Reciprocity, Bad Faith - Corporate Conversation - The Diigo Meta page

• 10 Mar 08
  

  Levy Rivers

  There are other tactics one could take but many of our current institutions are built using some version of this system.

  bad_faith corporate governance networking reciprocity rorty social

  • The short version of the concept of reciprocity can be summarized in the following maxims:

    • <!--[if !supportLists]-->Return good for good<!--[endif]-->
    • <!--[if !supportLists]-->Resist evil<!--[endif]-->
    • <!--[if !supportLists]-->Never return evil for evil<!--[endif]-->
    • <!--[if !supportLists]-->Make reparation for the harm we do<!--[endif]-->
    • We should be disposed to do these things as a matter of moral obligation
  • Not to confuse matters, but I am using the phrase “moral obligation” in a non-foundational way. I am not saying that there are rights granted from a state of nature that must be honored. What I am saying is that we should see allegiance to social institutions by reference to familiar, commonly accepted premises – but also as no more arbitrary – than choices of friends or heroes. Such choices are not made by reference to criteria.
  • Next we need to note that pleasure we take in reciprocal exchanges are enormously fecund. By prompting us to act reciprocally, they generate many of the conditions under which the sustained pleasures of social relationships are possible. It is therefore an instrumental good.
  • Reciprocation for that help – if it is a general feature of social interaction – reinforces helping behavior. It is a powerful element in sustaining the help we need. Not reciprocating, on the other hand, if it were a general feature of social interaction, would quite likely extinguish helping behavior. (Lasting unrequited love is rare.) Certainly, if evil were typically returned for good, the help would cease.
  • Now we turn to the next two elements - responses to evil. This idea is especially important in our age of globalization, environmental concerns, bifurcation of society, and terrorism.
    
    
    • Resist evil
    • Never return evil for evil

    If we are not to return evil for evil, how should we be disposed to respond to it? The options are what might be called active or passive acceptance, and active or passive rejection.
  • Jean-Paul Sartre's name for the state of mind in we lie to ourselves: Bad Faith. Some of our inner lies are trivial: I know what I am going to be late if I don’t go now, but I carry on as if I think there is plenty of time. Then I am in Bad Faith: I am being deliberately late, but I allow myself to believe I am unaware of it. When someone complains, I can say: ‘My goodness, I never noticed the time.’ Sartre points out how weird this self-deception is’…the one to whom the lie is told and the one who lies are one and the same’. The liar is also the victim. In Bad Faith, I am pretending to be two different people; I am myself, but I am also another person. Neither is responsible for how I seem to have acted.
  • But the real evil of Bad Faith isn’t the little moments of self-deception. Existentialism is about whole ways of living, choices of life, and Bad Faith can infect an entire life
  • Sartre puts it, in sadness and in anger - ’A person can live in bad faith’. You can spend you whole life as if you weren’t the person you really are. Bad Faith is a way of ‘establishing that I am not what I am’. If the lies really work, then when other people confront me with my actions, I will genuinely feel disbelief and outrage. The concept of Bad Faith is an example of the wider existential idea, that nothing can relieve us of the burden of responsibility for our lives and our actions.
  • We need to setup for the next post where we will discuss some the tension points where alert and inert stakeholders make themselves felt. Internally, we will consider the concerns regarding social media generated by the IT manager, legal staff, business intelligence and most importantly the whistle blower. From the external world to the organization, we shall review recruiting, investor relations, and advertising.

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