By David Gushee
Contemporary ethicists have retrieved an ancient insight by emphasizing the central role of habit in morality. After centuries of moral theories that focused on identifying rational moral principles that ought to govern human decision making, today’s ethicists have remembered the Greek philosophical insight that we are creatures of habit. We are what we do; and most days what we do is driven by habits rather than by conscious choice.
The habits of high-flyers in corporate America have come in for fierce criticism in recent days. The $700 billion bailout of the banking-and-finance sector has exposed to public view the habits of those who have lived at the peak of corporate power. Government money always comes with strings attached. In this case those strings have pulled open the curtains on numerous bad habits: huge executive compensation packages; massive golden parachutes for departing executives (many of whom are departing as failures); lavish spending on perks such as planes, office renovations, corporate retreats, and parties; and huge year-end bonuses often unrelated to corporate performance.
These habits have been deeply entrenched — so entrenched that even after becoming recipients of massive infusions of public money in 2008, many of corporate America’s titans have continued in such behaviors as if their companies were flush with cash. Old habits die hard, the saying goes, and this is surely true. But now the irresistible force of such habits has run into the immovable object of public outrage at a time of economic crisis.
It has seemed to this outside observer that the lavish habits found at the upper reaches of corporate America have been reinforced by the insularity of life at the top. Corporate boards seem to be populated by big-name, big-money titans of industry who are thoroughly accustomed to their own perks and have not hesitated to share them with those executives whom they purportedly supervise. If everyone has a corporate jet, if everyone spends millions on office renovations, if everyone flies to Tahoe for a weekend staff retreat, and if everyone makes about $10 million a year no matter how their company does, nothing seems odd about the particular culture of any particular company that does such things. The fact that service on a corporate board sometimes pays quite well in itself is a disincentive to blowing the whistle on the executives of that corporation.
Probably in no area other than money is habit more obviously central to behavior. People grow accustomed to the economic lifestyle which they inhabit. Those who have no disposable income grow accustomed to living accordingly; those who can blow $20,000 at the mall on a Thursday just because they feel like it grow accustomed to that lifestyle. I notice this in premarital counseling when I ask young couples to compare the economic habits they each grew up with. If Bill lived on food stamps and Mary in a gated community, their respective habits will pose a profound challenge to the success of their relationship.
Bad habits don’t change by themselves. They don’t change just because we hope they will. Normally they change only through concerted effort, most often reinforced by some kind of outside accountability — thus Alcoholics Anonymous and every other habit-breaking/habit-formation group.
This week President Obama decided to impose a little accountability on corporate excess in the age of government bailouts. His proposals address most of the excesses that strike those outside the corporate bubble as most outrageous: executive compensation, exit packages, nonessential perks, and so on. His proposals cannot apply to those companies that do not receive government bailout money — except, perhaps, in moral terms. Maybe some companies that are not on the government dole will voluntarily choose to reconsider policies of lavish excess. Wouldn’t that be refreshing?
In the end, the government cannot make Americans develop a moral compass or care about something other than their own self-interest. It cannot police the ethics of every person and company. It can and must sometimes intervene, however, when the most grotesque bad habits of various actors in society end up negatively affecting the interests of the whole.