JOURNAL: WEEK THREE

For the Good of All
Any personal model of professional ethics for me would be incomplete without some concept of the public good. Generally, people enter public service in pursuit of certain motives, whether they be to help others or even to just help themselves. In fact, researchers like Rainey, Crewson, Perry and others have shown a whole range of rationales for public service to explain why qualified candidates seek government and nonprofit positions. These motives range from compassion and self-sacrifice to expanding responsibilities and challenges to personal development of integrity. Not surprisingly, the financial rewards of public service are low on the list. Intrinsic rewards seem to dominate it. Taken as a whole, these motives provide evidence of a particular service ethic, an orientation to serving the public good that attracts various types of people.

The developmental aspect of public service emphasizes that people seek ethical actualization through service. Employees often feel a duty to serve, protect and defend the democratic ideals of society. This may be thought of as a form of patriotism. At the same time, they also feel responsible for the welfare of other human beings, and thus cultivate a sense of benevolence. Eventually, by serving people and society they also tend to develop a sense of personal integrity. This reaffirms their values and provides them with a sense of stability over time. Duty, responsibility and integrity are ethical terms besides being motives cited for service. By choosing to do one's duty, be responsible and maintain integrity in the face of budget cuts and political pressures, employees come to have, in a word, character. Character is how personal values are expressed in the employee. A strong, ethical character contributes directly to organizational mission.

When, on the other hand, character is weak, due to external forces or to the employee's own internal failings (or both), the developmental function of public service can and become dysfunctional or break down, weakening the organization.

Idee fixe

JOURNAL: WEEK TWO

Toward a Personal Model
During Week One, I considered the various aspects of how my experience in design paralleled the ethical design process. I think it is fair to say that there are plenty of direct comparisons. At the same time, there are some pretty significant differences too. Ethical decision-making is not as practical as the artistic design process, which is, at best, an applied form of reasoning. The purview of the ethical process, by contrast, is not limited to just practical matters, which is always the case in graphic design. Furthermore, there is usually no direct physical product as in art. Ethical decisions can certainly have very tangible results, but usually they are by-products of the decision itself. Finally, ethical resolutions have the propensity to involve more costly forms of compromise in terms of personal sacrifice than in art. The results in art may satisfy no one else, but if they satisfy the artist then the work is considered successful. The same cannot be said of ethics where the satisfaction of the decision-maker may well be rendered irrelevant depending on the situation. The process of arriving at an ethical decision is more definitive of the decision-maker than any result.That is why developing a personal model of ethical decision-making may be so important. The model presented by Cooper on page 20 of the text includes the typical inductive-deductive movement of the rational decision-making model. I know that that model would work for me, just as it has for others. I wonder, however, where in his model there is room to explain the more irrational aspects of ethical decision-making--in other words, means of intuiting solutions.

Intuition is featured prominently in the artistic design process. Although intuition is probably not the point of the ethical model, it certainly can inform decision-making at any point in the process. Indeed, the model would be somewhat incomplete without intuition since human beings rely on it for most every decision. Hence, we are struck by a comparison or hit upon an idea or go with our gut. Instinct cannot be readily ignored, nor should it be easily discounted. Though it is early in the text, Cooper's view of ethics seems to be more prescriptive than it is descriptive of how decisions are actually made. Obviously, the text is mainly concerned with ethical practicalities at the expense of other considerations. The whole point is to make the process an overt one for administrators so as to maximize the opportunities for reflection.

The vissitudes of decision-making theory aside, people need tools they can use to help them do their jobs better. Becoming self-conscious about decision-making, however, is not just a means to an end; it is also an end in itself. Indeed self-awareness of this type is what many religions, such as Buddhism, strive toward. Thus, if I, as an enlightened Zen administrator, come to know myself through a keen awareness of my own strengths and weaknesses (and through ginormous amounts of reflection), I should be able to swim the political waters of administration like some kind of administrative version of Mark Spitz. Moreover, perhaps my heightened sense of my own developing repertoire and sense of character will allow me to move toward a comprehensive personal model of ethical problem solving--one which takes into account my intuition as an essential driving force for my particular problem solving style.

The Decider
Cooper uses the concept of "moral imagination" to account for the way people navigate between objective and subjective responsibilities and to generate alternatives. Needless to say this concept appeals greatly to the creative side of me. The whole point of an advanced degree, one might say, is to cultivate a sense of possibility where others see only black and white. There is freedom to be found in shades of gray:freedom from the tyranny of simple-minded extremism. I view extremism as the greatest force of evil in the world today and for all time.Relativism has been mocked in recent years by conservative pundits and religious ideologues as a mere by-product of radical leftist social philosophy--a symptom of cultural decadence and moral decay. These voices claim that without absolute values of good versus evil, that refugees from the 60's opened a Pandora's box of social ills ranging from pot smoking to child pornography.

This kind of rhetoric is not simply reprehensible and false: it is a slap in the face of reason. Hypocrisy is among my biggest pet peeves and there seems to be a lot more of it to go around these days. One need only a cursory glance at the history of the human race to see that the main culprits of murder, genocide and hegemony have always been religious and cultural extremists. Those feta-loving founders of Western culture, the Greeks, understood this well after centuries of war and bloodshed. They arrived at the Aristotelian ideal of moderation and balance. America's Founding Fathers didn't build these ideals into the Constitution on a whim. They didn't invent democracy, nor the republican ideal, but they did perfect them. They deliberately constructed a careful balancing act between delegated powers, resulting in a slow, deliberative process to fulfill the terms of the social contract between government and the governed. Now that contract is dangerously close to being nullified through monolithic one-party dominance, a cowed legislature a polarized judiciary, and an executive branch run amok, willing to sacrifice our most cherished principles in the name of national security. Jesus's flair for terseness seems apropos: "They who live by the sword, die by it." Therefore, now is the time that the American intelligensia must step up and take a stand against the twin scourges of irrationality and reactionary thinking.

Those who would have us sell our American birthright offer, in the poetry of REM, "a truck stop instead of St. Peter's." To me, the Western tradition handed down to us by way of the Constitution represents the apotheosis of culture, the temple of the secular "religion." We are standing on the shoulders of intellectual giants. By contrast, those who would defer to authority, the so-called "values" crowd, are falling for a sales pitch involving manipulative dominionist dogma that would make P.C. Barnum blush. They are the cannon fodder in the so-called battle for the soul of America. The real agenda is not about saving souls so much as keeping a heavy thumb on the scales of economic progress. The price for that mendacity has been an artificial polarization away from the great political center where lasting social change is most prevalent.

As a result, the classic ethical schism of conequential versus non-consequential theories of morality has been somewhat resurrected in recent years. Consquentialists, most often associated with relativism, tend to agree that the rightness of an action depends mainly on the results. The utilitarian ideal states that the total net good of the results is the moral yardstick. Even murder can be justified simply by appeal to self-defense, the defense of others or of the nation in time of war. This does not mean that murder is ever easily justifiable. Rather, it means that ends CAN justify some of the most appalling of means.

By contrast, non-consequentialist theories discount the importance of the results in their evaluation of actions. They appeal to established moral principles and to higher powers that have set the bar. Actions for them fall onto a preset moral continuum that determines their rightness. Ends are irrelevant since the action sets the precedent. I think that this distinction is perhaps overdrawn from a postmodern perspective. Needless to say, bad means can lead to good ends and good means can lead to bad ends. Rather, the residual distinction is between those who favor utilitarian formulas for action versus those who favor the intrinsic value of actions. For example, utilitarians would justify war by saying that action had to be taken to prevent further bloodshed. If, for example UN forces invade Darfour to avert further genocide, then killing some insurgents is preferrable to letting the situation fester.

Conversely, those who favor value of actions over utility would say that it is right to fight for your country even if that means killing the enemy. This would be the John Wayne school of patriotism. Doing the right thing, most would admit, is not always so clear cut. One can count on a healthy dose of uncertainty and ambiguity prior to tough calls. Afterward, one may even expect to experience residual stress, guilt and other mixed emotions. Being a decider, is not all that it is cracked up to be. It may very well involve reconciling seemingly irreconcilable alternatives and avoiding ethical extremes to come up with complex solutions that require more than blind patriotism. Ethical analysis can tell us what is just, but we still have to have the courage of our convictions as a people to do it. Moreover, we should not forget what makes America great: our commitment to liberty. More so than average citizens, intellectuals have an obligation to fight the slippery slope of extremism and find a way that is free from the snares of our own worst fears.

JOURNAL: Week 1

WEEK ONE

Why a Journal?
CLASS REQUIREMENTS for PLS 508 state that we have to keep a log of our personal reflections during the progress of our studies to help stimulate an internal dialogue. The most important thing, the syllabus states, is that it be a personal documentation process, not just a log. The purpose, I take it, is to summarize on a weekly basis where the course takes me. To paraphrase Steinbeck, I'm not documenting the trip I take, but where the trip takes me. In other words, this is the beginning of developing a more overt process of ethical decision making--in the words of Terry L. Cooper, a design approach.

From the perspective of my life long career in graphic design, that makes sense to me. The whole idea of approaching problem solving from a rational, process-based perspective sorts well with my training and experience. It's not that being a designer prepares one to approach all problems rationally. Indeed, I'd make the case that such an approach lacks humanity, that touch of irrationality that often allows for truly creative and unique solution finding. What the design process does is allow designers to frame problems in such a way as to clarify them and refine understanding so as to encourage creative thinking. It is more problem finding than problem solving. Problem solving often implies that there is one best solution. Clearly, this is rarely the case. There is a tendency in humans to think this way, however, and that must be resisted consciously. By making the dimensions of a problem more explicit, one can begin to widen the scope of key issues, to use inductive reasoning to arrive at a more complete understanding. Only then can a truly creative mind begin to consider solutions.
The design process in art is a dynamic process in the sense that it is self-perpetuating. It is often broken down to varying levels of detail, depending on the source. Generally, though it involves the following four phases:
1. Problem Definition: summarize the problem dimensions, identify terms, research, analyze, redefine, etc.

2. Iteration: take mental inventory, make connections, prioritize characteristics, establish targets, brainstorm

3. Problem Solution: redefine, narrow down, critique, select, implement, etc.

4. Feedback: appraise, refine, reimplement, etc.

Being a professional designer or artist from a rational perspective, not only means being willing to abandon preconceptions and look at each situation with fresh eyes and an open mind, it also means being willing to channel one's feelings and intuitions in an explicit manner that may be at odds with these normally implicit pathways to knowledge. Rather than leaping to conclusions, which is often endemic to holistic thinking and Gestalt, a procedural approach leads the designer where artistic minds do not easily go. It wakes them from the sleep of reason by first moving mindsets toward the verbal, making the nonverbal explicit in the process. Design is the triumph of rationality over the inchoate.

Design also implies not being married to any one solution. The inclusion of feedback means that not only is there an element of isometric control, but that the process is a never-ending one. Solutions can only ever be approximations of the ideal. Therefore, their value is relative and is a partial reflection of the process that created them. One solution is likely to be interchangeable with any other (with varying results.) Only after many years of experience with this kind of overt thinking is it possible to shortcut the solution process. Moving from explicit to implicit forms of processing represents a kind of mastery that is difficult to come by and inconsistent in its results. Nevertheless, the process still undergirds the results. The best designers can switch hats interchangeably. Moreover, results are subjugated to process, in keeping with the post-modernist ethos of esthetics. For the creative-minded, the proverbial journey is more important than the destination. Zen rules.

What Lies Within
That having been said, the obvious comparisons between art and ethics are somewhat direct. Ethics also represents the application of reason to a broader area of human concerns, specifically morality. Like artists, ethicist must learn to balance the need for logic with other more "fuzzy" concerns. While reason is a necessary adjunct to moral decision making, reason without emotion lacks conviction. Reason without character is morally dangerous. Like artists, what ethical decision makers bring to the table is even more important to the process than the process itself. In two words, humanity matters. To quote Emerson, "what lies behind us and lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us." By the same token, without reason, decision-making is blind. Thus, an overt process, as in esthetics, makes sense in such complex contexts.

Furthermore, the process is a dynamic, ongoing one, informed by feedback and subject to refinement. If ethics is in fact "a science of human intentionality," then an overt process makes good sense. Ethical decision-making is an active process, involving uncertainty and ambiguity. Limits of time and information likewise limit the inherent rationality of solutions. Ethical solutions are, at best, approximations of the ideal. Meanwhile, conflicting responsibilities and roles impinge on the process further reducing the effectiveness of the process. Defining problems, iterating and testing problem solutions and refining them in the ethical context provides decision-makers with not just better solutions, but also with defensible rationales as to how they arrive at decisions. This allows them to move, like artists, from a level of pure expression to one of analysis and, ultimately, synthesis in the sense of self-creation. The ultimate product of our existence is the essence of who we are.
Questions become broader, ultimately, we must ask "who am I?"

That is where the so-called "design process" of ethical decision-making provides a model of progressive self-examination and identity-forming. In an ethical sense, we design ourselves in the process of solving problems. The process is a developmental one. Cooper calls the resulting internal/external orientation the "ethical identity" of the decision-maker. Like art, ethical decision-making is defined by the learned skills that are associated with its practice. As artists develop their oeuvre, they come to be defined more by their methods than their products. Likewise, as one progresses in increasing levels of ambiguity and complexity in ethics, the ultimate result is the character of the decision-maker. Great artists are made, not born, through experience, willingness to learn, great effort and methodical application of the principles of design. The artist is the ultimate product of his or her own efforts. Ethical decision-makers, are also a product of their own making. That is something to be admired. That is why I aspire to it: to find something greater that is within me.