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“Greed,” says Gordon Gekko, “Greed is good.” At this point in the movie Wall Street he is acting as the spokesman for the American Dream, so he naturally emphasizes financial greed. Yet he is willing to include, “Greed in all of its forms,” including greed for life and greed for happiness. Since greed almost always means trying to grab too much, even when what is sought is undeniably worth having, he must believe that MORE is ALWAYS better. Michael Slote's counterpoint: moderation is generally preferable.
1 Oliver Stone's 1987 film about various interpretations of the American Dream.
2 In “Satisficing Consequentialism, Part I,” Proceedings of Aristotelian Society, supplementary volume 58 (1984), pp. 139-64, in his 1984 Tanner Lectures in Chapter Three of his Common-Sense Morality and Consequentialism (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), and in his Beyond Optimizing, his most sustained and systematic consideration of this approach, which is the focus of this essay.
3 A good illustration of both the differences and the agreements is the “debate” between Craig Lehman and Lisa Newton over the desirability of hostile takeovers. One place you can find their articles is the 3rd edition of Beauchamp and Bowie's business ethics text.
4 Which is the way Plato presented that view in the Protagoras when Socrates amplifies his claim that akrasia is incoherent, at least under the hypothesis that the person is acting rationally (351a-57e). Comparison of the approval of a crowd with the roar of a great beast (at Republic VI: 492) suggests that Plato was aware that the assumption of rationality was far from trivial.
5 Slote considers a related problem on pp. 110-15 where he constructs a science-fiction example of optimizing when maximizing is impossible.
6 Bill Frederick introduced me to this more realistic alternative to Friedman's profit maximizing claims during a break at an early business ethics conference.
7 Pat Werhane and Richard Nielsen have both emphasized the need for creative solutions to moral problems that produce gains for each party. I believe this is a major part of Nielsen's program; it's virtually his definition of a win-win solution, one he rightly sees as promoting more good consequences than a simple righteous denunciation of another's evil.
8 In Book IX. Cf. Gorgias 493b-94e.
9 A well-ordering is an arrangement of objects in a single line so that any two can be compared and a decision made about which one is ahead of the other. Isn't that exactly the setting the optimizer needs? One qualification, this theorem depends on the axiom of choice; but most set theory, and al I naive, or intuitive, set theory includes this axiom.
10 My interpretation draws on the Republic, Protagoras, Gorgias, and the Crito. Slote believes that the Philebus shows that Plato favored moderation.
11 It is possible to view Aristotle as advocating moderation everywhere else in order to maximize your share of happiness. If we take seriously the calim that we are all trying to imitate the unmoved mover to the best of our abilities, one plausible interpretation is that we are trying for the impossihle, and so wish to maximize as best we can.
12 Although we know none can exist, not even in mathematics; that's Godel's Incompleteness Theorem.
13 In the mathematical realm, this translates as the rather simple observation that the union of metric spaces need not have a common metric (i.e., one which applies to the entire space while remaining compatible with the original metrics on each of the smaller subspaces).
14 Of course that's far from the only view. Friedman-type economists are prone to view the system as nothing more than the sum of the individual parts, in this case transactions. Nominalists in organizational theory sometimes exhibit a similar tendency.
15 Well, almost no one. I believe that Mill tried to ground even mathematics in experience, so I expect he would have been sympathetic to looking at consequences in deciding about rationality as well. But I know so little about Mill that I don't want to hazard any stronger claim.
16 Slote is clearly aware of, in fact endorses, these associations. That's one reason why he often prefaces a point about rationality with a similar point about moral action.
17 Michael Slote discussed some of his aims with me; Christopher Morris pushed hard from the opposite direction during a visit here. Fred Seddon provided the opportunity to present an earlier version to the West Virginia Philosophical Association at their March, 1991 meeting; Bernard Keating's probing comments were especially helpful. The members of my Game Theory and Decision Theory seminar (Spring of 1991) helped me work through many of the ideas presented here, and to see more of how they fit into the larger, often less technical, environment.