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Dirty Hands and Loyalty in Organisational Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

Chris Provis
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Abstract:

Organisational politics can raise the problem of “dirty hands,” illustrated in this paper by an example drawn from a textbook on organisation theory. The initial question is whether the main character has different ethical and political obligations, but this leads on to the question to what extent we can distinguish various different categories of obligation. The example may be of special interest because of the importance of close personal relationship in organisational politics, which brings the dirty hands problem together with the question to what extent friendships generate distinctive obligations. However, it is doubtful whether the allocation of obligations to different categories can be sustained in a useful way. It may be that we can put aside loyalty to an organisation, as a consideration which does not generate any distinctive obligation, but balancing other factors against one another may require the sort of judgment that has sometimes been called “political wisdom,” and sometimes “moral imagination.”

Type
Articles
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , April 2005 , pp. 283 - 298
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 2005

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References

Notes

An earlier version of this paper was given at the Annual Conference of the Australian Association of Professional and applied Ethics, in Brisbane in October 2002. This paper draws on material from several chapters of the author’s book, Ethics and Organisational Politics (Cheltenham and Northampton: Edward Elgar, 2004). It has benefited significantly from comments by the Editor and reviewers for BEQ. The author is also grateful to Dr Garrett Cullity for discussions about some of the issues.

1. S. P. Robbins, T. Waters-Marsh, R. Cacioppe, and B. Millett, Organisational Behaviour: Concepts, Controversies and Applications; Australia and New Zealand (Sydney: Prentice Hall, 1994), 556–57.

2. Ibid., 557.

3. Ibid.

4. See Plato, Gorgias, trans. W. Hamilton (London: Penguin, 1960), 83–91.

5. See, e.g., Stuart Hampshire, Innocence and Experience (London: Penguin, 1989), 163–64.

6. Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (London: Penguin, 1973), 209, referring to work by Ermolao Barbaro, late fifteenth-century scholar and diplomat.

7. See, e.g., C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 70–74.

8. See, e.g., Judith N. Shklar, Freedom and Independence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 142–48.

9. See, e.g., Anthony Skillen, “Workers’ Interests and the Proletarian Ethic: Conflicting Strains in Marxian Anti-Moralism,” in Canadian Journal of Philosophy, suppl. vol. 7, ed. K. Nielsen and S. C. Patten (Guelph, Ont.: Canadian Association for Publishing in Philosophy, 1981): 155–70.

10. Stuart Hampshire, “Foreword,” in Public and Private Morality, ed. S. Hampshire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), ix.

11. Robert Jackall, Moral Mazes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 12.

12. C. A. J. Coady, “Politics and the Problem of Dirty Hands,” in A Companion to Ethics, ed. P. Singer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 373–83, p. 373. For references to the extensive literature, see Coady’s article and M. Stocker, Plural and Conflicting Values (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 9–10.

13. G. H. Trevelyan, Garibaldi and the Thousand (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1909), 27.

14. Peter J. Steinberger, The Concept of Political Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 22, discussing Machiavelli’s concept of virtu and some commentaries on it.

15. See Steinberger, The Concept of Political Judgment, e.g., pp. 70–72, discussing Arendt and Oakeshott. The distinction certainly reflects to some extent the older, more general distinction between practical wisdom and theoretical knowledge: see, for example, Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VI, v–x. The idea of political expertise has also been studied to some extent by modern psychologists, but the emphasis of the studies seems to have been the mass politics of the modern nation-state: see, e.g., S. T. Fiske, R. R. Lau, and R. A. Smith, “On the Varieties and Utilities of Political Expertise,” Social Cognition 8 (1990): 31–48.

16. The term seems to have gained widespread usage in discussing the views of Kuhn and Feyerabend about scientific knowledge, but has subsequently been used more widely.

17. See, e.g., R. M. Hare, Freedom and Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 30–31; and L. A. Blum, Friendship, Altruism and Morality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 43–45.

18. See Patricia H. Werhane, “Moral Imagination and the Search for Ethical Decision-Making in Management,” Business Ethics Quarterly, The Ruffin Series: Special Issue No. 1 (1998): 75–98; and Patricia H. Werhane, Moral Imagination and Management Decision-Making (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

19. For the purpose of developing these points, we may ignore the fact that the original description of Tricia’s situation makes it seem unlikely that she would take either of the possible stances depicted as a “dirty hands” scenario.

20. C. P. Snow, The Masters, Omnibus edition (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1972), chap. 33.

21. M. P. Glazer and P. M. Glazer, The Whistleblowers (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 53–58.

22. Jackall, Moral Mazes, 112–18.

23. Cf. Harry Frankfurt, “The Importance of What We Care About,” Synthese 53 (1982): 257–72.

24. The Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary (based on The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, seventh edition) (Melbourne 1987).

25. Blum, Friendship, Altruism and Morality, gives extended discussion particularly of the relationship between friendship and Kantian views. For a summary, see J. M. Cooper, “Friendship,” in Encyclopedia of Ethics, ed. L. C. Becker and C. B. Becker (New York: Routledge, 2001), 581–84, p. 582.

26. Blum, Friendship, Altruism and Morality, 69.

27. Although the issues are complex. There are questions to be considered about the way in which acting out of friendship is different from acting to achieve some end (see M. Stocker, “Values and Purposes: The Limits of Teleology and the Ends of Friendship,” Journal of Philosophy 78 [1981]: 747–65), and about the extent to which utilitarians can admit “agent-relative” reasons and consequences into their calculations (see P. Pettit, “The Paradox of Loyalty,” American Philosophical Quarterly 25 [1988]: 163–71).

28. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934), VIII, iii, p. 461.

29. For Aristotle’s comment on the extent to which friendship is “proof against calumny,” see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VIII, iv, p. 467.

30. Blum, Friendship, Altruism and Morality, 49.

31. Ibid., 47.

32. R. E. Ewin, “Loyalty and Virtues,” Philosophical Quarterly 42 (1992), 411, 415.

33. D. Cocking and J. Kennett, “Friendship and Moral Danger,” Journal of Philosophy 97 (2000): 278–96.

34. See, e.g., Werhane, Moral Imagination and Management Decision-Making, 103–08.

35. Discussion of cognitive processes used by medical practitioners in diagnosis and treatment can be found in Robert M. Hamm, “Clinical Intuition and Clinical Analysis: Expertise and the Cognitive Continuum,” in Professional Judgment, ed. J. Dowie and A. Elstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 78–105.

36. E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 76.

37. C. A. J. Coady, “Messy Morality and the Art of the Possible,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supp. vol. 64 (1990): 259–79, p. 272.

38. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana Press, 1985), 17. He gives political considerations as one example of different sorts of things that may need to be weighed against each other.

39. It is to some extent the sort of situation she is in that has given rise to a debate over “particularism” in ethics: the idea that any particular situation may have characteristics so unique that general principles cannot be relied on to specify appropriate conduct. See, e.g., Moral Particularism, ed. B. Hooker and M. O. Little (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000); and Garrett Cullity, “Particularism and Presumptive Reasons,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supp. vol. (2002): 169–90. However, I believe that the comments made here are neutral with regard to major positions in that debate.

40. Stocker, Plural and Conflicting Values, 28–29.