DeLisa Winters asked:

The Budgeting VP for the large publicly traded corporation which I work for was very upset with me. I am a Divisional Manager with the company. After reviewing the midyear budget reports my Budgeting VP was angry because I had not spent all the monies allocated for new equipment purchases, i.e. computers, copiers, etc.

I indicated that my department did not need new equipment at this time and mentioned that I would like to use the money on employee training since no new equipment was needed.

My VP told me that it is not my job to decide how monies should be spent. In fact, I was reprimanded by my VP because I had not spent the money as directed. I was told also, if I did not spend the money as directed by the end of the third quarter, the money would be reallocated to a colleague’s budget, who is also a Divisional Manager, for equipment purchases in her department.

A statement was made that my colleague would spend the money allocated to her department as directed regardless of whether the equipment was needed or not. Additionally, I was told that my budget for next year will be significantly reduced if I did not adhere to what was told to me.

To me, my VP violated all ethical standards. I’m wanting to get someone else perspective on this so that I can see if I’m looking at this wrong or if what she said to me was unethical.

If so, if you were in my place what would you do? and … What changes should my company make to improve our resource allocation within the organization in cases like this?

Answer by Peter Jones

My sympathies. I see you have run foul of a very common problem. When chasing public funds it is often best to do so when budget deadlines are just coming up, since may public institution adopt the same ‘use it as we planned or lose it next year’ approach, including central government, and they can be desperate sometimes to spend up the budget in time.

I do not see an ethical issue but a management problem. The issue for the company, I would say, is whether it wants to devolve responsibilities or run everything from the centre. The modern trend is towards the the latter since modern communications technology and computer power now allow it to be done very easily. But it is usually highly inefficient at a local level in important respects, and very often for the reasons you give.

What would I do? I would buy myself a fantastic new music workstation, a couple of laptops, a big screen TV, a top of the range photocopier, lots of fancy software, call it miscellaneous equipment and take it home. If there’s anything left I’d ask my staff what they wanted for Christmas.

No. Really. What I would do is spend it in advance. I’d pay my suppliers for some appropriate but notional products and services, stuff you expect to have to pay for next year, get an invoice and if possible a receipt, account for it as spent, and then be in credit with them for next year. I used to do this all the time to get around the problem. It means next year you can make amazing budget savings. It’s standard practice for European Commission funded projects and used to be about the only way to make them work. All big institutions fall foul of this sort of wastage unless they trust their managers to make sensible decisions. Just check out a few government departments, they are masters of this sort of nonsense. Come February/March everybody is desperately trying to waste money all over the place in order to avoid budget cuts in the next year. Better to hide it away for a rainy day. Budget management by dictat from the centre can be globally efficient, but at a local level it’s often just a recipe for wasting money and demotivating managers.

Not sure what this has to do with philosophy but it’s an interesting issue. If you find the solution a lot of people will be interested.

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

The rather brutal answer to your predicament is this: that ethics and business are never happy bedfellows.

The reason is that ethical philosophy seeks a standard of behaviour by which human beings may live in society without hurting each other, and at the same time facilitating the pursuit of happiness for each individual.

Business, on the other hand, resembles politics by being principally concerned with the exercise of power. Business has a target or purpose in which the human being is made happy contingent on accepting the benefits rendered by business. In the context of small business, the two frequently go hand in hand. People in society have a need for shoes, and the cobbler serves that need while serving his own needs at the same time by charging money that enables him to buy food for himself and his family.

Big business, however, although it exists in principle for the same reason, has none of the needs that explain the existence of small business. It does not charge for its services because it needs food etc., but because its investors want a return for their investment. Accordingly the self-perpetuating principle is the escalation of autonomy for money. The success of a business is gauged by the amount of excess of profit over expenses.

One practical outcome of this is that business must exert power on several fronts. In society by advertising to ensure that consumer will buy product X rather than product Y, and telling lies is part of that game. Inside by ensuring that staff minimise costs and maximise income. The staff are accordingly under pressure from the power of the business which affects their life significantly.

Your predicament is, that the exercise of this power is generally enhanced by mechanisation of its procedures — that is, removing the decisions of human beings from the scene, because humans are driven by ethical considerations. For business, ethics are a necessary evil, not a value. One look at the pharmaceutical industry or the weapons industry will tell you this.

Your idea of enhancing the skills of staff is an ethical idea. If this was useful to the company, they would support you. But it costs money; and while equipment costs money too, this disbursal can be rationalised under the ethics-free tenets of mechanisation. Business would always choose machines to do the work that has to be done and dismiss personnel, if it is possible. But if business has to hire staff, they would obviously also prefer staff that arrives, already trained. Why not? Why do we have technical colleges, run by government (i.e. public money)? To make staff training cost-free to business.

What you are doing, therefore, is to infract the power structure of business. You are operating under the assumption that human values play a positive role in business, whereas the opposite is the case in most instances.

It is very sad, for you and for mankind altogether. We Westerners have promoted the idea (based on Locke’s political theories) that freedom of economic agency is the foundation of a liberal society. Poor old Locke had no notion that business would thereby become a political power running in parallel with social political power. Furthermore that this political power can be restrained with only the greatest difficulty under the principles on which democratic societies are structured.

I think I’ve said enough to make the point. I will conclude by noting that Machiavelli is nowadays part of the business curriculum. Machiavellianism has become the philosophical backbone of business; it is being studied more intensively by business leaders than by political leaders. I think that says more than a thousand words in explanation of your ethical worries. I’m sorry to say that your situation is practically hopeless. Philosophy and ethics are each concerned with ‘truth’ and ‘justice’ in the human context. The truth and justice of business is the benefit such concepts render to business.

Sarah asked:

What would Aristotle’s response be to ‘what is the meaning of life?’

Answer by Caterina Pangallo

For Aristotle the meaning of life is eudaimonia. I believe that Aristotle discovered something really fundamental about human beings when he thought about what makes them happy, what they want out of life and how they wish to organise society to achieve it.

Aristotle finds that people pursue many different activities. For example, some want to get married and have children, others want to do business or play sports, or travel to distant lands, or read books, or they like to sit in parliament, or they want to be professional soldiers.

Aristotle asked, is there something in these many activities which they have in common?

Let’s look at a few examples and ask, why does a person do this?

a. Jack likes a game of golf. Of course he likes to win, but that’s not the end of it. In the main his interest is just in a good game.

b. Jacqueline like lots of money in the bank. But it isn’t the money for itself, but because she can buy what she wants with it.

c. Bill is ambitious and wants public recognition for helping poor people. But if he asks himself why he does this, he would answer, it makes me feel good to help others.

d. Mary likes romantic novels. But for her, the interest is not in the novels as such, but because she likes to fantasise about love and foreign countries.

And so we can go through a long list of activities people do. They are entertained, challenged, moved, satisfied, interested — in a word, they do these things with some particular end in view. What is this end they are seeking?

Aristotle says that all these activities are designed to achieve something other than the apparent purpose for which we do them. I might build a house, but the house is for living in. So the house again has another purpose behind it. I might go to war and my purpose is victory, but the victory points to another end beyond it.

In other words, when we finish one activity, we look to another. Therefore it is the activity in itself that is common to all these many pursuits. And why activity? Because it makes us happy to pursue something which we think is good for us:

Therefore if there is an end for all that we do, this will be the good achievable by action, and if there are more than one, this will be the goods achievable by action.

Therefore the end we strive to achieve is feeling good, feeling happy: ‘Happiness, then, is something final and self-sufficient, and is the end of action.’ And when we do these things, we always try to do the best we can. This trying the best we can he calls arete = excellence.

In sum, what’s common to the activities of all human beings is this: We look for the good (agathon) in what we do, and we pursue this good for the happiness (eudaimonia) it brings. And in pursuit of these things, we tend to find the greatest satisfaction in doing them really well (arete). So: the good life is the pursuit of happiness. And happiness is not in the things done and the end achieved, but in the doing it; and furthermore, happiness is the ‘end product’ so to speak.

Bobby asked:

Does education undermine the authenticity of students and thus undermine the concept of a free will?

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

Your question has three prejudices for which you give neither an explanation nor a definition.

Therefore the question cannot be answered.

Prejudice No. 1 is education. Unless you say what it is and what it’s for, I can’t answer except that I give you my explanation and definition. Which is not altogether fair, because you are asking a question for which you seem to want a clear answer that involves also the question of values.

Independently of the other two issues: Education is a means by which the human young creature is equipped with knowledge and skills that are necessary for survival. The people who do this are parents, school teachers, instructors at work and others. They are people who have also been taught, and additionally gained some experience that enables them to judge what is good and bad in the context of surviving. If you picture for yourself a small human society in the desert, or the jungle, or on the North Pole, you can see at once that without education the young child would miss out on essential know-how. The child would have self-educate and this is almost impossible because the dangers of ignorance in such an environment are likely to be fatal very quickly.

In advanced societies, education is additionally concerned with giving the child an education to enable it to live among other people, so behaviour is part of it, as well as technology, institutions, politics etc.

No need to go on. The need for education, however you define it, is indispensable for a human being that is new to the world.

The second prejudice, the authenticity of the student, I do not understand. I have not the faintest idea what it means. But I suspect there is no such thing, because no human being is formed without absorbing some influences from his or her social environment. So an ‘authentic student’ is a self-contradictory assumption.

The third prejudice, free will, is also impossible without looking at a social environment. You cannot have free will without an education that helps you with identifying what other people mean by free will. So the idea of education impairing free will sounds like nonsense to me.

Steven asked:

Thomas Hobbes theory of knowledge is not altogether original. What has given him a name in history is his exaltation of brute force among men and in the state, what do you think of this?

Answer by Caterina Pangallo

The answer to your first sentence is partly yes and partly no. Because Hobbes attempted to analyze primitive human instincts and appetites in a scientific manner similar to Galileo and Descartes. But his solution was that he tried to overcome the scientific problem by introducing the Social Contract Theory. And this theory of the state is his original concept.

Which means that your claim about him exalting brute force is totally off the mark. He needs this kind of concept only to show that man, as a rational animal, has ways and means of overcoming it.

In Hobbes’ philosophy, the rational state grows out of this state of nature where brute force reigns. The way this happens is by people forming communities with the view to protecting each other against brute force by individuals.

So they form a social contract, which spells out the freedom and obligations of each member of the community.

Eventually he develops the point of view that large states need an absolute central authority. Therefore the term ‘sovereign definer’ embodies the concept of sovereign authority.

This is the opposite of despotism, because the ultimate power still remains with the community. In the social contract and law, Hobbes says that the obligation can only be based on the freely given consent of each man to give up some portion of his personal freedom. It becomes communal freedom and defines the concept of justice.

Accordingly there must be an ‘impartial instance’, e.g. a judge, to arbitrate disputes. Hobbes’ king is bound to the social contract together with his subjects. He is the first servant of the state and only entitled to so much wealth and honour as befit his authority as the head of the state. Indeed Hobbes makes it clear that the social contract requires the king to be faithful to the state in the performance of his duties. If he fails or refuses, the subjects have cause for rebellion and should seek to depose their king.

This also includes the separation of justice, over which the monarch has no power.

Historically Hobbes was opposed by royalists because he took away the absolute power of the monarch. Democrats resented him because he reinstated monarchical authority. That made him the meat in the sandwich.

However, when the English parliament decided to execute their king (Charles I), the intellectual and political foundation for this was none other than Hobbes’ social contract.

Alecq asked:

How is it that a human can believe that something is good or bad? If we were not taught as such, we would be ‘unethical’ and ‘without morales’. Where in the line of human history did someone decide that taking something from someone without asking was ‘bad’. To the ‘thief’, that object and the act of taking it might be necessary, but is still considered ‘bad’.

‘Cheating’ on a spouse or killing isn’t tolerable either, but people have been killing for millennia before it was accused as ‘murder’ and thus framed ‘bad’. If hitting a girl is bad, how has it become so? Bombing a building can be considered extremely good for whoever did it, but bad for the victims.

All I ask is this: How do we, as humans see things as good or bad, while our degenerate species cannot.

Answer by Shaun Williamson

The thief doesn’t want other people to steal his possessions. The murderer doesn’t want to be murdered. The man who beats up his wife doesn’t want to be beaten and bullied. The torturer doesn’t want his children to be tortured by someone else.

Morality is about what makes human life possible to the highest degree. It is not about slavishly following what other people say is good or bad, it is about joining together with other people, as moral equals, to decide what is good and what is bad.

Sylvia asked:

According to Kant, does the fact that we experience objects through our mental framework mean?

That we can know only how things appear to us, and not know objects as they are in themselves?

Answer by Eric George

The best way to understand Kant, is to first understand Hume and then understand the different philosophical approaches between both Kant and Hume. As Kant stated: ‘From this it follows incontestably, that pure concepts of the understanding never admit of a transcendental, but only of an empirical use, and that the principles of the pure understanding can only be referred, as general conditions of a possible experience, to objects of the senses, never to things in themselves…’ — Critique of Pure Reason, 1781.

Influenced by Hume, the basis of Kant’s resistance to the contemporary philosophers of that day (orthodox rationalism) who held that knowledge is expressed from reason, is his ‘thing-in-itself’, that our minds cannot come into direct contact with ultimate reality because our brains are pre-fitted with many various concepts and sensory filters. This follows that since knowledge is expressed through experience rather than reason, what we perceive and understand as reality, is in actuality a step or two removed from things in themselves.

Where Kant differs from Hume is on the very nature of experiences, Kant denied the classical empiricist position (that experiences cement themselves on the brain), to Kant the idea that concepts are a result of experiences and depend upon them and cannot exist before them seemed totally ridiculous. Hume maintained that concepts e.g. such as the minds notions on space, time etc.. are based upon observations within an experience, Kant ultimately refuted this by peeling back Hume’s ideas and evaluating them at square one.

Kant achieved this by the following, in concerns to say the concepts of time and space, how can we as humans experience that one thing is next to another thing (space) or that one event happens after another (time)? Unless we already have concepts such as ‘next to’ and ‘after’ i.e. the concepts of time and space built into our minds to begin with, Kant solidified this argument by making clear that if such things were not already built into our minds to begin with, we could never even make sense of the complexity that is perception. Concepts of space, time along with an army of other ‘categories’ such as quality, relation, cause, quantity must be inherent to thought, Kant believed, they are forms in which we impose on experiences in order that we may understand and organise them — to make sense of them.

In addition to this, since everyone shares the same thoughts on space, time and such therein, Kant also upheld that these ideas are not only innate but are also universally contained. If space and time only exist in the mind, as Kant pretty much implies, then by experiencing the world as existing within time and space we are in fact just experiencing how the world appears to us, not really how it is. The oasis-mirage you see in the desert, is really just sand.