Why Business Ethics Matters

This opening chapter tells a basically optimistic story about human nature that centers on the concept of Harmony Games in which people help other people and help themselves at the same time. In the account to be given here, we intuitively identify with other human beings. We are species-ists, and our species-ism is basically a good thing. Our ability to treat other people as “we,” with other animals and nature as “them,” has played a central role in our becoming the planet’s dominant large land mammal. Our affect-laden intuitions and our use of language help us to align effectively not only with people we know, but also with all other members of our species, in playing social games.

The central aim of this chapter is to relate the four temperaments to the Harmony perspective on human nature that was introduced in the opening chapter. I suggest that human life consists in substantial part of quicksilver transitions from Harmony in one mood to Harmony in another mood. In what follows, I propose an eightfold division of Harmony: four temperaments times two forms of thinking/feeling. Each temperament can Harmonize in an intuitive System 1 mode or in a reasoning System 2 mode. In that eightfold array of Harmony, I identify one weak link. Modern humans are strong, I contend, in creating seven kinds of Harmony Games but are much less effective in creating one: Sanguine System 2 Harmony. As much as we believe in the Sanguine as the pinnacle of our aspirations, we do not intellectually respect self-help books, and other guides to happiness, even as we do respect calculating, compliance-oriented, and argumentative modes of reason.

Standard mathematical game theory, as expressed in matrices, game trees, equations, and other forms, is, in my view, both beautiful and highly valuable. Further, the standard game-theoretic stories of prisoners and so on are highly interesting, and illuminating. But it is a different version of game theory, a critical, philosophical, moral emotions version that does not assume the calculating egoism that is the common currency of the standard tales of prisoners, teenage daredevils, and the like, though not of mainstream game theory as a whole, that this book is devoted to advancing. It is important not to assimilate the philosophical approach to game theory advanced here to the standard mathematical approach, and to the standard stories.

We moderns think we know important truths about the universe and its workings that our classical predecessors, no matter how brilliant, did not. In many respects, our confidence is warranted. We know the velocity with which our planet is revolving around the star that spawned it, and the speed with which it is rotating on its axis; we know the velocity with which the arm of the galaxy in which our solar system is located is turning around the center of the galaxy; we know the red shift that allows us to calculate how fast our galaxy and the rest of the universe are now pushing apart, some thirteen billion or so years after the great expansion, or “Big Bang,” that got our universe going. We have a picture of our corner of the universe that is not only beautiful—the green and blue ball of Earth; the middle-aged yellow Sun that will one day grow old, swell up into a red giant, and then die; the billions and billions of stars in the great twin spiral nebulae of the Milky Way nebulae and its neighbor, Andromeda—but that accords with verifiable empirical truths in a way our ancestors’ pictures did not. Further, we now know enough about how evolution works in a variety of organisms both to appreciate Aristotle’s perspicacity in the first quote, in which he anticipates the essence of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, and to suggest to him that he may well have radically overstated the case against favorable variations arising by chance.

My aim in this chapter is to provide some practical ideas on how the Four Temperaments approach to game theory that this book is devoted to promoting can be related to teaching, and also to research and practice. Although the material in the chapter can stand on its own, it can also be related to a potential critical business ethics school, and to analogous groups in other disciplines, that bring together people who share an emotional commitment both to scientific truth and to fictionalizing, fabulizing story-telling, and who respect and embrace both a critical, debunking spirit and a Sanguine, accepting one.

In our lives, there are times to make peace, to make love, to make amends, to make money, to make tracks, and to do many other things. There is also a time to make war. Making war in the form of making a systematic, reasoned argument that A is better than B, in a situation in which other reasonable people can, and should, argue that B is better than A, is not for everyone. But for those of us who, in at least part of our lives, are politicians, lawyers, normative philosophers, or other types of advocate, it is our duty.

Four Temperaments and four corresponding games govern us, and quite possibly everything else in Nature, if the argument of this book is right. This book has been a preliminary one, which tries to get us to appreciate the division of ourselves into Phlegmatic, Melancholy, Sanguine, and Choleric parts, and the related division of social interactions into four games. If the approach advanced here were to gain currency, future work will rebel, and should rebel, against the simple overarching four-part division I have proposed as a key to understanding our ethical nature. But it is right, I believe, to begin with a simple model.