People like the old rules

Much to my surprise, the response to last week's column set a record, both in terms of total e-mail volume and in the speed with which it arrived. I had printed a letter from a reader who was faced with a dilemma. He had one job offer on the table and was awaiting one he thought would be better. He wanted to know if it would be OK to take the first job and then switch if the other offer did come through.

I told him I thought it would be wrong to take the first offer, knowing that he was hoping for, and would take, the second. But I went on to question whether my position was defensible or whether I was clinging to an outdated set of values. After all, the corporate world has effectively changed the rules of the game.

Most readers, out of about 200 responses, agreed with me. Unfortunately, none of them convinced me of my own answer.

What is at issue here is what is required of the person, rather than what is permitted. When considering the morality of actions, we usually try to determine whether a particular act is required or permitted -- or whether morality is neutral on it. In this case, being up-front with the first company is certainly permitted. It wouldn't harm the company in any way, and it might even make the person feel better about himself or herself.

However, the crucial question is whether such action is required -- and that's a horse of a different color. It's also how a lot of the readers walked themselves right into a logical trap.

The most common response was that a person who found himself in such a situation shouldn't do "something wrong," just because someone else had done something wrong. That has a certain appeal to it, but fails on several points.

First, it assumes that the act in question is "wrong," when that was the exact thing we were trying to determine -- whether or not it was wrong. This is what we call "begging the question," a very common logical fallacy. In begging the question -- or "petitio principii," for those with a classical education -- you appeal to the very question under discussion to prove your point. It's a kind of circular logic that takes you into a philosophical infinite loop.

Some people tried to analogize it by saying something along the lines of "If you were stealing from me, it doesn't mean I can steal from you." As one of my philosophy professors used to bellow at me, when teachers were still allowed to bellow at students, "Vogt, you're on the right track, but I'm afraid you're on the wrong train of thought."

The problem is that these ethical intuitions are grounded in interactions between individual persons, moral agents who are, for the most part, equal. When you're operating in that arena, then the feelings hold. I can't steal from people just because they are thieves. I can't murder someone just because he's a murderer.

But the introduction of the corporation changes things. Many people, including many who wrote to me, still can't understand the concept of the corporation.

Legally, corporations are "persons," and have all the legal rights that natural persons have -- and then some. However, they have no moral motivation. They are not moral agents. That's what I meant when I called them "amoral." It's not necessarily a disparaging statement, but merely a description of where they're coming from.