Jane Jacobs The Ethicist: Systems of Survival and Jacobs' Moral Philosophy

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Social & Political Thought, University of Regina. iv, 150 p. This work intends to show that Jacobs’ moral philosophy makes a strong case for objective moral knowledge. She posits that there are two moral syndromes that are intended to guide working life morality. Roughly speaking, the commercial syndrome guides commerce and the guardian syndrome governs politics and other occupations associated with territorial management. These syndromes are composed of several interconnected precepts and Jacobs argues that these precepts from one syndrome should not be employed with precepts from the other. Should we fail to observe this rule, we will trigger what she calls the Law of Intractable Systemic Corruption (LISC). This law states that every time a working environment mixes precepts together the result is a monstrous moral hybrid syndrome that produces intractable systemic corruption. While this work is too small to prove such a grandiose claim, by diving into Jacobs’ example of the Latin American debt crisis we can see how her system of analysis makes it clear what moral knowledge the actors involved mistakenly ignored and how their doing so caused the crisis. Even though one successful example does not prove the LISC correct it does show that, in at least some instances, it is objectively better to behave morally than to behave immorally. Jacobs hopes to employ this objective knowledge, through increased moral education, to support the use of fear and enforcement that are intended to keep societies from collapsing from corruption within. However, Thomas Hobbes, whose political philosophy also relies on fear, has a different perspective on human nature than Jacobs. Jacobs assumes that people generally want to behave morally and that many moral mistakes can ultimately be attributed to a lack of understanding instead of intentional ii selfishness. Hobbes uses the idea that human beings prioritize their self-interest as the basis of his conception of human nature. He argues that if this is the case then people can only be motivated by fear to adhere to the prosocial behaviour necessary for societies to succeed. A set of experiments conducted by C. Daniel Batson et al. on moral hypocrisy seem to create a sort of Ring of Gyges scenario in the lab meaning that participants can pursue their self-interest without with the fear of consequences. At first glance, the results of these experiments provide a justification for Hobbes’ view of human nature. However, through reference to the work of George W. Watson et al. and Maureen Sie, we can show that Batson’s experiments failed to take into account reporting bias and context. Through further experiments Watson et al. show that we still have good reason to believe that people value morality and can be motivated by it. If Hobbes’ pessimistic view is not justified by the empirical evidence then it seems fair to say that Jacobs’ contributions toward objective moral knowledge are a helpful step toward supporting her proposed addition to fear in moral education. Student yes