Third prize is you're fired

Have you heard about the manager of a sales team in Provo, Utah who waterboarded one of his employees as a motivational tool? He wanted to demonstrate that they should be fighting for sales as hard as the employee was fighting for air. The manager stated that he was inspired to do this by reading a story about Socrates holding a student's head under water to demonstrate that he should want knowledge as much as he wanted air. That confused me somewhat since I've never heard or read this story and it is so utterly unlike anything else Socrates is ever reported to have said or done. So, I googled it. As I suspected, someone made it up, passed it off as fact and it has since made the blog rounds as truth. As you can imagine, the Socrates story makes me sadder than the waterboarding incident.

The waterboarding incident is appalling and deflating. The fact that anyone would think it allowable to do to an employee, much less motivational is beyond belief. Then again, if the United States government says it's not torture, or that it is necessary, why shouldn't the citizens of that country think the same thing? Bush has refused to answer the question about waterboarding, but he has implied that it is an acceptable behavior in order to get information from enemy combatants. Well then, it must ok for the rest of us. Why wouldn't the manager in Utah think it's acceptable if the highest authority in our country refuses to denounce it? We are not allowed to ask our government or its representatives to do things on our behalf that we do not think are morally permissible. Oddly enough, that works both ways; the government or its representatives is also not allowed to do things on our behalf that they believe are not morally permissible. It's a symbiotic relationship, this bond between government and citizen; a representative acts for the citizens just as the citizens act for the government. If one half of the equation is endorsing an action then the other half of the equation must also be allowed to endorse that action. Since our highest authority has made a direct implication of endorsement of this technique it is utterly permissible for that manager to waterboard his employee.

Are you as disgusted by that last sentence as I am? It begs the question, of course, of how it is possible that a representative of the people of the United States would even consider the use of waterboarding an acceptable practice. It is obviously a morally reprehensible act and no one could successfully mount a moral argument for the necessity or rightness of the it. It goes back to the good old "Euthyphro dilemma." Is a thing moral because God says it is so, or is it moral simply because it is? Is a thing moral and allowed simply because our highest government authority says it is so, or is it moral simply because it is? Obviously, this analogy falls a bit short since we are comparing something infallible to something fallible; however, the basic premise remains, what or whom decides the morality of an act?

I would hesitate to invest that much power in something as fallible as a person in authority. Not only does authority come with its own detractions, the person in authority is not always static. If we have invested all of our morality in the person in charge, does it then change with each new change of authority? What, then, would our foundation for deciding a thing's morality be? Getting back to Euthyphro: how can an act be deemed moral or immoral unless it actually is immoral or moral? The morality has to be a part of the thing itself, rather than an arbitrary label. If we're only finding morality in the way we perceive a thing or in the way we describe it, we're only giving lip service to whether or not morality exists. That cannot be! Otherwise, the morality of an act would be separate from the act itself. The rape of a child would be separate from the wrongness of it. No. The wrongness of the act is as much a part of the act as the base act itself. You cannot divorce action from morality unless you assert that morality does not exist. And if you cannot divorce the two then the morality is an intrinsic part of the action. The waterboarding psycho of a manager has no basis for the contention that a thing is permissible, even if it is deemed so by authority.

Back to the Socrates question. I wonder where the story started? I decided to google one of Socrates' most famous lines, "The unexamined life is not worth living." The first page that popped up was an article for someone promoting a way to success in personal and professional life. I find it rather interesting that people are co-opting philosophy and trying to force it into a role it should not and cannot have, the role of nothing more than anecdotal importance. In other words, using philosophy in little snippets and stories to demonstrate your point or world view, rather than arriving at your point or world view from philosophy. It would be easy to take little things written (or said, in the case of Socrates) out of context and force them into the neat boxes of life lessons we think we've learned or are attempting to teach others. The waterboarding manager is the prime example of this thinking: he read a story about a famous philosopher and used the idea from the story to justify action taken. The problem is, you have to have examined the action, the cause, the logic, the morality, the nature of the thing before you can attempt it. Using philosophy in the former way puts all of the emphasis on what happens after a thing is done, rather than on what came before.

Let's assume for the moment that the Socrates story is true. The purpose of the action taken by Socrates is to teach his student or students that knowledge is as necessary as air, as necessary as life. It is, in other words, intrinsically bound to life itself. So, how do we get from that idea to waterboarding an employee? Obviously, Socrates would have been making a far subtler point than the manager was attempting to make; pursuing sales is not the same thing as pursuing knowledge. I don't even mean that in the superficial way of sales being less than knowledge and somehow not quite on the up and up; what I mean is that sales are tangible, knowledge is not. With that in mind, how can you possibly apply the Socratic story to the idea that you should waterboard an employee to get him to recognize the importance of sales? Are sales intrinsic to life? Of course not. The comparison can't be made. If the manager had done the mental heavy lifting necessary for philosophy and understanding our action through philosophy, he would have seen this to be the case. Instead, he read a story, thought hey! that can work for me! and implemented it without thought, only desire. He wanted the outcome of the story, not the idea behind it. Again, it puts the emphasis on what comes after, not on how you got there.

Philosophy is all about the way you get there. Some of my students struggle with this idea in their papers because we are so used to making a choice or statement and then thinking about the ideas behind it after the consequences are manifest. The question in our minds isn't "why," but "how." How can I get from A to B, not why should I get from A to B. Using philosophy as a tool for marketing a self help or professional success strategy is against the very idea of philosophy. Anyone who tries to use it that way is only seeking to justify something they think they already know and refusing to recognize that the why behind it is more important than the how. It's taking things backward; it is starting with an idea and then finding things to justify the idea without the rigorous process of examination. In other words, it's saying, "abortion is wrong," before you understand what that means. We should always start with an "I don't know," before we make any categorical statements or decisions. How can you know that abortion is wrong unless you gotten to that conclusion through reason, through a progression of examination? We can't start out knowing; it must come from examination and we must start from a position of uncertainty. In other words, we know nothing that we did not first not know. The conclusion (the assertion of truth) is the result, not the foundation.

Another famous Socratic quote is, "I know that I know nothing." This was related by Diogenes after the Delphic Oracle stated that Socrates was the wisest man. People are often confused by the above quote but it makes perfect sense if you understand that the process of knowledge is far more important than the knowledge itself. Hell, you may not get to knowledge! We tend to ignore why we believe a thing to be true and only believe it because we think it must be so. This is the worst form of ignorance and the one most prevalent in our society of separation. Unless we get back to a fundamental understanding of the "why" of things, the examination of things, we are doomed to turn into unthinking people who act without thought. It's very disheartening.

Socrates would be pissed.

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