Times of Insight: Conscience, Corporations, and the Common Good

Front matter

Eminent Voices in Business Ethics Sead Fae fefioen abi PANEER

Kenneth E. Goodpaster Times of Insight: Conscience, Corporations, and the Common Good

OPEN ACESS A Springer

Contents

Contents

About the Author

Kenneth Goodpaster earned his AB in mathematics from the University of Notre Dame and his PhD in philosophy from the University of Michigan. He taught philosophy at the University of Notre Dame during the 1970s before joining the Harvard Business School faculty in 1980.

Chapter 1 A Introduction Geek for

Abstract In this chapter, I offer a reflection on my nearly 50-year career in the field of applied ethics, suggesting that certain issues (conscience and corporations) were themes in the first twenty years. In the second 20 years, the issues still included corporations, but added is the issue of what constitutes the common good. I introduce the four insights around which the narrative is built (the moral insight, the institutional insight, the anthropological insight, and the Socratic insight). I remind the reader that these explorations of the ethics of organizations take their philosophical departure from Plato’s analogical comparison of the soul of the human person with the culture of the city-state in his dialogue, the Republic. I then provide an overview of Times of Insight: Conscience, Corporations, and the Common Good as a whole and the organization of the chapters to come, including a graphic depiction of these chapters that will be used as a unifying thread throughout. This chapter is an organic part of a larger work about the overall contribution of Kenneth Goodpaster to the field of applied ethics and is best read in the context of that larger work.

1.1 Reflection

It is an honor to be asked to contribute to this book series. It affords me an opportunity to reflect on my body of work over the past half-century and to identify patterns among the books, articles, book reviews, and case studies that comprise my curriculum vitae (see Appendix 1). More importantly, it allows me to highlight contributions that have been appreciated and to share some that have been less noticed (see Appendix 2). My hope is that the reader will benefit as much from this extended reflection as I have benefitted from writing it, and that this book can serve as a useful departure point for future work in the field of business (or organizational) ethics.!

'Let me note at the outset that references to published works of mine are of course dated by their appearance in print, which may not be their place in the timeline of my professional development.

© The Author(s) 2022 1 K. E. Goodpaster, Times of Insight: Conscience, Corporations, and the Common Good, Issues in Business Ethics 54, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-03 1-09712-6_1

2 1 Introduction 1.1.1 The First Twenty Years [1975-1995]

The title of this book, Times of Insight: Conscience, Corporations, and the Common Good, is intended to capture a progression of insights surrounding the three main subjects that have guided my career of teaching and research in the field of applied ethics. I began seeking an understanding of the role of conscience in the lives of individual persons with the conviction that such an understanding would be helpful if it were applied to institutions.

This was something of an “inversion” of the strategy of Socrates in Plato’s Republic, Book II. Socrates says of his friends Glaucon and Adeimantus:

They wanted to arrive at the truth, first, about the nature of justice and injustice, and secondly, about their relative advantages. I told them what I really thought: that the enquiry would be of a serious nature and would require very good eyes.’ (Plato, p. 185).

Socrates went on to analogize the soul of the person to the structure of a republic, implying that finding justice in the larger entity would help to discern justice in the smaller (the person).?

Inverting this idea, my approach has been to look at the idea of virtue in the individual person and to try to discern its implications for institutions, including especially business corporations. To paraphrase Socrates, “I propose that we enquire into the nature of responsibility and irresponsibility, first as they appear in the individual, proceeding from the lesser to the greater and comparing them.” I have called this strategy the Principle of Moral Projection.

In the earlier manifestations of this projection strategy, there was a surge of scholarly opinion in the direction of expanding the moral agenda of corporations to include not only stockholders but also, in various ways, stakeholders. This “expansion” of corporate concern appeared to follow the analogy with individual conscience—based on what we will call in Chap. 2 the moral insight. It drew upon expectations that we have of one another for consideration, respect, honesty, and integrity (Goodpaster 1991).

Christopher D. Stone, then law professor at the University of Southern California, appeared to have come to a similar strategy, but from the point of view of jurisprudence:

If people are going to adopt the terminology of ‘responsibility’ (with its allied concepts of corporate conscience) to suggest new, improved ways of dealing with corporations, then they ought to go back and examine in detail what ‘being responsible’ entails—in the ordinary case of the responsible human being. Only after we have considered what being responsible calls for in general does it make sense to develop the notion of a corporation being responsible. (Stone 1975).

? Emphasis added.

>See Smith 1999: “Plato actually makes the analogy of state and soul—by appealing to the similarities between a tripartite state of rulers, warriors, and craftsmen, . . . to a tripartite soul of reason, high spirit (or thumos), and appetite.” Note that this analogy is controversial among Plato scholars.

1.1 Reflection 3

Nevertheless, there were skeptics: those who doubted that organizations could ever be morally analogous to individual persons (Ladd 1970) and those who doubted that organizations should ever be morally analogous to individual persons (Friedman 1970). In the “early decades” of the field of business ethics, these skeptics required not only comprehensive counterarguments but also a reasonable portrait of what the idea of “corporate conscience” might look like if it were implemented in the competitive arena of business practice (Goodpaster 1991). Thus, my journey from conscience to corporate conscience called for an understanding of the meaning and value of orienting, institutionalizing, and sustaining ethical values as an organizational attribute (Goodpaster 2007). In Chap. 3, I call this shift the institutional insight.

1.1.2 The Second Twenty Years [1995-2015]

Eventually, the arc of my teaching and research (shifting the focus from conscience to corporate responsibility) had to confront a different kind of question: If the projection from individual conscience to corporate conscience was to be actionable in society, it called for a robust idea of human dignity and the common good. I was troubled by the view that business ethics for the corporation simply amounted to maximizing the “good” of the stakeholders, with little attention to the meaning of “good.” It is tempting to take refuge in a less controversial “interest satisfaction” view of the good for both stockholders and stakeholders. This is often referred to as a “thin” theory of the good. After all, defenders of this view argue, we live in a highly pluralistic society with little agreement about a “good life.” But it does not take much effort to imagine misguided interests (and/or rights claims) on the parts of any and all of the groups identified as stakeholders. And then what? Does not the imperative to maximize interest satisfaction lose some or all of its normative hold on us (Goodpaster 2010)?

If we are to invoke an idea like “the common good” and give it substantive meaning, rather than relegating it to a slogan that all can salute simply because it is vague or empty of meaning, we need to have an idea of a whole person and extend that idea to all persons.* Thus, my journey from conscience to the corporation called for a second movement, a movement from the idea of corporate conscience toward a “thicker,” more substantive understanding of the common good. In Chap. 4, I refer to this new awareness as the anthropological insight.

In addition to these reflections on the ingredients in a normative ethics for business (conscience, corporations, and the common good), I needed to offer some reflections on a “delivery system” for those ingredients. In other words, I needed to reflect on my teaching, both in the business school classroom and in corporate

“The COVID-19 Pandemic during 2020-2021 illustrated the tension that can exist over the pursuit of the common good. Health officials focused on curbing the disease, while economists focused on opening schools and businesses—both in the name of the common good.

4 1 Introduction executive education. In Chap. 5, I share my thoughts about the case method and certain additional methods I have used with executives. What emerged from these reflections was what I called the Socratic insight.

During the last 8 years, perhaps not coincidentally during the severe political polarization occasioned by the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, in addition to reflections on a “thick” rather than “thin” account of the good (and therefore of the common good), I have witnessed with alarm a new tendency on the part of business organizations to invoke “corporate responsibility” and “business ethics” in defense of practices that objective observers would describe as “political orientation” or simply “partisanship.” Corporate examples abound, but based on a 2019 Axios-Harris Poll (Nather) the main takeaways were:

e The big tech companies do better with Democrats than Republicans, at a time when they’ve been accused of being biased against conservatives. Even the lowranked Twitter was slightly more popular among Democrats.

e The most polarized companies were the Trump Organization—which scored highly with Republicans and dead last among Democrats—and Target, which did better among Democrats than Republicans.

e When you include independents, Wegmans was the only company that made all three top 10 lists.

e Independents’ favorite company was Amazon.

e The least favorite companies had privacy scandals (Facebook) or other scandals (Wells Fargo), are going bankrupt (Sears), or cut off their customers’ HBO (Dish).

What this illustrates, in my opinion, is a kind of outsourcing or “alienation” of corporate conscience to either an ideology or a political party whose purpose is to win elections and achieve political power. But corporate responsibility as corporate conscience calls for “in-sourcing” decision-making criteria and basing them on the mission and core values of the organization.’ This trend in many ways runs the risk of undermining rather than reinforcing the aims of business ethics as a field—of offering counterfeits for conscience. I will have more to say on this subject in Chap. 6, but suffice it to say now that the politicization of business decision making can infect the formation process of business decision makers in both business schools and company programs (Fig. 1.1).

5On October 10, 2019 and again on February 27, 2020, I developed these ideas in PowerPoint presentations to members of the Center for Ethics in Practice at the Opus College of Business within the University of St. Thomas. The title of the presentation was “Corporate Responsibility and its Counterfeits.”

1.2 The Organization of this Book 5

The Corporation

© THE INSTITUTIONAL INSIGHT

Business Education

+ THE SOCRATIC INSIGHT e The Academy e Executive Education

* THEN & NOW e The Insights * Counterfeits

* A Polarized Society * Hopeful Signs

The Last Eight Years

* THE MORAL INSIGHT * "Realizing the Other" * Conscience in Action

* Plato's Analogy A ons., * Comprehensive

; The Common Conscience Good

Fig. 1.1 Times of Insight: Conscience, Corporations, and the Common Good

*The Whole Person and All Persons

* Moral Projection * Dual Awareness

1.2 The Organization of this Book

Here is a brief summary of the chapters of this book. As will be evident, each chapter reveals—in retrospect—an important insight that advanced my thinking on the main theme of the chapter.®

Chapter 2—Conscience and the Moral Insight begins with reflections on the source of ethics itself as a discipline, eventually exploring the meaning and development of the concept of corporate responsibility as it unfolded during the first 20 years of my work in the field of business ethics. Here I discuss the meaning of business ethics in relation to the study of ethics generally, and conscience more specifically.

Chapter 3—Corporations and the Institutional Insight elaborates further on the Principle of Moral Projection and introduces the organizational counterpart of the moral insight for individuals, namely, the institutional insight. In addition to tracing the elements of conscientious decision making from personal to organizational manifestations, this chapter also traces the elements of certain obstacles to conscience, from personal to organizational manifestations. One very central such obstacle is a pathology that I have called teleopathy.

Chapter 4—The Common Good and the Anthropological Insight reflects on the second 20 years of my work in the field of business ethics, a realization that normative ethics, in order to be truly normative (and non-relativistic), must explore more robust “theories of the right and the good” than had been offered in the late twentieth century (Brenkert and Beauchamp 2009; Goodpaster 2010, 2012, 2017 [reprinted as Appendix 2c of this book]).

Chapter 5—Business Ethics Education and the Socratic Insight shifts the focus from the subject matter of business ethics as a field to the pedagogical point of view. If business ethics is incorporated into the curricula of the nation’s business schools (and into the curricula of the nation’s executive development programs), it matters how that is done. Indeed, if business aspires to be a true profession, an

The moral insight, the institutional insight, the anthropological insight, and the Socratic insight. Alongside these four insights, there are two principles that guide the flow from one chapter to another: the Moral Projection Principle and the Moral Fractal Principle. More on these later.

6 1 Introduction institution in the classical sense, the moral formation of its future leaders must be initiated and developed by a faculty and administration that are fully committed to this calling. In the course of this discussion, the Socratic insight emerges as a way to put the ideas surrounding “conscience, corporations, and the common good” into action.

Chapter 6—Concluding Reflections: Then and Now In the concluding chapter, I will (a) provide a summary of the journey described in Chaps. 2, 3, 4, and 5; (b) reflect on my earlier work indicating my discoveries and changes in thinking; (c) discuss problems that have arisen during the eight years since my becoming Emeritus Professor; and (d) share some thoughts about the future of the field of business and applied ethics in the face of a severe polarization of political values in the U.S. and even abroad.

Chapter 7—Afterword Offers a retrospective summary of the book as a whole and an image of the Sower, who in my view is a compelling portrait of the educator in the field of applied ethics.

Appendices At the end of this book, in Appendix 1, I have included my full curriculum vitae. In Appendix 2, the reader will find reprinted three of my articles that have received less attention than most of the others. I offer them here with the permission of their publishers to round out the retrospective and prospective thoughts occasioned by the invitation to write this volume.

e “Toward an Integrated Approach to Business Ethics,” Thought, Volume 60 (June, 1985), pp. 161-180.

This article offers an interpretation of responsibility in business ethics on three scales or levels of analysis—the person, the organization, and the economic system. Utilizing innovative work in mathematics on “fractals,” I suggest both descriptive and prescriptive implications of this conceptual model. Executive Education in the academy and in corporations might benefit from this imaginative understanding of the multi-leveled moral ecosystem within which the leader must lead. As with all ecosystems, “everything is connected to everything else” (Commoner 1971).

e “Tenacity: The American Pursuit of Corporate Responsibility,’ Business and Society Review (118:4, 2013), pp. 577—605.

In this article, corporate responsibility in the American experience is articulated under the concept of tenacity, regarding the possibility that business responsibility in a (relatively) free market economy is possible. The article offers three basic convictions that underlie that tenacity. First, the Checks & Balances Principle tells us that there are checks and balances in democratic capitalism which give us confidence that the pursuit of economic goals will be moderated for the common good. Second, the Principle of Moral Projection shows that there is good reason to consider the corporation not only as a legal person under corporate law but also as a moral person. And, last, the Moral Common Ground Principle reflects that there are shared moral values ascertainable by well-developed consciences in individuals and in corporations.

e “Human Dignity and the Common Good: The Institutional Insight,” Business and Society Review, (March, 2017), pp. 27-50.

In this article, I develop the idea of the “institutional insight” as a pathway to two foundational values for applied ethics: human dignity and the common good. I explore—but do not offer a definitive analysis of—these two values, which I believe are critical to the progress of business ethics (indeed to the progress of applied ethics generally). In several previous articles (Goodpaster 1991, 2009, 2012, 2013), I have alluded to this theme, but here I hope to have shown that human dignity and the common good underlie both (1) management’s fiduciary duty to shareholders, and (2) management’s obligations to “stakeholders.” Indeed, it may be that the frequently observed tension between the latter two normative paradigms can be resolved only by engaging in the comprehensive moral thinking afforded by the institutional insight.

Brenkert GG, Beauchamp TL (eds) (2009) Corporate responsibility and its constituents: a tripartite model. In: The Oxford handbook of business ethics. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 126-157

Commoner B (1971) The closing circle; nature, man, and technology, Ist edn. Knopf, New York

Friedman M (1970) The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. The New York Times Magazine

Goodpaster K (1985) Toward an integrated approach to business ethics. Thought 60:161—180

Goodpaster K (1991) Business ethics and stakeholder analysis. Bus Ethics Q 1(1):52-71

Goodpaster K (2000) The Caux round table principles: Corporate moral reflection in a global business environment. In: Williams OF (ed) Global codes of conduct: an idea whose time has come. Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, pp 183-195

Goodpaster K (2007) Conscience and corporate culture. Blackwell Publishing, Malden

Goodpaster K (2009) Corporate responsibility and its constituents. In: Brenkert G, Beauchamp T (eds) Oxford handbook of business ethics. Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York, pp 127-160

Goodpaster K (2010) Business ethics: two moral provisos. Bus Ethics Q 20(4):740-742

Goodpaster K (2012) Goods that are truly good and services that truly serve: reflections on “Caritas in veritate.” J Bus Ethics 100:9-16

Goodpaster K (2013) Tenacity: the American pursuit of corporate responsibility. Bus Soc Rev 118:577-605,

Goodpaster K (2017) Human dignity and the common good: the institutional insight. Bus Soc Rev 122(1):27-50

Ladd J (1970) Morality and the ideal of rationality in formal organizations. Monist 54(4):488-5 16

Nather D (2019) The most popular companies in America, ranked by partisan leaning. AXIOS. https://theharrispoll.com/the-most-popular-companies-in-america-ranked-by-partisanleaning/. Accessed 3 Sept 2020

Plato (2008) Plato: the republic (trans: Jowett B). Forgotten Books, Charleston

Smith ND (1999) Plato’s analogy of soul and state. J Ethics 3(1):31-49

Stone CD (1975) Where the law ends: the social control of corporate behavior. Harper & Row, New York

8 1 Introduction

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

Chapter 2 A Conscience and the Moral Insight geii

Abstract This chapter offers an introduction to the field of ethics and the central place of conscience within it. To explicate the idea of conscience, I draw upon the work of nineteenth-century Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce. Royce understood conscience as the product of a certain insight, what he called the moral insight, which he defined as “the realization of one’s neighbor, in the full sense of the word realization; the resolution to treat him unselfishly.” I then go on to illustrate parallels to Royce’s moral insight in the works of Plato, Jean Piaget, Hannah Arendt, Joseph Ratzinger, and Anthony DeMello. This is followed by a discussion of the work of Jonathan Haidt aimed at tracing the universality of conscience across cultures and strategies for putting conscience into action—even in a pluralistic society. I wrap up this chapter with two subsections: (a) some structural remarks about the field of ethics, anticipating the theme of Chap. 3: Can a corporation have a conscience? and (b) two serious objections to the very idea of treating corporations as morally responsible entities. This chapter is an organic part of a larger work about the overall contribution of Kenneth Goodpaster to the field of applied ethics and is best read in the context of that larger work.

2.1 Key Terms

Philosophers usually begin their books by examining the meanings of the central terms and ideas in their writing. I will do this eventually for phrases like “business ethics,” “institutional insight,’ and “moral anthropology.” However, in this first chapter, I want to communicate the departure point of my career-long interest in moral philosophy and the initial theme of this book—the phenomenon of conscience. It behooves us to clarify certain basic terms that I will be using at the outset and throughout this book, specifically “insight,” “moral insight,” and “conscience.”

© The Author(s) 2022 9 K. E. Goodpaster, Times of Insight: Conscience, Corporations, and the Common Good, Issues in Business Ethics 54, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09712-6_2

10 2 Conscience and the Moral Insight 2.1.1 Insight

Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary defines “insight” as:

1. an instance of apprehending the true nature of a thing, esp. through intuitive understanding: an insight into eighteenth-century life; and

2. a penetrating mental vision or discernment; faculty of seeing into inner character or underlying truth.

The common element between (1) and (2) seems to be a shift from an accepted understanding of a phenomenon to a deeper discernment of its true nature. To have insight is to be able to discern something deeper (“what lies beneath”) or something larger (“a bigger picture”). A contrasting element between (1) and (2) seems to be that (1) refers to “an insight” as an instance, a momentary breakthrough, while (2) refers to a human faculty, an ability, even a gift for discerning the truth of a situation.

As you, the reader, will see in what follows, when I use the term insight in connection with matters of morality or ethics, the common element and the contrasting element become especially relevant. Some philosophers and psychologists have focused their attention on the “moment of breakthrough” element in ethics—Josiah Royce distinctive among them. I will discuss them in the next section. Others have focused their attention on the “human faculty” element in ethics. I will discuss them subsequently in the section called “Conscience.”

2.1.2 Moral Insight

Five decades ago, in Ann Arbor, my philosophical mentor and guide at the University of Michigan, William Frankena, said to me that the deepest truths in ethics were also the simplest. More than once he mentioned a Harvard philosopher and friend of William James—Josiah Royce—as having articulated one of these deep and simple truths more eloquently than anyone else he had ever read. Royce called it the moral insight and defined it as “the realization of one’s neighbor, in the full sense of the word realization; the resolution to treat him unselfishly.” Royce immediately added something, however, that emphasized the fragile nature of this transformative breakthrough:

But this resolution expresses and belongs to the moment of insight. Passion may cloud the insight after no very long time. It is as impossible for us to avoid the illusion of selfishness in our daily lives, as to escape seeing through the illusion at the moment of insight. We see the reality of our neighbor; that is, we determine to treat him as we do ourselves. But then we go back to daily action, and we feel the heat of hereditary passions, and we straightway forget what we have seen! Our neighbor becomes obscured. He is once more a foreign power. He is unreal. We are again deluded and selfish. This conflict goes on and will go on as long as we live after the manner of men. Moments of insight, with their accompanying resolutions; long stretches of delusion and selfishness: That is our life.' (Royce 1885)

'Emphasis added.

2.1 Key Terms 11

For Royce, the moral insight was not to be understood as a once-and-for-all event. Returning to the “illusion” of self is a persistent human trait. Royce’s way of describing the foundation of ethics is notable for this recognition of our tendency to “backslide” from the moment of insight—the moment of truth—into the illusion that our neighbor is “unreal.” Royce believed that the moral insight (a gateway to what later philosophers called the “moral point of view” (Baier 1958)) was the origin of ethics, the spark that gave rise to conscience. But he wished not only to identify this origin, this spark, but also to warn at the same time of its propensity for a kind of forgetting, returning us to the delusional state of self-centeredness.”

Recent work in behavioral psychology by Ann Tenbrunsel (Bazerman and Tenbrunsel 2011) and others seems to corroborate Royce’s perspective on the nature of the moral insight:

According to Tenbrunsel, the business frame cognitively activates one set of goals—to be competent, to be successful; the ethics frame triggers other goals—to be fair and not hurt others. And once you're in, say, a business frame, you become really focused on meeting those goals, and other goals can completely fade from view.* (Joffe-Walt and Spiegel 2012)

Another psychologist, Anthony DeMello, characterizes what Royce called the moral insight as a kind of “waking up” from a sleep state to what he called awareness (DeMello 1990).* For DeMello, awareness frees us for discerning deeper truths about ourselves and a bigger picture than our often self-centered worldview. A similar idea springs from the book Alcoholics Anonymous (1939) and forms the basis for most 12-step programs today.°

2.1.3 Conscience 2.1.3.1 Its Basis

Many thinkers have reflected upon the nature of right and wrong, good and bad, virtue and vice, and our ability to know and apply these moral attributes in practical ways in our lives. Here I will mention the thoughts of four other thinkers: Plato, Jean Piaget, Hannah Arendt, and Joseph Ratzinger. What these thinkers have in common

Tn the pages ahead, I urge the reader never to lose sight of this fundamental conviction about the moral point of view, for as we explore Times of Insight: Conscience, Corporations, and the Common Good, the touchstone of our inquiry will always be the dignity and well-being of human persons—“our neighbors”—as well as the propensity for backsliding, for “forgetting” the insight when we feel “the heat of hereditary passions.”

3We shall discuss in the next chapter whether the point of view of business needs to be as amoral as Tenbrunsel seems to think. I think it does not.

“Anthony DeMello, S.J. was a Jesuit priest-psychologist born and raised in India. His message was particularly rich in that it blended Eastern (Buddhist) and Western (Christian) spiritual traditions.

*DeMello also writes: “Spirituality means waking up. Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep. They’re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up” (p. 5).

°“Step 12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs” (p. 60).

is a desire to understand the human faculty of forming good moral judgments as we decide how to act and to live. Each of these thinkers believes that our faculty of conscience can provide reliable access to ethical knowledge under the right conditions. This contrasts with various brands of moral relativism:

e Subjectivism—in which moral judgments are not true or false but are simply the deliverances of our considered personal preferences or emotions regarding ethical matters.

e Cultural relativism—in which moral judgments are not true or false but are the deliverances of our cultural or sub-cultural predispositions on ethical matters (from sources as varied as family, religion, voluntary associations, geographic regions, racial groups, gender, national identities, etc.).’

Accounts of conscience typically seek to anchor our moral judgments in specifically human capacities: based on philosophical reasoning, social scientific observation, or theological reflection. Plato, for example, used his argument from analogy between the republic (city state) and the human soul to suggest that conscience in individuals is our faculty of knowing how to keep a proper balance between the rational, the passionate, and the appetitive parts of our souls (analogous to the knowledge class, the military class, and the merchant class, respectively, in the macrocosm of the city state). Injustice consists in a disordering of the parts of the soul, similar to the disordering of the parts of a city whose military class pursues the demands of the merchant class and thus makes insatiable demands on the acquisition of new land and new resources. The contributions of prudence and temperance that would be made by the knowledge class get left behind. Such imprudence and intemperance in individuals, of course, can lead to what we often call the seven deadly sins.* The central point for Plato was that there was a pathway to knowledge about matters of ethics and morals, a non-relativistic pathway based on an account of human nature. Socrates modeled this pathway in his dialogues.