The Institutional Imperative, Part 2

One important consequence of the institutional imperative is that institutions tend to staff themselves with exactly the sorts of people who would tend to work to preserve those institutions. That is, someone who would not make it their first priority to preserve a given institution would not be knowingly selected for a position in that institution. This is why a country would not elect a leader whose stated goal it was to destroy that country's government — a so-called revolution is needed for that. Likewise, it is why a corporation would not hire a CEO whose goals did not match up with the company's.

This is why the heads of corporations, despite any contrition to the contrary, will never work toward the interests of people in general, but only toward the interests of the corporations they work for. When the legally required goal of a corporation is profitability, anyone who becomes a head of a corporation must consent to their actions being directed primarily towards that goal, rather than any humanitarian or just one (profitability, after all, rarely aligns with humanity or justice). No matter how much a CEO or board of directors might in their heart of hearts wish to improve the lot of their workers or the people they generally exploit, they only come into their positions if they are already willing to put these better natures aside for the sake of the corporations survival in the market. And should their consciences prevail, they would promptly be fired and mocked as weak and incapable.

This is why the claim that merely selecting better people to fill the positions in an institution can change the fundamental values of that institution is mistaken. An institution has its own values and priorities, which must be accepted by any person who fills a role in that institution before they would be allowed to do so. The institutional imperative results in a continuous vicious cycle whereby institutions are established with nominal goals, adopt the primary goal of survival, and then staff themselves with people already willing to carry out those nominal goals and necessarily the primary goal, and maintain this state for as long as possible, until collapsing.

Compare this to what I earlier called a group of individuals. Such a group would come together with the primary goal of solving a certain problem. However, unlike an institution, there would be no formal organization to the group that did not arise from the very character of the problem to be solved. The group would be recognized from the outset as a temporary, fluid system for dealing with the specific problem at hand. If the problem were a permanent one (for instance, waste management in a city) then the group would be constantly working, but would have no offices or formal rules. Rather, it would shrink and grow as needed, with procedures determined by the needs of any given moment. This would certainly be more difficult to maintain and run, but would ultimately be worthwhile, I believe, in that it would avoid any chance of corruption, as well as the risk of deviating from its stated purpose.

There are, of course, many other aspects which would have to be explained to account for how a dynamic, informal group could run any of the complex systems which make up modern society. The previous paragraph was meant simply to provide contrast to the way institutions work. At the least, I hope I made clear what I mean by the institutional imperative, and why it can lead to serious problems in society.

Who Is a Moral Agent?

There is an important assumption about moral agency which always goes unstated in political discussion. It is this: institutions have moral agency. I could not possibly disagree with anything more than this. I believe that this assumption is responsible for a great deal of the evil that happens in the world. The assumption is unquestioned and unacknowledged because people do not think carefully about where moral agency can rest. Liberals who are outraged by the Citizens United verdict have no problems with treating the government as a valid moral agent, capable of killing, stealing, and taking on social projects. Likewise, right-wingers want to treat huge, fascistic corporations as equivalent to human beings, but balk at the idea of the government doing anything which doesn't put money into their wallets.

My take on this matter is simple: moral agency must lie with individual human beings. This is a minimal assumption, and I will take it for granted. However, humans do not live in isolation, and collective decisions must be made. As such, there must be some provision for super-individual moral agency. This is what I refer to as a group of individuals, or simply group. I do not use this term in a simple way, meaning any attempt at decision making involving more than one person. Instead, I use it in a technical way, to mean a voluntary association of individuals, none of whom relinquish or subvert their own moral agency, but merely use some method to determine the prevailing moral judgement of the group. The methods by which a group can come to such a determination are manifold: voting, by simple or super majority; formal debate; consensus building; and many not yet invented, I'm sure.

I contrast the idea of the group to the idea of the institution. An institution is also a super-individual decision-making body. However, it is not composed of individuals. In fact (as I shall discuss in a future post) institutions have priorities and prerogatives completely independent of the will of any given person. Obviously, decisions within institutions are ultimately made by individuals. But that individual must be willing to act, and must in fact act, in the interests of the institution rather than in their own individual interest or they would not be placed in such a position to begin with. A perfect example of this comes from a friend of mine who was tasked to go to a State Legislature meeting on behalf of the healthcare non-profit he works for. The people in charge had decided they would side with a certain political bloc which my friend opposed. However, it was his job to go and relay, and argue for, the position of the non-profit. His individual opinion of the matter at hand did not matter in the slightest. All that mattered was whether or not he could accurately relay the prevailing opinion of the institution he was a part of.

I do not think that the suppression of one's own moral agency in such a circumstance is conscionable. Be it as an employee, a soldier, or a politician, one should not have to abnegate one's own moral agency to serve a greater good. Such a good can be served voluntarily, and morally, by acting as part of a group of individuals, whose decision you can protest and even reject with no artificially contrived consequences to you, such as destitution or imprisonment.