Michael Gurstein wrote:
>
> Hmm...
>
> I'm wondering where the accountability is for the senior execs who covered
> up the Ford/Bridgestone efforts for a half dozen years, hundreds of lives
> and thousands of injuries; or the accountability of the tobacco execs.; or
> PG&E (Erin Brockovitch); or the wonderful folks who brought Minimata disease
> to Japan; or John Roth of Nortel who rather casually it seems destroyed the
> pension hopes of half the Canadian population while making sure that his own
> stock options were secure...
[snip]
Clearly corporations have acute senses of accountability -->
when it comes to enforcing the nondisclosure agreements people
enter into voluntarily(sic) as the only way the company will deign to
employ them or pay them a settlement for damages the company has
done to them, etc. (It's a free country!)
There are examples of corporate accountability. I think it was
about 15 years or so ago that the captain of a ship
transporting cars (Hondas?) from Japan to the U.S. committed
sepeku when the cars arrived rusted.
Commander Waddle of the U.S.S. Greenville at least got a
slap on the wrist for slicing the Japanese fishing trawler
Ehime Maru in half.
It seems to me that people should earn their paychecks. Little
people earn theirs by the sweat of their brow, the
damage to their physical and mental health, and the alienation
of their soul (maybe we need to resurrect the old name for
"shrinks": "alienists"?).
If a CxO is going to get lots of perks and do nothing except
occupy a Hermann Miller leather chair behind a birds-eye maple
desk, he can still deserve every penny in his 7-dollor-digit
income if he sets the corporation moving in an unprecedentedly
dynamic direction with one well chosen 10 word monosyllabic sentence,
or if in even fewer words he prevents a disaster. He need only
work for one or two minutes in his whole career to be worth
every cent he gets paid. But if he doesn't perform
at this Zen-enlightened/Maslow-flow-state level but rather
incontinently pisses PCBs into the Hudson for many
years, then he should be
"paid" equally *well*, i.e., appropriately, in terms
of recovering billions of dollars in damages from him
(or the company that holds the performance bond on him -->
how many executives are bonded to the level of the possible
damage they can cause?) and/or criminal punishment.
Anybody who finds those terms of employment not to their
liking should probably get paid less and sweat more. Sort
of like the woman in _One Hundred Years of Solitude_ who got so
excited by something or other that she sat down on the
kitchen stove and was useless as a wife for the rest of
her life.
Man is the being whose ontological difference from everything
else (including AIs) is that he (she or other) is able to
give an accounting for his existence: for what he does and does not
do. He is able to respond meaningfully to a question: "Why did you do what
you did?" (Of course, this human attribute is more generally
used to intimidate children and wage-workers than Deans
and CEOs! Who shall intimidate the intimidators?)
Allowance needs to be made for honest mistakes.
No person should be sentenced to life imprisonment
without parole for clearly
stating to the board of directors that they are not
competent to do their job and that the company needs to
find someone more able (IBM corporation, for one, may have had at least
one CEO somewhere between 1970 and 1990 who did not meet this
minimum expectable level of officer performance but
was not brought to justice).
But it is not an honest mistake when, e.g., Madam Curie kept silent
about the carcinogenic effects of X-Rays (they killed her brother, etc.),
because she feared if the public found out that would lessen public
enthusiasm for using X-Rays. On the other hand, the 2 July 2001
New Yorker magazine essay on Fred Soper -- the man who tried to
wipe out malaria with DDT -- shows that things are sometimes
more complicated than people generally think. Soper may well
have been far the better of the two.
--
A big problem, as I see it, is when people are expected to
please the people "above" them. (This starts with children
being taught to honor their fathers and mothers even/especially
when the latter do not deserve honor
-- see Alice Miller's books.) I simply cannot believe
that the corporate scientists who do
or collude with doing dirty things operate under clear charters that
the only thing they will be punished for is hiding negative side
effects of things the company does.
I cannot believe that Captain Waddle and his crew operated under the
explicit understanding that he should take notice of the important
visitors on his ship *only* after he had triple checked
all safety procedures and that if the visitors had a bad time or
arrived back in port late that was of incomparably less consequence than
making sure the crew not use toilet paper in such a way as to
clog the toilets.
The people who need to be held culpable are the ones responsible
for "setting the tone" (what Lawrence Kohlberg called,
in the context of schools: "the hidden curriculum").
This is one of the reasons why the "invisible hand" is
so dangerous, because it leads to people
thinking not just that no one is accountable --> but that,
for inexorable structural reasons, no one *can be* accountable.
+\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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