Barack Obama asked that we not “jump to conclusions” about Maj. Nidal Malik
Hasan, who is alleged to have killed 13 Americans at Fort Hood last Thursday.
Forget “jump to.” If only President Obama would crawl toward, or flirt with,
or even stumble upon a conclusion, I’d be overjoyed. On this you can rely:
Obama will never express a conclusive opinion on last Thursday’s massacre."
I happen to have been reading a wonderful book by the University of Chicago
philosopher and classicist, Martha C. Nussbaum, entitled
The Fragility of Goodness. The book
was written in 1981. My philosophy professor at Sarah Lawrence College, Elfie
Stock Raymond, was likely an admirer of Nussbaum because I see many parallels
between Nussbaum's ideas and Elfie's that we discussed in conferences back in
the early to mid 1970s, especially her rejection of Kantian ethics. Reading
Nussbaum, 35 years later, I am able to better grasp that position.
The book is about moral complexity as seen through the eyes of Greek
tragedians and philosophers, notably Aristotle. The third chapter, that I have
been working through is about Sophocles's
Antigone. One of the themes of Greek tragedy is conflict among moral
duties, and Antigone is about this,
the conflict between Creon's unitary commitment to the good of the polis and
Antigone's unitary commitment to her duties toward her dead brother, killed in
a war against the same polis. Nussbaum argues that moral richness and
complexity are at the heart of Sophocles's and other tragedians vision, and
that they contrast with a much more narrow vision of ethics of Plato. I am
waiting to get to Aristotle, but clearly his philosophy emphasizes the
importance reconciliation of competing moral virtues. Perhaps you can see the
message for corporate maangement here. So many of our business leaders have
had unitary moral codes. In the case of Jeffrey Skilling, the emphasis on
creativity or the image of creativity at the expense of all other moral
values. In the case of Robert Moses an emphasis on transportation flow at the
expense of uprooting hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers. In the case of the
management theorist Chester Barnard, an emphasis on the moral code of the
corporation at the expense of all other moral codes, including filial loyalty.
These views are Kantian in that they assume so optimal moral solution. Barnard
speaks of leadership as the creative reconciliation of moral codes, but his
the creativity is unitary in nature and so Creonic--the simple value of
corporate profit maximization is the ultimate good in his view; creativity
comes in just to convince employees to forsake their other codes.
But here we have Barack Obama. His problem is not the conflict among virtues
or the reconciliation of belief, but rather the bankruptcy of belief. He has
no values at all. There is no moral ambiguity in an army officer's turning
traitor to his country, murdering 13 people and wounding 30 more. Only an
ethical cretin would claim that there is a need to "reserve judgment".
Obama's moral sickness reflects a deeper malaise in America. The nation has
allowed ignorant ideologues to take control of its education system. As a
result, Americans have increasingly become moral degenerates addicted to
failed government solutions and incapable of thinking logically. Barack
Obama's cretinous morality is a symptom, not a root cause, of American
decline.