Overall, I think you wrote a good article ("No excuse," Keep the Joint Running, 6/16/2008). However, I have to wonder about your statement, "It's worse than immoral. It's inefficient."
It seems to me that, in the grand scheme of things, morality is a higher value than efficiency, Some pretty terrible things have been done in the name of efficiency, including telling salaried employees that mandatory long hours is a way of life. (The typical reasons given for requiring long hours are often a cover for the boss wanting more hours of work without paying for them.)
Stating that something is an abuse is a moral judgment. Regardless of the quoted statement above, it seems to me that you typically stand up for the moral thing to do.
- More than efficient
Dear More ...
That's the trouble with the printed word - irony ends up being too hard to distinguish from a simple declarative sentence that means what it says.
Although I was only being partially ironic. While I'm flattered at your statement that I stand up for the moral thing to do, in fact I avoid assertions about what is and isn't immoral. In the end, these discussions always seem to devolve to argument by assertion - if you and I disagree about what is an isn't moral, it's rare that any evidence and logic exists that either of can use to successfully persuade the other.
Beyond that is the ancient disagreement between deontologism and consequentialism. I'm firmly in the consequentialist camp myself, which means the only way I have to evaluate the morality of any action is to understand its consequences - morality, for me, isn't in the act itself.
So I content myself with defining "moral" as what I can coexist with, "immoral" as what I can't, and communicate both in terms of my being able to accept something or not rather than trying to label some behaviors and attitudes as moral and others as immoral.
And when subjects like honesty and dishonesty come up, if I can't explain why the consequences of one are superior to the consequences of the other, then I have no leg to stand on.
Which gets me to the point: If an employee who reports to me is dishonest, it means I can't accept what he or she tells me at face value. That, in turn, means I have to spend some of my time investigating, which is, for me, inefficient.
Which puts it in the category of behaviors with which I choose not to coexist.
Aren't you sorry you brought the whole thing up?
- Bob
Posted by Bob Lewis on June 28, 2008 06:00 PM
