows.

God created the world and it was good.

Man lived in the Garden of Eden.

Adam and Eve disobeyed God and had to leave the paradise because of this,

and evil is the consequence of the fall of man.

Two forms of evil exist, natural evil, understood as God's punishment.

God might send an earthquake or a tsunami to punish us for our sinful lives.

And moral evil, which results from our decisions led by our weak character and

caused by our alienation from God.

Within this worldview, however, very soon a logical problem appeared.

The problem that is called a theodicy problem because there are three

claims that are very difficult to, to bring together.

Evil exists, God is benevolent, and God is omnipotent.

Questions that drove philosophers crazy in the Middle Ages and

beyond were the following.

God could have created the world with fewer crimes and misfortune.

Why does crime exist?

God created eternal suffering in hell for limited bad action.

Why does suffering exist?

Is God superior or inferior to reason?

If reason is superior, God is weak.

If God is superior, the link between guilt and

punishment, good and evil, is just random.

The philosopher Leibniz came with a solution to this theodicy problem.

According to him, God's action happen for the best of us.

There must be a link between sin and

suffering because God has created the best of all possible worlds.

Sin, in the sense of moral evil, is linked to suffering in the sense of

natural evil even if we cannot understand and see the causality.

This was a dominating worldview that was shaken at latest in

1755 when an earthquake happened at Lisbon.

Lisbon at the time was one of the wealthiest cities in the world.

It was the cosmopolitan harbor for the exploration and colonization of the world.

On November 1, 1755, Lisbon was shaken by an earthquake.

This earthquake shocked the Western civilization more than

any event since the fall of Rome.

If cosmos and polis are connected, why do earthquakes happen?

Why did this horrible earthquake happen in Lisbon?

Was it a punishment of god?

The earthquake occurred in the morning of November 1 and lasted for

about ten minutes.

Many houses got destroyed.

The sky turned dark with dust.

After the earthquake, terrible fires rage over the city.

People desperately tried to flee to the harbor.

However, the earthquake triggered a tsunami and huge waves smashed the port.

Those who were looking for shelter at the waterfront died.

All this looked like a destruction orchestrated by God.

But how could God do this on All Saints Day?

In particular, people were puzzled by the fact that most churches got

destroyed while the quarter with the whore houses remained more or less intact.

The earthquake of Lisbon sent intellectual shock waves through Europe and

since Lisbon,

the belief that natural evil is connected to social evil was dropped more or less.

Society focused on the evil it can reach, moral evil, evil done by human beings.

And the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau delivered a highly

influential new idea on evil.

According to him, God created the free will and we abuse it.

Evil develops over time.

It has a history and we can influence it.

Evil is an alienation from human nature and

counter forces against evil are first, a better self knowledge.

And second, better institutions of politics and education.

In other words, in order to fight evil, we need pedagogy, and

psychology, and politics.

With the philosopher Immanuel Kant, the clear separation between

metaphysical arguments about God and reason-based arguments got reinforced.

A basic human challenge, according to Kant,

is the gap that exists between what is the case and what should be the case.

But despite all the horrible things that happen in the world,

we have to be convinced that the world, in principle, should work.

So, for Kant, evil means not to follow the moral law within me.

Evil means to act against reason, to abuse reason.

Since then, we have developed a clear understanding of good and

evil, moral and immoral, as connected to reason.

Modernity is the result of the rise of reason with all its good and

bad consequences.

We have modeled human behavior on the basis of our belief in reason as an ideal.

In social sciences, what dominates today is the concept of rational choice and

the idea of the homo economicus,

the calculating individual decision maker who is maximizing his or her own utility.

Evil is the result of conscious decisions.

It is the result of intentions.

It is driven by doubtful motivations.

Reason is, at the same time, the driver and the cure of evil.

So reason drives us towards the dark side, but it helps us to cure ourselves and

protect ourselves against it.

Let us jump to the 20th century.

What response was for the belief and the link between cosmos and

polis, it got destroyed.

Auschwitz was for our belief in the power of reason.

Up to 3 million people died in Auschwitz.

And Auschwitz raised doubts about the sense we apply moral categories

to human decisions, explaining it as a deviation from reason.

Auschwitz was not an event where reason was absent.

It was, in effect, the result of a careful application of reason and science.

Evil is closer to good application of reason in the sense of Kant than we

want to believe.

Individual intentions and the magnitude of evil do no longer connect after Auschwitz.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt's conclusion thus is that evil is banal and normal.

It does not need bad intentions, as in Kant's view.

It does not need a demonic dimension.

It spreads, as she says, like a fungus on the surface.

The 20th century saw two immense wars fought with

the best scientific knowledge available.

It saw two repressive political systems, fascism and communism, responsible for

millions of death.

It comes as no surprise that the postwar intellectual debates show a deep

skepticism regarding the role of reason in human decision making.

Postmodern philosophy radically breaks with the idea of reason-based progress in

human history.

Evil is not the opposite of reason anymore, not the opposite of progress.

It gets intensified with reason and progress.

Postwar researchers became interested in the social conditions that promote evil.

Writers like George Orwell in his dystopian novel 1984 describes how

repressive contexts keep people in check and determine what they do and think.

Psychologists like Asch, Milgram, and Zimbardo started to

examine various aspects of contextual forces that drive evil.

This is where our course takes its start.

While we do not deny the existence of intentional and

reason-based unethical decisions, we assume that most evil does not

result from who we are, but rather from the context in which we are embedded.

Many things might happen not because of who were are, but despite of who we are.

We thus need a better understand of context-driven evil.

To conclude this first session, in the premodern understanding,

evil is the result of the fall of man.

Our suffering is the punishment of God.

After Lisbon, evil gets disconnected from theology and

gets analyzed as a social phenomenon.

Evil in its modern conception is a deviation from reason.

After Auschwitz, evil gets disconnected even from reason.

The analysis of evil starts to focus on the context in which decisions occur.

[MUSIC]

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