JustinIdea

Character

I know it has been over a year, but I thought the following quote in Consilience, which I am working on finishing, is great to reflect on.

True character arises from a deeper well than religion.  It is the internalization of the moral principles of a society, augmented by those tenets personally chosen by the individual, strong enough to endure through trials of solitude and adversity.  The principles are fitted together into what we call integrity, literally the integrated self, wherein personal decisions feel good and true.  Character is in turn the enduring source of virtue.  It stands by itself and excites admiration in others.  It is not obedience to authority, and while it is often consistent with and reinforced by religious belief, it is not piety. (269)

 

Minorities Holding-Back Minorities

The fact that an African-American firefighter would punch a Latino firefighter, because the Latino firefighter stood up for equality under the law, is ridiculous.  It's sad that some minorities want their employers to promote them based-on the color of their skin instead of the content of their character, and these are the ones who have been holding back minorities for the last 45 years.  Did they not listen to Martin Luther King, Jr - a man that is held up as a martyr among men and in the same esteem as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln?

 

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

 

The content of one's character is judged based-on merit and how they deal with others.  Holding minorities to a lesser standard than whites is reverse discrimination and does not hold true to the words that King spoke on August 28th, 1963.  If minorities aren't up to par competing based-on merit, they need to shape-up and start working harder and smarter, instead of complaining about discrimination.  Focusing on championing educational achievement in minority communities by the minorities themselves, like Booker T. Washington had done, would be a great start.

 

But too many minorities feel entitled today because of injustices that occurred in the past.  But do you know what?  This is America.  We aren't limited by a caste society where you must stay in the same social bracket that your parents were born in and perform the same job as them.  We have the freedom to be our own people.  If your workplace is discriminating against you, then quit and start your own company whose policies of non-discrimination will make you out-compete the competition and put them out-of-business.  

 

Yes, there is still racism in America, but it isn't nearly as bad as it was 50 or 150 years ago.  Today's racism is peanuts compared to then.  So stop complaining and start working, doing otherwise is a disservice to those that were enslaved and faced heavy discrimination in the past.  And if American-born minorities don't start working, then the immigrating minorities will leave them in the dust (and hopefully change the culture of laziness among some of the American-born ones at the same time).  Just look at President Obama.  He's the son of a Kenyan immigrant (no American slave roots).  It's the work ethic that counts.  

Utilitarianism is Slavery, Individualism is Freedom

I can get into some fairly intense debates with a few friends of mine that subscribe to the utilitarian ethic, since I am an ardent individualist.  So I've been thinking about how to best show the fundamental flaw of utilitarianism and why individualism is the view I subscribe to.

It all comes down to the fact that utilitarianism is slavery.  When you use a utilitarian philosophy, you work on creating the greatest good for the greatest number, which means that whoever is doing the deciding of what the greatest good is and who the greatest number are is in essence playing god by controlling what everyone else can do and everyone that they control is their slave.  This person doesn't need to be a big man either; it can be a small group or a majority of the people as well.

For example, let's say we have a group of people that want to go to war and another group of people that don't want to.  The reason those that want to go to war are for it is to get the other nation's resources and to expand.  Right now, the ones that want to go to war are in the majority, and since everyone that is part of the group needs to go to war (as in be enlisted in the military and see combat), then those in the minority are a slave to the opinion of the majority, and must go along with it, even if they object to it.  Under individualism, the majority would not be able to force the minority to go to war.  They would have to go to war by themselves and could not enslave the minority for their aims.

This is just one example, but anytime you use the utilitarian ethic, you are saying that the individual is a slave of the group's opinion, whether the group is a nation, a company, or a group of peers exerting pressure.  This is exactly why the United States is a republic and not a democracy.  Democracy is tyranny of the majority, while a republic protects the Rights of the minority. 

Since slavery was abolished in the United States with the Thirteenth Amendment, why are people in the United States still trying to enslave individuals by using the utilitarian ethic?  Only individualism provides true freedom.

Transparency as a Competitive Advantage

I believe it was in my entrepreneurship class that our instructor said 70% of a company's market value was derived from its intellectual property.  If you were to open up all of your intellectual property and allow the world to scrutinize it, would 70% of your value suddenly deteriorate?  Or could you make your business more valuable by showing the world the "crown jewels"?

It seems that logically if you show all of your competitors everything that you're doing, your company will be left in the dust as they keep their trade secrets and integrate yours to boot.  You've lost your entire competitive advantage right?  Could any positive consequences come from this?

I can see a couple potential positives from it: increasing the quality of one's products and services, increasing employee retention, having a faster rate of innovation, and decreasing consumer cynicism.  Having a policy of transparency can potentially increase the quality of the company's products.  Viewing what has taken place in the open source community, if you open up the source code of a piece of software, suddenly tens of thousands of eye balls are able to scrutinize the code, test it, and find more bugs than would be found by the company's own bug testers.  For the pharmaceutical industry, opening up all of their clinical trials to more scrutiny by the scientific community would allow the companies to potentially increase the quality of their drugs and the targeting of it.  It would also allow the company's to avoid negative publicity, such as happened with Merck a few years ago.

The policy of transparency would also create a greater incentive for the brightest minds to want to work for the company, because they would be able to share ideas and innovations with their peers at other institutions, which would spur further innovation.  An anecdote from the book I just read, Science Goes to War, talked about how the warring city-states of ancient Greece adopted a policy that their scientists could freely talk amongst themselves.  Scientists were less likely to defect from their city-state, because they would be able to discuss their discoveries with the brightest mines regardless of which city-state they were a part of.  Seeing as the quality of a company's employees are an incredible source of competitive advantage (they are the ones that develop the innovations), it would help to both recruit and retain the brightest people, potentially decreasing the costs associated with recruiting and retention.  The increased rate of innovation would occur from the dialogues the employees would hold with others not at the company, but that we're extremely knowledgeable in the field of interest.

The policy could also help to decrease consumer cynicism.  To pick on the pharmaceutical industry again, consumers complain a lot about high drug prices and don't always see the correlation between drug cost and care received (the same can go with the health care industry in general).  A policy of greater transparency could help to decrease consumer cynicism toward the industry by not only informing consumers as to what drugs are on the market, but which ones did not make it and why.  If the company also broke-down it's expenditures on the various failed drugs it would allow it to show consumers why they need to pay the higher prices for the successful drugs, compensating for all the failed R&D. 

Also, with the transparency of the failed trials, the companies could allow academic researchers to continue to run tests on the drugs in different settings and see if any of them allow for the drug to be successful.  if it ends up being successful, the company can then sell the drug to the designated market, leasing the intellectual property if need be.

With all of these taken into consideration, it might be worthwhile for companies to test a policy of transparency with respect to their company and the market and/or field of study.