I received today my monthly issue of Quality Progress, a publication of the American Society for Quality. The magazine’s theme, this time, is an exploration as to whether a culture of quality can contribute to a stronger compliance regime.

To be honest, it is an interesting question — the answer to which, at least in ASQ’s apparent view, is that there is a necessary connection between “quality” as a concept and “all things good” as an outcome. If only there was more and better big-Q quality, then the world would be a much improved place.

Never mind that “quality,” in the hands of irresponsible or uninformed practitioners, can be devastating. But that’s OK; ASQ’s hidden premise is granted, for the sake of argument. I was willing to bite.

Until, that is, I hit one of the feature articles: “Advancing from Compliance to Performance,” by the MBA-certified principal of an ethics and quality consultancy.

For a group that prides itself on “quality,” I am disheartened that ASQ didn’t seem to put the ethics article to even a basic scrutiny for philosophical rigor. The author made numerous suspect claims that even a half-competent undergrad could have spotted. Among the more egregious:

• “If organizations would practice ethics as the logic-based discipline and quality problem it is, they would achieve higher levels of accuracy, repeatability and performance. This, in turn, would result in better moral and economic outcomes for all involved, including themselves.”
• The author identifies something he calls “Ethics Quality,” which rests on two conditions: “Sound ethical reasoning (right thinking, or ensuring supporting arguments are fallacy free) is applied as controllable process inputs. The outputs result in intents, means and ends that are good for all involved,” and that “this process of right inputs and good outputs becomes repeatable and is integrated throughout the organization.”
• “Ethics may seem like one of those soft disciplines that has no scientific backbone, but this could not be further from the truth. The field of philosophy regards ethics as a normative science.”
• “All scientific disciplines follow a sequence of reasoning steps related to the scientific method, and so must ethics … (1) identifying the moral issues, (2) transforming wrong thinking to right thinking, (3) refining viable alternatives, (4) validating and following through, and (5) renorming.”
• “Refining of viable alternatives: This step requires agents to logically balance duty and consequential ethical theories and to use universal ethical principles to find the best possible alternative.”

Most of the rest of the article, which went on for some length, either repeated bland business-speak about improving value to the organization through ethical leadership, or dazzled the readers with multiple blinding flashes of the obvious.

Here’s the problem. “Ethics” is one of those things that everyone thinks they understand but which few grasp in the details. People who have had absolutely no exposure to moral philosophy seem to think themselves competent to speak authoritatively about what “ethics” entails.

I know not what the author’s philosophy background includes. I do know that many of his assertions would be greeted with bemusement, or befuddlement, by people who have some understanding of academic moral philosophy. The ludicrous claim that “the field of philosophy regards ethics as a normative science” is one case in point; actually, ethics — with aesthetics — falls under the broad division of “theories of value” and are “normative” only insofar as ethical judgments are intended to shape behavior. The writer, who seems so impassioned by “right thinking” (i.e., an avoidance of fallacy) nevertheless falls for one of the oldest fallacies in the book — equivocation — with regard to the “normative” value of ethics. And ethics as science? Please. At heart, ethics is no more and no less than the process by which people make value-laden choices. Science, it ain’t.

The casual manner by which the writer glosses over and makes harmonious the centuries-old warfare between the deontologists and the consequentialists is also astonishing. His solution to ethical problems seems to require doing one’s duty to the greatest good. But this is like claiming that the solution to religious violence is syncretism.

The article in Quality Progress is irritating, but it is hardly unique. The proliferation of self-appointed applied-ethics experts who lack a serious formation in moral philosophy does no one any good. It is telling, I think, that without anything more than a brief abstract, I was accepted to deliver a 90-minute concurrent session, titled “Ethics as a contributor to a culture of quality” at this fall’s annual education conference for the National Association of Heathcare Quality.

Yes, I have a background in ethics; I have a bachelor’s degree in the subject and a fair amount of graduate-level coursework in the field. Am I a national expert? Hardly. But judging by those outside of the academy who do act as experts … scary.

The cause of ethics in the business world is not advanced by the blind leading the stupid.

I was cleaning out some old files when I came across a one-pager I had typed in 1999, transcribing the “six mistakes of man” identified by Cicero. Good stuff:

• The delusion that personal gain is made at the expense of others
• The tendency to worry about things that cannot be changed or corrected
• Insisting that a thing is impossible because it hasn’t been accomplished
• Refusing to set aside trivial preferences
• Neglecting development and refinement of the mind, and not acquiring the habit of reading and studying
• Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do

Perhaps those Romans were on to something.

My friend Duane copied an article out of his current issue of American Political Science Quarterly for me.  The article’s argument, by a political scientist and philosopher from Duke, suggested that incentives should be more properly viewed as an exercise in power politics (and hence subject to close ethical scrutiny) and not, as is traditional, as a purely economic matter — a voluntary transaction — that is thereby presumed to be morally appropriate.

Interesting stuff.  The argument itself was quite clever, although ultimately unpersuasive.  And it was unpersuasive not becuase of a defect of reasoning, but rather because of the conceptual framework in which the author boxed herself.  She was imprisoned by her own assumptions.

There is no point in dissecting an APSQ article here, and anyway, such a critique would be superficial and beside the larger point.  Which is this: As “thought” becomes increasingly rarified and abstract and technical, two problems become increasing apparent.  First, that practicality and common sense are more and more marginalized in the public square of intellectualism; second, that the complexity of today’s original thought — especially as practiced in the social sciences — seems to increase the rate of argumentative failure resulting from assumptions of worldview.

Many have commented ad nauseum about the first problem; there’s not much original to add, except perhaps to note that contemporary thought (in sociology, philosophy, political science, literature … et cetera) is leading more and more to outcomes that border on inadvertent self-parody.  The fine arts are the most obvious example of this trend, but the social sciences aren’t far behind, as Alan Sokal’s Social Text experiment demonstrated. 

The second problem hasn’t had as much discussion, perhaps because the only ones who “get it” are those who have an intimate relationship with the Ivory Tower and hence may be reluctant to air its dirty laundry.  But the evidence abounds.  My own discipline, philosophy, presents a depressingly forthright case study in this.

It is not a secret that one of the biggest movements in 20th-century academic philosophy was the “linguistic turn.”  In a nutshell, this refers to the growing emphasis on philosophy of language, and the logical underpinnings of langauge, as a sort of grand unifying theory of the whole of traditional philosophy.  Everything — from metaphysics to epistemology to aesthetics — could be cast as a language problem, with philosophy of language omnipresent to explain how language constructs reality.

But along the way, philosophy lost its soul.  The discipline, under the linguistic turn, became increasingly the province of technical philosophers who were well-versed in linguistic theory and formal logic.  Concurrently, the accessibility of philosophy to the layman declined — contemporary philosophy in the analytic mode is sufficintly abstruse that even grad students are routinely incapable of understanding today’s academic philosophers.  Any grad student who “gets” Quine, for example, is probably lying.

Legal theory provides us with something by way of explanation for this trend: the idea of a ladder of precedent.  Sometimes, constitutional decisions by the courts seem quite at odds with the literal meaning of the Constitution, but the decision quotes a series of prior decisions and other relevant acts, each of which incrementally supports the most recent rung of the ladder.  Insofar as the previous decision is accepted as sound, so also is the next.  And so on.

Likewise, I think, with most of today’s social sciences.  And so also with the APSQ journal article.  The deeper the chain of reasoning, the more that fundamental assumptions are required to support the final argument.  This proliferates the potential avenues of attack against a theory or argument, and the natural defense against those attacks is to become increasingly “technically abstract.”

Thus, although I found a serious bone of contention in the second graf of the APSQ article such that the entire argument was open to criticism, the overall argument the author presented was — in its way — coherent (or so I thought). 

The author reasoned from a closed system of her own devising, which was logically sound yet based on a series of assumptions, each of which is open to debate.  By employing hidden premises that are, themselves, little more than assumed positions on controversial issues, the illusion of complex and original thinking is presented.  But it is merely facade; any monkey with sufficient talent can string together a series of dubious assumptions that will justify something intellectual-sounding.

I am, of course, not equating the professor from Duke with a monkey.  I’m just using the article as a jumping-off point for my observations.

Closed systems, hidden assumptions, unnecessary technical complexity, vague abstraction, and the need to sound smart … these things are feeding the academic monster, much to the detriment of a proper and rigorous intellectual environment.

A course correction is needed in today’s academy.  Let’s hope it happens before too much more nonsense is placed in the public domain.