Philosophical Conversations with my old boss

So I was talking to my former overseer Bailey about where managerial authority is legitimated from. We agreed that it is self sustaining on its own creation: “the myth of effectiveness.”

He argued that a bad manager will, however, eventually irritate his managed if he is bad, and he will then render himself ineffective.

good as something

I would like to think that but I think there are far too many bad managers to hope that the invisible hand of good management will take care of the issue for us.

We also pursued the question of why virtue ethics societies failed. It seems that as soon as you have a plurality of cultures you’re doomed to fail…

You see this tendency even with the Greek virtue ethic cultures. When a barbarian(that is, a non-Greek speaker) arrived they were handled with this very odd treatment as the Greek did not know if the outsider observed themis (a minimal hospitality of civilized peoples). If he did observe themis, then the question still remained as to what his roles were.

In light of not knowing his roles, he could not be determined to be good as something or bad as something. Bailey suggested that as soon as mingling of different cultures happened, the survivability of a virtue ethics culture decreases dramatically.

First, an offender to one (say) city-state’s code could leave to go find survival in another place. i.e. if I hacked off Athenian mores I could travel to Sparta or Thrace and live out my days. If i were bound to Athens, hacking off the community would engender this person is “bad”, this would affect my ability to get food, protection, and would certainly lead to my death. So, it is suggested that:

Access to travel
Access to other cultures

Weakens the survivability of a virtue ethics enclave.

I then suggested that religion, it seems to me, is the willful associating of oneself to a teleological end. If I am a Christian you can say “Steven, you are doing bad, as a Christian. If I claim no such affiliation your “Steven, you are doing bad” is subject to the Emotivist query of: “Why? By whose standards?”.