100. The Republic: Part 1a

Note: This post is the one hundredth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

Note also: this is a continuation from post 98.




"I'm gonna getcha, getcha, getcha, getcha.
One way or another"

One Way or Another, Blondie



In the first chapter of 'The Republic', Plato sets out to demonstrate the flaws in the some of the conventional views of what justice is. He does this by, in the words of Jane Jacobs, 'syndrome hopping'.

The way it works is that when given a notion of justice that corresponds to the commercial syndrome, Socrates will then trip the person who suggested it up by putting the commercial notion of justice in a guardian setting, and then vice-versa when a guardian notion of justice is presented.

First off, he asks the businessman, Cephalus, to define justice, and Cepahlus suggests that justice is the repayment of debts, a commercial sort of answer. So Socrates then asks if one should return a weapon to a friend who is not of sound mind, which is a guardian type situation where clearly loyalty and concern for another takes precedence over the commercial virtues of honesty and keeping a promise.

Led in this Guardian direction, Polemarchus who has taken over the argument for his father Cephalus, goes with it, and is led by Socrates into a guardian view of justice which is that giving people what they are owed really means giving good to one's friends and harm to one's enemies.

Socrates then switches back to a commercial argument, suggesting that, as in the the commercial syndrome, it is not right to harm anyone since that will have a negative effect on their well-being, so the idea that part of justice is doing harm to one's enemies (true in a guardian context) must not be right (as seen in the commercial context).

Next, the sophist Thrasymachus enters the fray, with a new twist, offering a definition of justice, quite popular to the present day, which borrows the self-interested parts of both syndromes to build a selfish 'monstrous hybrid' as Jane Jacobs would have called it. Thrasymachus maintains that justice is simply the interest of the stronger or as we might say nowadays, that 'might makes right'.

In his response, Socrates focuses on the inappropriateness of bringing the Commercial syndrome notion of self-interest into the Guardian role of being the ruler (as opposed to the alternative approach which would have been to show the inappropriateness of bring Guardian virtues of deceit and force into a commercial venture).

First, Socrates responds via allegory to various professions such as medicine where fulfilling the duties of that profession successfully entails serving the interest of the subject (e.g. the patient, for a doctor) rather than serving one's own interests. He notes that if people ruled for their own interest, then it wouldn't be necessary to pay people to take on the job in most cases.

Next, Socrates asks about the relationship between the just and the unjust. He shows that in professions, the just, for example, doctor, only professes to exceed in skill non-doctors, not other doctors. His point is that it is the just who only claim to better than the unjust, while it is the unjust who claim to be better than everyone, just or unjust alike.

At this point, I couldn't help but be reminded of the experiments on cooperation conducted by Robert Axelrod, in which a simple tit-for-tat strategy (that only punished the unjust and cooperated with the just) proved to be the most successful in the tournament.

Finally, Socrates points out that even thieves need a willingness to forego their own interests, lest they fall to fighting amongst themselves and all ending up getting long sentences in a prisoner's dilemma (i.e. their lack of unity will preclude them from being effective in any meaningful way).

At the end of book 1, Socrates admits that while he has repeatedly pointed out what justice is not, he has yet to make any progress on saying what justice is.

He leaves that challenge for a later book, and I'll have to leave it for a later post.

27. Ethics and Words

Note: This post is the twenty-seventh in a series. Click here for the full listing of the series.

"Don't tarry in the Marshes," Orddu, while from within the cottage Taran heard loud and angry noises. "Else you may regret your foolish boldness, or bold foolishness, whichever¹"

In this post, I'm going to describe a behaviour between two people and then ask you to think about what word you would use to describe this behaviour. Simple enough?

First case: Two people work together to achieve something that benefits them both that they couldn't do on their own.

Second case: Two people work together to find a place to live, where they can share living expenses

Third case: Two people work together to fight off a bear that attacks them

Fourth case: Two business executives from different companies work together to prevent prices from dropping in their industry due to an unproductive price war

Fifth case: A home inspector and a home owner work together to reach an agreement that benefits them both more than issuing a citation for a violation of local bylaws would.

Sixth case: A businessman reaches a deal with the head of an invading army not to raise trouble as long as the invading troops don't disrupt his business.

Seventh case: Two anarchists work together to form a plot to kill all the members of the Canadian government

Eighth case: Two Taliban soldiers work together to ambush and a kill a group of Canadian soldiers.


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The first case, two people working together to achieve something they both benefit from, generally, as far as I know, goes by the name 'cooperation' and is generally held to be a 'good thing' or virtuous.

But all 8 cases involving two people working together for mutual gain yet not all would typically go by the same name.

Cases 2 and 3 are still standard cooperation.

But case 4 would normally go by the name 'collusion' which is considered unethical and is illegal in many places/contexts.

Case 5 typically goes by the name 'corruption' or 'bribe-taking' and is also considered unethical.

Case 6 goes by the name 'collaboration' and is even more unethical.

Case 7 might go by the name 'conspiracy' and is (arguably) most unethical of all.

Finally, case 8 seems similar to case 7, but here I suspect that we would normally be back to using the phrase 'cooperation' since there is no ethical condemnation of the act because it is understood that, in war, attempting to kill the enemy is what you are supposed to do.

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In Systems of Survival, after listing out the ethics in the guardian and commercial syndromes, Jane Jacobs explains the absence from the lists of some typical ethical values,

"Where's cooperation, courage, moderation, mercy, common sense, foresight, judgment, perseverance, faith, energy, patience, wisdom? I omitted these because they're esteemed across the board, in all kinds of work."

But based on the 8 cases I've listed above, I can't agree that the simple act of cooperation is universally esteemed, unless we include that esteem as part of the definition of cooperation.

When it comes to ethical values, there is both the denotation (what behaviour is described by the value) and the connotation (whether that behaviour is considered good or bad) to consider².

In the extreme case, a word like 'good' is all connotation, no denotation.

Interestingly, even though 'cooperate' has a strong positive connotation such that a different word is used for 'bad' cooperation, it's opposite, 'competition', does not have a strong connotation. Whether in a good sense, 'our business is a lot more competitive than it used to be' or in a bad sense, 'Bobby needs to learn to not be so competitive with the other children' the same word is routinely used (although it's interesting to note that a quick review of the thesaurus, shows that most of the synonyms for 'competitive' carry negative connotations - 'aggressive', 'antagonistic', 'combative' etc.).

This leaves open the question of whether there actually are any behaviours that are universally supported, or just words with strong positive connotations such as 'wisdom'. Even something as universally admired as perseverance gets recast as stubbornness when it seems that no good will come from the perseverance. In more severe cases (i.e. when perseverance is not combined with moderation), it might even start to be referred to as obsessiveness. A google search of the word 'perseverance' finds nothing but praiseworthy behaviour, but a google search of 'perseverance' and 'obsessive' brings up a gallery of mental disorders and destructive behaviour patterns.

Anyway, I'm sure that was all no-longer-fashionable hat to linguists and ethicists, but it's new to me, at least in terms of my awareness of the extent to which ethical terms contain a mix of both a descriptive and a positive/negative component. We need to be careful not to assume that a certain behaviour is universally praiseworthy just because it goes by a less common name in its non-praiseworthy context.

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¹from Taran Wanderer, by Lloyd Alexander

²This is true for a lot of words, of course, but it applies particularly to ethical values.

Old Boys Club

Update: Looks like public reaction actually forced a positive change for once as apparently the Greens will now be included in the debate. I may have to reduce my cynicism meter from 9.8 to 9.7 (out of 9) - although I still think we need to establish some sort of objective criteria for who is included/excluded from televised debates during elections.

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Dear Unelected and Unaccountable Media Consortium,

During the 2006 Canadian federal election, you stated that the Green Party was excluded from televised debates because they did not have an MP in the House of Commons. As we head to a 2008 Federal election, the Green Party now has an MP in the House of Commons and you are now saying that they can not be included in the debate because, "it is better to broadcast the debates with the four major party leaders, rather than not at all."

I am trying to decide which is worse, a) that you continue to lie about the true reason the Green Party is excluded from the debates (do you really expect us to believe that if there was a televised national debate, the other political parties would rather allow the Green Party to have the floor to itself for 3 hours of prime-time television than participate?), or b) that whatever your true reason is, you felt that it was better to claim that you had to exclude the Green Party because you were blackmailed by the other federal parties.

My conclusion is that, absent your establishing clear criteria for deciding which parties will be included in the debates, this matter should be decided for you by Elections Canada.

In the meantime, your credibility as anything other than a defender of the status quo and established interests continues to dwindle.

Yours truly,
Declan.