Are we, human beings, naturally evil, or essentially good?

Bearing upon this fundamental question about human morality let me try to picture the emergent management Zeitgeist generally espoused as a lean and agile corporate culture, very much like in David Burkus’s book “Under New Management”[1] or David Siegel’s long essay “The Culture Deck”[2], and many others.

Awesome stuff, that’s for sure.

The issue, the fundamental one, pretty much started in the 17th-century with Thomas Hobbes with his “Leviathan”[3], in which he put forward the concept of the state of nature as "war of all against all" in which men's lives are "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short".

We’re mean.

This view was soon opposed to, namely by Lord Shaftesbury, in his “Inquiry Concerning Virtue”[4], he postulated that the moral sense in humans is natural, innate, and based on feelings, rather than resulting from indoctrination.

No, we’re nice.

More recently, from the evolutionary biology’s side, namely from Marc Hauser[5], came the notion of human morality as an instinct, very much in the same way Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker sought to explain language.

He gives a telling example, regarding euthanasia, in which the stated American Medical Association’s policy condemns the intentional termination of the life of one human being by another – mercy killing – but sees the cessation of the employment of extraordinary means to prolong life when there is irrefutable evidence that biological death is imminent, as a decision of the patient and/or his immediate family. Does it feel right? Does it fit our moral intuitions?

Hauser believes it doesn’t.

Another line of research also points this way, this time from the study of our nearest relatives in the animal kingdom and, according to Franz de Waal[6], we’re essentially nice, not mean.

In short, goodness takes proper account of others while badness treats them as mere instruments.

According to de Waal, the human capacity to act well has its evolutionary origins in emotions we share with other animals. He calls it “emotional contagion”. Although the human moral behavior is more elaborate than that of nonhuman animals, it is, nevertheless, continuous with lower animal behavior.

Emotional contagion, empathy, and sympathy are observed even in rats which had learned to press a lever to obtain food but stopped doing it if their response was paired with the delivery of an electric shock to a visible neighboring rat.

We reach out to lift up a fallen elderly person in the street without even thinking about it, and then, provide post hoc explanations, whereas, in reality, our behavior was automatic and intuitive.

We’re hardwired to be nice.

Now, what does this has to do with management? And to the Zeitgeist mentioned above?

In his book’s introduction, David Burkus depicts the rise and hegemony of Taylorism, in which the manual laborer is seen as doing its best to study just how much slower he can work and still convince his employer that he is going at a good pace. So, enforced cooperation and standardization had to rest solely with management.

People, particularly the manual workers, were seen as mean, kind of reminiscent of Hobbesian philosophy.

Douglas McGregor took good notice of it, more than fifty years ago in his book “The Human Side of Enterprise”[7], by counterpointing his Theory Y to those authoritarian, control-oriented assumptions, which he termed Theory X.

Things kept moving. Organizations increasingly need their workforce to engage in mental labor. It’s all about knowledge work now, and as Peter Drucker[8] also pointedly put almost twenty years ago, the responsibility for the knowledge worker’s productivity rests with himself. The knowledge worker has to have autonomy.

It’s not old wine in new bottles but these new, radical, and even revolutionary ideas aren’t that novel.

Of course, “Put customers second”, “Lose the Standard Vacation Policy”, “Ditch Performance Appraisals”, to name just a few, are pretty wild.

Could it be a path to goodness?

“There is also no clothing policy at Netflix, but no one comes to work naked”.

Who knows, maybe when we reach our natural, blissful, goodness state…

[1] Burkus, David (2016). Under New Management. How Leading Organizations are Upending Business as Usual. Pan Books.

[2] Siegel, David (Jun 12, 2014). The Culture Deck. https://medium.com/swlh/the-culture-deck-c4126ec63b18#.lrfk6or9t (accessed March 2, 2017).

[3] Hobbes's Moral and Political Philosophy. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hobbes-moral/ (accessed March 2, 2017).

[4] Lord Shaftesbury [Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury]. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/shaftesbury/ (accessed March 2, 2017).

[5] Hauser, Marc D. (2006). Moral Minds. How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong. Abacus.

[6] de Waal, Franz (2006). Primates and Philosophers. How Morality Evolved. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

[7] McGregor, Douglas (2006). The Human Side of Enterprise. Annotated Edition. McGraw-Hill.

[8] Drucker, F. Peter (1999). Knowledge-Worker Productivity: The Biggest Challenge. California Management Review, Vol. 41, NO. 2.