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Virtue in Chains

Marcus Tullius Cicero was a remarkable jurist and student of the moral sense. But in his time, his Roman Republic was rotting from within.  Executed on orders of Mark Antony, Cicero lived until the death throes of his beloved republic.

Once, however, he – without knowing it – put his finger on the disease which was eating away at the life force sustaining Republicanism – the culture which valued and sustained a res publica – a “common thing.”

This month of June in 59 BC, 2,081 years ago, Cicero wrote a letter to his friend, Atticus.

Atticus, as I recall, was out of Rome in Greece on a business trip.  The triumvirate of Crassus, Pompey and Julius Caesar was in power unconstitutionally.  Crassus allegedly fixed elections and bribed juries.  Pompey had legions loyal to his person.  Caesar had smarts.

Cicero wrote: “We are held down on all sides.  We don’t object any longer to the loss of our freedom. … All with one accord groan of the present state of affairs, yet no one does or says a thing to better it.”  The only one to speak or offer open opposition is a young Curio.

All this, wrote Cicero, dolor est maior, cum videas civitatis voluntatem solutam, virtutem adligatam: “only makes sadness the greater for we see that the will of the community is not tied down, its virtue is in chains.”

Whenever virtue is in chains, the state does not belong to citizens, but to those who dictate the terms and conditions of life.

That is the way some years ago, the Caux Round Table took for its motto the Latin phrase – Virtue is not Chained:

Unilever, Aristotle, Maslow and Moral Capitalism

A recent story in the Wall Street Journal reported that Unilever is associating its product Hellmann’s mayonnaise (full disclosure: Hoa and I buy Hellmann’s) with a mission to curb food waste.

For example, in the post-industrial consumer economy of the U.S., each year, 108 billion pounds of food is wasted.  That equates to 130 billion meals and more than $408 billion in food thrown away each year.  Shockingly, nearly 40% of all food in America is wasted.

This follows a “brands with purpose” business strategy adopted by Unilever CEO, Alan Jope.

Some resist this strategy of associating virtue with the products and services provided by capitalism on the grounds that companies should not go “woke” and attempt to impose political, social or cultural outcomes in free societies.  Consumers, it is said, should have the right to follow their own values in the way they spend their money.

But as I argued almost 20 years ago in my book, Moral Capitalism, the values of capitalism come from consumers, from buyers, not suppliers.  Consumers, on the whole and in sub-markets, determine the outcomes of capitalism.  If no one wants a product or a service, any company planning to supply it will quickly run into market failure.  Investors and lenders will only fund such a profitless company for so long, unless they look at it as a charity meeting some deserving need, like a church or a homeless shelter and become donors.

Now, in ethics, Aristotle described happiness as a combination of active virtue and having sufficient material goods.  Thus, for Aristotle, a consumer of mayonnaise who wants to act virtuously, while selfishly enjoying the taste and other sensible physical properties of the concoction, is seeking personal happiness.  Such consumers can use their money freely in the marketplace for food to realize, on their own, their personal understanding of happiness.

The modern psychologist, Abraham Maslow, provides an alternative understanding of why Unilever’s brand with purpose strategy is a sound business model.  Maslow has a different, but rather similar take on happiness than Aristotle.

Maslow described individuals as seeking various kinds of happiness, from the most material and mundane to the most abstract and intangible.  He also proposed that people first seek to satisfy basic needs and then proceed to reach out for more and more intangible forms of  “the good,” as Aristotle would say.

Maslow’s famous hierarchy of human satisfactions is:

From my point of view, Alan Jope is selling in one jar of mayonnaise a product that 1) satisfies a basic need of food, but also 2) provides the purchaser with an opportunity to experience self-actualization and 3) perhaps also meet esteem needs in being appreciated by others who worry over food waste and belonging needs to be part of a cultural community which also worries over food waste.

Thus, both Unilever’s strategy to do “good,” as their customers are now more willing to purchase participation in bringing about such good and the proposal that companies should have a “purpose” over and above profit, shows capitalism evolving along the lines proposed by Maslow – from meeting basic needs to more and more selling opportunities to meet psychological and self-fulfillment needs.

I predict that the market, as driven by customers, will sort out those companies that can meet real needs that customers are willing to pay for satisfying and those that fail to produce goods and services for which there is no demand.

It should come as no surprise that, with the astounding success of capitalism over the last 300 years in creating wealth, humanity today can enjoy living where, more and more, psychological needs and self-fulfillment needs are achievable.  Wealth has enabled so many to meet their basic needs so that they can now aspire to meeting needs higher on Maslow’s hierarchy.  Thus, it is only natural that the forces of capitalism – demand and supply – are now focused more and more on helping us meet those more abstract needs.

But when business seeks to meet psychological and self-fulfillment needs, it begins to trespass into the social spheres of culture and politics, which are contentious, as different people value different kinds of psychological well-being and have different ideas about what self-fulfillment is all about.  What I insist is good for me may be anathema to you, so do I get to cancel you or do you get to cancel me?  Moreover, who between us should be the guide to best business practices?

The Person and the Office are Not One and the Same

I recently ran across a saying of American President Harry Truman which I had never seen before, but which goes to the moral core of the Caux Round Table’s Principles for Government.

Our foundational principle for moral government is that public office is a public trust.  No trust gives ownership, personal dominion to be willful, arbitrary or capricious over the powers and assets held in trust.

President Truman once said to a reporter: “Two persons are sitting at this desk.  One is Harry Truman and the other is President of the United States and I have to be sure that Harry Truman remembers on all occasions that the President is there too.”

Checks and Balances: 50 Years after Watergate – Tuesday, June 28

Please join us for an in-person round table at 9:00 am on Tuesday, June 28, at Landmark Center to consider the state of our constitutional republic.  Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives allege an unconstitutional insurrection occurred on January 6, 2021; Dinesh D’Souza alleges in his new documentary, 2,000 Mules, an unconstitutional stuffing of ballot boxes funded by plutocrats to steal the presidency in 2020.

Fifty years ago, the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters by agents of the executive branch took place on June 17.  As a result, President Nixon resigned from office after the constitutional process of impeachment for abuse of power exposed his personal involvement in a cover-up of that burglary.  Was that extra-constitutional political act of seeking electoral advantage the beginning of the erosion of our constitutional democracy?

The issues we face today were clearly and precisely foreseen in the Federalist Papers.

Madison wrote that a well-constructed republic has a “tendency to break and control the violence of faction.”  Faction, he said, introduces into public councils “instability, injustice and confusion.”  Sounds like the USA of our time.

Federalist 51 advises that a republic must be so contrived that the interior structure of the government and its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places.  “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition;” “… the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other – that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights.”

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”

When a jury in Washington, D.C. condones lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, can federal courts ply their proper role in providing a check on the police power of the federal government?  If law is not enforced, of what use is a constitution to check the corrupting vice and destructive power of faction?

In his written Farewell Address to the American people, Washington wrote:

“All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations under whatever plausible character with the real design to direct, control, counteract or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle and of fatal tendency.  They serve to organize faction; to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community.

However, combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

Let me now take a more comprehensive view and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally.

It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.”

So, right now, in our time, what is the role for morality in our republic?  Or rather, whose morality?

Cost to attend is $10 per person.

A light breakfast will be served beginning at 8:30 am.

To register, please email Jed at jed@cauxroundtable.net.

The event will last about an hour and a half.

With Regrets – Cancellation of Global Dialogue at Mountain House

We have been informed that accommodations at Mountain House in Caux, Switzerland this coming July 30 and 31 will be, shall I say, spartan at best.

Other meetings in July have been cancelled so that staff will not be hired. Reception support, meal preparation and cleaning will be provided on a minimal acceptable basis.

After discussion with our board, we have decided to cancel our planned Global Dialogue. I am concerned that participants will inconvenience themselves with travel and time, but not experience Mountain House at its best. Support for last minute travel issues, etc., as they arise, may be lacking as fully needed by our participants.

Regretfully and with apologies, therefore, we are cancelling this year’s Global Dialogue at Mountain House.

I am exploring options for convening a Global Dialogue yet this fall in another venue in Europe.

May Pegasus Now Available!

Here’s the May issue of Pegasus.

In this edition, we seek to answer 2 questions: 1) what do we understand as the proper relationship between moral and legal behavior and 2) what do we recognize as the proper tension between private and social benefits?

In that vein, we include an article on directors of moral systems and another on surviving speed and complexity.

We also include a piece I did on purposeful boards of directors, which was published by the Singapore Institute of Directors earlier this year, as well as an announcement about the 2021 Dayton Award, which was awarded back on May 6.

I would be most interested in your thoughts and feedback.

A Tale of Two Billionaires (with apologies to Charles Dickens)

The U.S. is experiencing a second episode of a multi-billionaire attempting to pull the strings of democracy as a puppet master.

This raises grave issues for the possibility of capitalism faithfully supporting moral government. Since Aristotle and Mencius, it has been noted that, as a moral fact, “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

In its ethical principles for the ownership of wealth, the Caux Round Table advocates self-restraint on the part of the wealthy and subordination of their drive for dominion to ethical principles of moral government, first and foremost that public power is a public trust.  When a person has such arbitrary and capricious power in any form, that power confers upon them an office of responsibility for protecting and enhancing the common good, that power becoming a constructive trust held on behalf of the community.

Now, the first U.S. multi-billionaire I hold up for scrutiny is Mark Zuckerberg.  In 2020, he and his wife gave some $400 to $419 million (estimates found in the press) to an effort to help Democrats get more voters for Joe Biden in an effort to defeat Donald Trump.  Whether they succeeded as planned is contested.  Their effort was revealed early in 2021 in Time Magazine.  The caper is now known as “Zucker Bucks” or “Zuck Bucks.”

Private money from a multi-billionaire was given, gratus, to public and quasi-public workers collecting ballots in the 2020 elections and recording voter choices.

The charge is that many of those “public servants” collected ballots from persons not entitled to vote and recorded their votes as legitimate, thus preventing the genuine will of the people from being dispositive in our politics (see the book Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech and the Democrats Seized Our Elections by Mollie Hemingway).

Recently, Elon Musk gave us a second tale of a multi-billionaire seeking to impact the American democracy, also in the arena of free thought and political choice – the life blood and oxygen of any humanized constitutional democracy.

Musk has proposed to buy Twitter for $44 billion, take it private and make it a platform for free speech.  Here, private power is being used to promote a moral end – free speech for all.

Again, as with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, I am forcefully reminded of the Athenian ethic as reported by Thucydides: “The strong do what they can; the weak what they must.”

I don’t know about you, but that is not an ethic I can tolerate.

Caux Round Table Board Member Issues Warning on Food Insecurity Crisis Triggered by Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

Our board member, Devry Boughner Vorwerk, in collaboration with the Eurasia Group, a consulting firm in New York City, has issued a report trying to estimate the likelihood of acute food insecurity later this year, given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the inability of Ukraine to export its harvests of grain, grain now in storage and grain which might be harvested later this year.  Already, there are fears in Egypt of political instability, which will be set in motion by food shortages.

Devry’s report notes that:

The number of people facing food insecurity globally will rise by up to 243 million by November or a total of 1.9 billion people, explains a new report, “Food Security and the Coming Storm,” from Eurasia Group and DevryBV Sustainable Strategies.  This report offers new forecasts and policy recommendations for this global crisis based on a collaborative approach among the partners using geopolitical scenario analysis, market modeling and issue expertise. Russia’s war with Ukraine has shocked agricultural markets, increasing food inflation and global hunger.  Combined with the Covid-19 pandemic, the war and countries’ responses to it are pushing global food prices even higher, heightening the risk of poverty, hunger and malnutrition.

The report presents three potential trajectories for the Russia-Ukraine war: unstable stalemate, escalation and climbdown.  It estimates the impact of each on global food insecurity.  Notably, Eurasia Group’s most likely scenario, unstable stalemate (a 70% probability), is also the most grave for global hunger.

Even in the most optimistic scenario, climbdown (a 5% probability), which would assume a cease-fire and de-escalation, food insecurity in 2022 would still be higher than in 2021.

Prior to the war, levels of hunger had already surpassed previous records set in 2021, with close to 193 million people acutely food insecure and in need of urgent assistance across 53 countries and territories.

Probability Scenarios of Food Insecure Population by November:  

-Unstable stalemate – 70% probability -1.92 billion, +17.3%
-Escalation – 25% probability – 1.78 billion, +8.7%
-A climbdown – 5% probability – 1.51 billion, -7.6%

Despite this dire forecast, the report says a series of policies could help reduce human suffering in any war scenario—if the world can cooperate.  These include a concerted effort to keep food trade open with Ukraine and Russia, despite sanctions and other wartime considerations.

Devry Boughner Vorwerk, CEO of DevryBV Sustainable Strategies, underscored that point, noting that “while food aid is critical to address the immediate humanitarian crisis, this study also demonstrates the need to focus on local production zones at scale in impacted countries over the next six to 24 months.  The G7 and multilateral lending institutions need to dedicate targeted emergency funding to the greatest areas of production potential to ensure a sustainable food system going forward.”

The full report can be found here.

Can Diversity, Inclusion and Equity Efforts Have a Legitimate Moral Foundation?

Recently, I met a vice president of diversity, inclusion and equity of a local institution.  He had a different take on his mission – a Gospel take, actually.  Taking Jesus’ parable (only a narrative?) about the good Samaritan seriously, as Pope Francis did in his important encyclical Fratelli Tutti, leads one straight to a non-race-based vision of diversity, inclusion and equity.

That is a moral basis for diversity, inclusion and equity I have not heard at all brought up in our public discourse about the undoing of “white racism” and “systemic racism” or cleansing our country of its “original sin.”

These justifications of diversity, inclusion and equity preferences have a moral dimension; the effort seeks the common good.  But…

Hasn’t the high ground of morality been to put aside the superficial and look to the essence of another’s humanity?  Are racial appearances a superficiality or an essence?

Is it their appearance which gives rise to discrimination, ostracism, stereotyping, marginalization, refusing to honor and accept as a friend, peer or relative someone of a different “race?”  Is it not, rather, our misuse of that appearance in our own minds and mores, which is the source of the rejection?

What was it about the Samaritan which caused the others to pass him by?

Using race or some similar ascriptive characteristic to give preferences, to separate sheep from goats on judgment day, doesn’t square with many theologies of the human.

As you may recall, we spent considerable time over the past two years learning about the covenants the Prophet Muhammad gave to respect and protect Christian communities.  In one covenant, he wrote of taking others “under the wing of mercy.”  The Qur’an teaches that God created all persons, one by one, to serve as his “khalifa” or steward protecting and making fruitful his creation.

Mencius based his moral vision on benevolence (仁).  This character is derived from the character for human person (人) and a mark for the number “2.”  Benevolence gives us the ideal of human persons together.

Jesus grounded his ethic of being human on seeing every other as oneself; on being equitable between ego and other; on seeing diversity as a kind of sameness; and on wanting to include the perspective of others in our own thinking and feeling.

The apostle Paul spoke of there being “neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

The Buddhist middle way is not exclusively for those born to practicing Buddhist parents or by accident being raised in a Buddhist culture.  The Noble Eightfold Path of right-ness or fit-ness is available for every sentient human mind.

Discriminating tribalisms – “us” and “them” – I suggest, don’t rise to the highest levels of theological insight and can keep us in darkness of heart and mind.

The origin of “equity,” “epikeia” for Aristotle, was to make space for those who had a claim to differential treatment.  Thomas Aquinas explained equity as:

“When we were treating of laws, since human actions, with which laws are concerned, are composed of contingent singulars and are innumerable in their diversity, it was not possible to lay down rules of law that would apply to every single case.  Legislators in framing laws attend to what commonly happens: although if the law be applied to certain cases it will frustrate the equality of justice and be injurious to the common good, which the law has in view.  Thus the law requires deposits to be restored, because in the majority of cases this is just. Yet it happens sometimes to be injurious—for instance, if a madman were to put his sword in deposit and demand its delivery while in a state of madness, or if a man were to seek the return of his deposit in order to fight against his country.  On these and like cases it is bad to follow the law and it is good to set aside the letter of the law and to follow the dictates of justice and the common good.  This is the object of “epikeia” which we call equity.”

In the courts of equity in England and America, a person seeking “equity” needed to do equity first in order to claim its special solicitude from a person in authority.  The maxim was that one had to come before the courts with “clean hands” to ask for equity, which was a moral privilege, not a legal right.

By the way, the courts of equity were first created in England by lord chancellors who were often senior clerics and so trained in Christian theology.

We would, I am sure, do much better for the common good in our efforts to provide benevolence through diversity and inclusion and to do equity if we were to reframe our narrative away from justification by race to justification by our personal grace and by faith in all who come our way that they, too, may be inclusive of and equitable towards others.