Moral Fictions and Scientific Management* Paul Santilli

ABSTRACT. This paper examines Alasdair Maclntyre's argument in After Virtue that corporate managers do not have the rational expertise in social control which they have used to justify their position in modern society. In particular, it is claimed that managerial science by taking an emotivist view, putting ends and values beyond the reach of sound rational judgment, has made human relationships matters of manipulation and under- mined its own moral legitimacy. The question is advanc- ed as to whether managers must operate from emotivist premises or whether they can truly understand and thus truly manage human affairs by rational reflection about human purpose, value, and intention.

Moral Philosophers, including those interested in business ethics, have tended to take the power and authority of the corporate manager for granted. Rarely investigating the status of mangement itself, they have preferred to deal with the specific moral responsivilities of those who have already assumed managerial roles. An exception to this tendency can be found in Alas- dair Maclntyre's new book, Af ter Virtue.1 While engaged in this book in examining the history and foundations of moral philosophy in general, Maclntyre also raises some far reaching and dis- turbing questions about the moral status of the manager in modern culture. In this paper I shall describe the salient points in Maclntyre's analysis of the manager, in the hope that it may con- tribute to a new kind of discussion in business ethics.

paul c. Santilli is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Siena College, Loudonville, N. Y. His previous publication is: 'The Informative and Persuasive Func- tions of Advertising: A Moral Appraisal', Journal of Business Ethics 2 (1983), 27-33.

At present, business ethics seems to be merely a matter of applying principles worked out in the pure air of moral theory to the rough and ready world of business. From MacIntyre, how- ever, we shall learn that moral theories are already embodied in the moral functions of mangement, providing social legitimacy and sanctions for those functions. If that is the case, then reflection on the ethics of business should be more than a one-sided application of norma- tive theory to facts, but rather an exercise in moral philosophy itself, which is prepared to challenge, modify, and even discard some of the cherished assumptions of contemporary ethics.

There is today in our country a large and still growing interest in careers in management and in the acquisition of an M.B.A. as a "ticket to paradise", to quote one young manager recently graduated from the University of Chicago. Apart from the obvious economic rewards, what makes a position in management so appealing, I think, is that it epitomizes what it means to live well as a contemporary man or woman. There are many respectable jobs in our society, but management now has become preeminently respectable. The manager is sure that he or she is significant, worthwhile, in tune with his or her time and place, and is accepted by others as being so. In a broad sense then, one could say that today being a manager has a moral as well as economic appeal.

According to Maclntyre the manager has become a central character in modern society. By his definition, a central character is one who brings to his social role a set of beliefs and values

Journal of Business Ethics 3 (1984) 279-285. 0167-4544/84/0034-0279500.70. © 1984 by D. Reidel Publishing Company.

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which give a moral ideal to his culture (p. 26). Central characters are "the moral representatives of their culture and they are so because of the way in which moral and metaphysical ideas and theories assume through them an embodied existence in the social world" (p. 27). Ordinary social roles tolerate a split between the public function and the private personality;for instance, we regard the personal attitudes and values of an electrician as things apart from his work as an electrician. For Maclntyre, no such split exists in a central character; here role is fused with personality, for society expects to see its own fundamental norms and ideals mirrored.

If Maclntyre is right about the presence of central characters in society and about the iden- tification of the manager as one of them, then it follows that any description of the manager's place in the modern corporation must refer to the moral beliefs embodied in that place. At first sight this demand seems surprising, for we might think that managerial functions can be accurately described without any mention of moral concepts - this is, in fact, what is done in all management textbooks. But we would not really know what the social tasks of the management were if we failed to see the moral dimension of those tasks. To see what the managerial function is is also to see what core beliefs and values ought to be expressed in that function. If it is indeed central in our society.

There are essentially two major moral beliefs which are, according to Maclntyre, inextricably linked to modern management systems. The first belief is what has come to be known in twentieth century ethics or 'metaethics' as 'emotivism'. Emotivism holds that what is good for the human being cannot be defined by rational means since the good is simply a product of a variety of individual or collective preferences rooted in emotion, not reason. That any value has its source in an essentially arbitrary choice or desire is the leading thesis of emotivist philos- ophy, a philosophy, Maclntyre contends, which has dominated modern moral theory in both its Anglo-Saxon and Continental versions. Emo- tivism also claims that the realm of value is separable from a realm of facts and that about facts objectively true judgments are possible,

about values they are not (See pp. 11-13). It is easy to see that these are also basic

assumptions underlying managerial practises. For the manager corporate values are given. They represent the ends which he is supposed to attain through his rational expertise, but are themselves not defined by that expertise. Managerial reason operates only to develop the means to reach predetermined goals and objec- tives, and is able to verify its judgments or dis- prove them by the measurable successes or failures it accumulates in the pursuit of such ends. The manager, says Maclntyre, "treates ends as given, as outside his scope; his concern is with technique, with effectiveness in transform- ing raw materials into final products, unskille'd labor into skilled labor, investment into profits" (p. 29). Managers are

seen by themselves, and by those who see them with the same eyes as their own, as uncontested figures, who purport to restrict themselves to realms in which rational agreement is possible - that is, of course, from their point of view, to the realm of fact, the realm of means, the realm of measurable effectiveness (p. 29).

Closely connected with the emotivism embod- ied in management is a second moral belief, which legitimizes the managerial status of authority, privilege, and reward. Underlying the system of management is the belief that because managers are rational and effective in meeting corporate objectives they are entitled to the power and benefits that their position brings them. It was Weber who first and most force- fully promulgated the thesis that rationality and efficiency, not personal charisma or tradition, would serve as principles legitimizing the author- ity of the newly emergent bureaucracies of the twentieth century. What justifies the prestige and powers of the leaders of managerial bureau- cracies is their perceivedabili ty to provide rational, predictable, effcient controls over social and economic matters of fact:

The decisive reason for the advance of bureaucratic organization has always been its purely technical superiority over any other form of organization. The fully developed bureaucratic apparatus compares with

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other organizations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of production. Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of the Files, con- tinuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduc- tion of friction and of material and personal costs - these are raised to the optimum in the strictly bureau- cratic administration... 2.

Now, for anyone who has recently dealt with a bureaucracy, like the Registry of Motor Vehicles, there may be some question as to whether bureaucracies are the models of machine-like efficiency that Weber thinks they are. Neverthe- less, social scientists rarely dispute his claim that the social principle of legitimacy for the wealth and power of the bureaucratic manager is the use of rationality in the effective realization of goals. Managers themselves invite this social trust in their abilities to manage large social organiza- tions with an expertise unavailable to the general public.

II

So far, we have learned that the manager has a moral status in contemporary society rooted in two fundamental moral beliefs, which are: (1) the emotivist belief excluding values from the realm of reason and (2) the legitimating belief that managers are efficiency experts authority. Both beliefs appear to reinforce each other. On the one hand, emotivism limits the region of expertise to facts and lends credence thereby to the claim that there is a class of experts actually managing business matters in a rational manner. On the other hand, the presence in society of an apparently successful class of efficiency experts bolsters emotivism's doctrine that it is only in the purstfit of value free knowledge that objec- tive success may be had. Furthermore, the emo- tivist relegation of valued ends to the nether world of sentiment also weakens the authority of those figures who have traditionally sought wisdom about the human good in general and the good of political societies in particular - the political philosopher, the poet, the p r o p h e t - and strengthens the position of those proposing to deal only with the factual and the quanti-

liable - the behavioral scientist, the statistician, the manager.

But as we scrutinize these two beliefs more carefully it will become evident that their rela- tionship is not as harmonious as it might appear.

We ought to see, first of all, says Maclntyre, that emotivism entails "the obliteration of any genuine distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations" (p. 22). This is because ex hypothesi discourse about values can never be rational, and thus efforts to achieve a consensus about which ends to pursue in any given policy will require non-rational tools of persuasion such as seduction, deception, coer- cion, and other kinds of manipulation. Non- manipulative relationships among social agents can exist only if persuasive arguments can be rationally communicated and commands rationally justified. Given emotivism, there can be no rational criteria for defining the good, the valuable, the worthwhile in policy; hence, the attempted use of reason in discourse about such things would only be a semblance, masking what actually must be manipulative efforts to impose one person's preferences upon another. Disagree- ments about what one should seek in this or that enterprise cannot in principle be resolved rationally, but only "by producing certain non- rational effects on the emotions or attitudes of those who disagree with one" (p. 12). Success in doing this is a measure only of one's power, not of one's rationality.

Should not a society convinced of the truth of emotivism be therefore a society in which manipulative relationships prevail and in which power commands authority? MacIntyre agrees that our society, which looks to figures like managers as emblems of its moral ideals, is indeed committed to manipulative relationships, but he contends that it masks this fact by its reliance on what he calls 'moral fictions'. A 'moral fiction' is a concept which is intended to serve as an objective criterion of moral debate and judgment, but which in fact does not do so. By its pretension to offer a rational criterion for moral consensus, it disguises the inherently irrational nature of debate about values in a society committed to emotivism: 'The mock rationality of the debate conceals the arbitrari-

282 Paul Santilli

ness of the will and power at work in its resolu- tion" (p. 68). Maclntyre credits Nietzsche for exposing the will to power lurking beneath the morality of the modern world. This morality is a composite of various moral fictions promising order and rationality, but concealing the unfathomable struggle for power at the root of all accepted values. Nietzche was wrong, in Maclntyre's opionion, to accuse all morality of being fictitious in this way - Greek and medieval beliefs about virtue, for instance, were not moral fictions - but he was right to see and to prophe- size that nineteenth and twentieth century moralities, dominated on the surface by rules about human rights and social utilities, were in essence insupportable cover-ups for the mani- pulative power relationships of emotivism.

We cannot examine here Maclntyre's arguments which reduce beliefs about human rights and social utilities to moral fictions. 3 For our purposes it is enough to have grasped the meaning of moral fictions in order to turn to the moral fiction of direct concern to our theme, namely the legitimating belief in expert efficien- cy underlying the social position of the manager.

We have noted that managerial effectiveness at social control is generally thought to justify "the claim of the bureaucratic, managerial mode to a place of authority in our lives" ( p. 71). This means that any doubts cast upon the rational effectiveness of the manager may deci- sively weaken his moral authority, indeed to the point of rendering it 'fictitious'. Are there grounds for such doubts?

Maclntyre thinks there are. Effectiveness, he asserts, is "part of a masquerade of social control rather than a reality". The main reason why this is so is that the knowledge necessary to gain the kind of organizational control aspired to by the manager simply does not exist. In a Socratic way, Maclntyre presupposes that exper- tise is a matter of knowledge; and for the manager such knowledge

would have to include a set of factual law4ike gener- alizations which would enable the manager to predict that, ff an event or state of affairs of a certain type were to occur or to be brought about, some other event or state of affairs of some specific kind would

result. For only such law-like generalizations could yield those particular causal explanations and predic- tions by means of which the manager could mould, influence, and control the social environment. (p. 74 /

This suggests that the manager needs generaliza- tions like those found in the physical sciences which offer controls over morally neutral, predictable, law-obeying facts. Unfortunately, the facts of social behavior yield no such generalizations. In the bluntest possible terms, MacIntyre asserts that the salient fact about the social sciences "is the absence of the discovery of any law-like generalization whatsoever" (p. 84). The best that the social sciences have been able to come up with are insightful, but not law- like generalizations about certain aspects of human affairs, which tolerate many counter- examples and offer no explanation of the con- ditions under which they would or would not hold. These are in many ways, Maclntyre thinks, akin to the proverbs of folk societies (p. 99), and not without value, to be sure, but also not what one is usually thought to learn in graduate training in business administration.

One could argue that the failure of the social sciences to produce law-like generalizations was due to such factors as the infancy of those sciences, the complexity and number of variables in social interactions, or the need for more sophisticated techniques of discovery. In these cases, one need not claim that scientific manage- ment is based on intrinsically unstable founda- tions. Rather, one should say tha t problems standing in the way of enlightenment about human behavior were of a technical and tempo- rary nature only, and that with the progressive solution of these problems management would acquire greater expertise in prediction and control and thus vindicate its claim of legitimacy.

In opposition to this view, MacIntyre argues that human affairs will never be subject to law- like generalizations because of the inevitable intervention of what Machiavelli called Fortuna.

For tuna is the personification of sheer contin- gency threatening even the most well-researched and precisely formulated generalizations. The sources of unpredictability are systematic and deeply inherent in human life and are not

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merely the result of methodological flaws or gaps in our statistics (See pp. 88-95). This pervasive unpredictability, which for Maclntyre is at the heart of human existence, rendering "all our plans and projects permanently vulnerable and fragile", prevents the social sciences from patterning themselves after the physical sciences, prevents them from gathering law-like generaliza- tions about social behavior, and finally prevents managerial planning and prediction from being effective instruments of social control.

In summary, Maclntyre's argument is that by its own presuppositions to be morally justified in holding its place of preeminence in society the managerial bureaucracy must wield effective, rational powers of social control; such power lies in the possession of law-like generalizations about human behavior; so, bureaucratic manage- ment depends on the social sciences; but knowl- edge gotten from the social sciences is not 'scientific' in the usual sense of the word, not because of some temporary state of history, but because of the pervasive unpredictability of human life. Therefore if the social sciences are not in good order, scientific management cannot be in good order, and therefore the belief that it is in good order and in possession of rational expertise is a "moral fiction" (p. 101). Such a moral fiction is a particularly pernicious one, one which hides the irrational power struggle within the relationships of corporate society.

III

Maclntyre believes that by using Fortuna to defeat a view of the social sciences that envisions them as generators of law-like generalizations he has likewise reduced the presumption of efficien- cy in managerial bureaucracies to a sham, there- by undercutting their moral claim to our allegiance. But one must ask MacIntyre here that even if we grant that authority rests on the rational expertise brought to problems in the organization by the manager, must it be the case that such expertise is inextricably bound to a concept of knowledge which defines it as operating from a stock of law-like generalizations and only from such generalizations? Why must

rationality be so narrowly circumscribed? After all, Maclntyre himself acknowledges that there is a reasonable predictability as well as unprecita- bility to human life. He states,

Knowledge of statistical regularities plays as impor- tant a part in an elaboration and carrying out of plans and projects as does knowledge of scheduling and co- ordinated expectation. Lacking either we would not be able to make rational choices between alternative plans in terms of their chances of success and failure (pp. 97-98).

If this is true, then why should not a manager be able to use systematically gathered statistics in a 'knowledgeable', rational way in order to improve planning, scheduling, coordinating, and so on? Would not the ability to understand, formulate, and utilize these resources of prediction be a specialized knowledge, legitimating the authori- ty of those possessing such knowledge?

A very good example of what a managerial expertise could be that is not bound to law-like generalizations is given by Maclntyre himself, ironically with the intention of exploding claims to expertise. He cites with approval a study by Burns and Stalker which shows that an "effec- tive organization has to be able to tolerate a high degree of unpredictability within itself" for

attempts to monitor what every subordinate is doing all the time tend to be counter-productive; attempts to make the activity of others predictable necessarily routinize, suppress intelligence and flexibility and turn the energies of subordinates to frustrating the projects of at least some of their superiors. 4

If true, this should, of course, be taken as valuable information stemming from research in the social sciences, precisely the sort of thing graduate schools of management would want to include in their curriculum. Surely the use of such studies would give the manager a rational basis for effective planning and successful pre- diction.

It seems to me, that by drawing on these social sciences that were able to produce useful statistical regularities and inductive, though not law-like, generalizations about social behavior, the managerial establishment could make good

284 Paul Santilli

its claim to be a domain of expertise in planning and control, although it could not claim the same kind of control as that exercised in the application of laws to facts by the physical sciences. Thus, this expertise need not be taken to be a 'moral ficton'. Maclntyre has not proved that "our social order is in a very literal sense out of our and indeed anyone's control" (p. 101), as he puts it in a rhetorical flourish. At best, his argument has shown that the social order is not subject to control by a scientific knowledge of a very specific kind. It leaves open the possibility that there are degrees of social management based on 'scientifically' gathered insights, which are, as he himself would admit, available to managers) I take it that all the Weberian assumption of legitimacy through efficiency required was the existence of rational modes of control, not specifically modes founded on law-like generalizations.

Conclusion

It would, however, be unfair to Maclntyre to leave the argument here. His attack against the moral status of the manager may still be vindicated in the following way:

If we give up what we can call the 'strong claim' to found managerial expertise on law-like generalizations concerning social facts in favor of the 'modest claim' to base expertise on statis- tical regularities concerning human affairs, we do not thereby fictionalize the legitimating belief in managerial effectiveness. This is what I have argued against Maclntyre. But, if that legitimating belief also requires an expertise which is concerned solely with facts in exclusion from human values, then the belief cannot be sustained. That is, if the moral legitimacy of scientific management depends upon emotivist beliefs about the limits of rationality, then Maclntyre, by pointing to the systematic un- predictability in human life, has indeed severely undercut that legitimacy. Why is this?

According to Maclntyre, a large part of human unpredictability lies in our own desire to be unpredictable; we seek freedom and spon- taneity in our lives and resist attempts to make

us controllable and predictable (p. 99). Human behavior in significant ways depends upon values, intentions, and purposes, none of which are simply facts. In large measure, Fortuna enters human lives because social acts are initiat- ed and continued by free choices and directed teleologically to meaningful, valued ends. Since these acts cannot be reduced to bare physical or behavioral facts, they cannot be understood and controlled as can the facts of physics and chemistry. Free choice, meaning, value ultimately defeats all efforts to arrange human affairs into law-like generalizations. A rationality that ignores this in prejudice of the factual is a failed rationality, one which distorts rather than rules human conduct by stripping it of the dimension of meaning and value. Only a reason geared to meaning and value could be capable of offering to social organizations a direction that would be effective in the long run.

Although Maclntyre does not make this explicit, what his argument has shown, I think, is that the two moral beliefs defining current perceptions of management are in contradic- tion with one another. On one hand, if the legitimating belief in managerial expertise is sound, then the philosophy of emotivism embodied in the manager as a 'central character' cannot be true. For expertise demands a toler- ance for and an understanding of human values if it is to be founded on a genuine science of human behavior. To put it clearly: to be justified the manager must be rational; to be rational he must treat values rationally (or else his claim to direct human lives really is a sham); hence, his emotivist beliefs cannot be right. On the other hand, if it is emotivism which is the sound doc- trine, then all control of human behavior must at bottom be a form of manipulation, and not rational; thus, since a manager could not rational- ly control social behavior, the belief in his legitimacy would be false.

Consider that if emotivism were true, the manager would have to rule by sheer power (whether the power of coercion, rhetoric, charm or some other), because only power could get people to submit to objectives for which they had no previous personal preferences, rational persuasion necessarily being ruled out. An

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emotivist manager could lead by personal charisma or by subtlety at manipulation, proving his effectiveness in these ways, but that could not give him legitimate title to his degreees and his prestige in society, at least not according to the original Weberian thesis. As long as emotivism is taken for granted then MacIntyre is right to call belief in rational efficiency a 'moral fiction', for it pretends to a rationality in human lives, where in truth by expelling matters of spirit from the care of reason it delivers only manipu- lative controls over society.

What, finally, should we say of the moral status of the manager? I would like to conclude with the optimistic assertion that managers are indeed some of the most important agents of social change in modern culture, and that there- fore they must be convinced that economic and social reason is more than a matter of arranging means to meet pregiven ends, but a matter also of defining those ends, that their tasks require what traditionally has been a kind of political wisdom about what men seek and about what is good. Only such insight, in my opinion, could give them that moral entitlement to leadership which they have already so willingly assumed.

Notes * Paper presented at the 16th Conference on Value Inquiry, entitled: 'Ethics and the Market Place: An Exercise in Bridge-Building or On the Slopes of the Interface'. 1 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (University of Notre Dame Press, Indiana, 1981). Further references to MacIntyre will be incorporated into the text of the paper. 2 Max Weber, Economy and Society, III, ed. by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Bedminister Press, N.Y., 1968), p. 973. 3 These arguments are found mainly in MacIntyre, Chapter VI. 4 MacIntyre, pp. 100-01. Tom Burns and G. N. Stalker, The Management Innovation, 1968. s At one point (p. 101), Maclntyre acknowledges that many managers and bureaucrats will not claim the kind of scientific control and expertise that he says does not exist. He argues, however, that he is not battling a straw man, "For claims of this modest kind could never legitimate the possession or the uses of power either within or by bureaucratic corporations in anything like the way or on anything like the scale on which that power is wielded". I do not think this is convincing; Maclntyre does not really give us grounds for believing this and relies on terms like 'way' and 'scale' which are too vague.

Review

Lois Banfill Shaw (ed.), Unplanned Careers: The Working Lives of Middle-Aged Women, Lexington Books, Lexington Mass. and Toronto, 1983, viii + 147 pp., $24.95.

(a) Bibliographical Data: See above; hard cover; D.C. Health and Company; National Longitudinal Studies of Labour Market Experience (U.S.), HD6056.2.U6U56/ISBN 0 - 6 6 9 - 0 5 7 0 1 - 0 .

(b) General Appraisal: • (Recommended for libraries.)

(c) Specific Ratings: This is excellent with respect to questions it raises and tries to resolve. The clarity of the writings varies from fair to poor. The data base is only fair and this affects not only the depth and scope of the book, but also the value of the charts, graphs and tables.

(d) The authors of the eight essays discuss in Chapter 1 (Lois B. Shaw and Theresa O'Brien) the general plight and problems of women seeking to re-enter the labour force in middle age; in Chapter 2 (Lois B. Shaw) special problems of re-entry for women, white or black - married, or divorced, or widowed or separated; Chapter 3 (Lois B. Shaw) the causes of irregular employment patterns which affect the options available to middle- aged women seeking work. In Chapter 4, Anne Statham and Thomas Deymont ask why some kinds of work have been unusual for women to obtain, and consider the extent to which the explanations reflect prejudice against women, difficulties with regared to training and background, economic cycles, race, health, etc. In Chapter 5, Anne Statham and Patricia Rhotan look for changes in the attitudes of men (and also women) towards the propriety and good sense of women's

Journal of Business Ethics 3 (1984).