3 Keys to Picking a Career

All things being equal most of us want more money.  All things being equal most of us want a career that brings immense personal satisfaction.  What if those two things do not align?  What if the career that you would love to pursue makes it extremely difficult to make money.  Some common examples come to mind - teachers, artists, philosophers, and musicians.  They all can be fulfilling careers, if only they would pay more.  That's not to say that some of those jobs don't pay a lot in some instances, but for the majority of people who attempt them, the pay is miniscule.  What can be done about that?  What if you're one of the 50% of Americans that hate their jobs?

Read the rest of this post on Reason for Success.

SMART goals and philosophy

In Why Businessmen Need Philosophy, Dr. Harry Binswanger identifies the ultimate CEO in your life is your philosophy.  What does that mean in practice?  Take goal-setting.  Based on what I understand about philosophy, I would suspect that an ideal approach to goal-setting would be based on your values - clearly identified, objectively defined, and do not contradict reality.  How does Objectivism relate industry best standards for goal-setting - to create SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound)?  Below, I discuss specific quotes from Rand that relate to these best practices...

Read the updated version on Reason for Success.

Why Ambitiousness?

In a world where ambition is sometimes frowned upon, why would I explicitly focus on such a habit and more so, consider it a virtue?  I agree with Ayn Rand's definition of ambition: "the systematic pursuit of achievement and of constant improvement in respect to one’s goal" By this conception, hopefully you can envision a positive aspect to ambition.  I want to improve my understanding of the world.  I want to improve the education program at my school.  I want to improve my family's financial situation.  I want to improve my productivity.  I want to improve my ability to communicate effectively.  I want to improve my relationship with my wife and family.

It is imperative to have and pursue goals in order to stay alive.  When these goals are rationally based in reality, we have the framework for developing these goals towards higher and higher achievements that are fulfilling and meaningful.  I could not and would not be satisfied with my current income level for the rest of my life - not because I am not making enough to enjoy life, but because I would be a sign that my life has become stagnate.  Once I achieve today's goals, I set my bar higher to achieve tomorrow's goals.  As I continually push myself to be the best that I can be, I increase my enjoyment of life.  If I am a better professor, my students and colleagues should hopefully respond positively.  If I find ways to increase my income, I will be able to experience better life's wonders or prepare myself better for emergencies.  If I am a better husband, I will have a more fulfilling relationship with my wife.  If I am a better father, my children will have a better chance at becoming fully independent, virtuous, happy adults.

When ambition turns to irrational goals (political power, prestige, etc.), the dark side of ambition rears its ugly head.  I have no desire for power over others nor care about my prestige because neither of these things will improve my happiness.  Nor should anyone.

Developing habits, part 2

Earlier this month, I stated I was reviewing habits that I would like to develop.  Over the past few days, I have been reviewing what habits/virtues that I deem appropriate for cultivating.   I used several sources for evaluating various virtues, including Ayn Rand's virtues in Virtue of Selfishness (VOS), Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Steve Pavlina Personal Development for Smart People, Branden's 6 Pillars of Self-Esteem (as much as I hate the guy, he did write some useful things on developing habits), and The Virtues Project (which mostly helped me review a list of virtues that I may have forgotten).

In compiling and organizing this list, I tried to develop a hierarchy of virtues, with four major virtues, Rationality, Productivity, Integrity, and Justice, and lower level virtues that best capture the totality of the top virtue.  While this does not perfectly match Ayn Rand's conception, my goal was to put this in my own terms.  However, her influence is readily apparent.  For each, I considered habits in developing of ideas, habits with staying true to ideas, and habits applying ideas consistently.  I tried to stop at thirteen virtues, so that I could use these virtues similar to Ben Franklin did (as I described  in my last post on developing habits).  Because of that, I'm sure this list is not comprehensive, but serves as a practical starting point.

So without further ado, here is my list along with a brief explanation of each.

Rationality - applying reason to all my thinking

• Living Consciously:  Applying my focus and mental awareness to all situations. 
• Independence:  Verifying all ideas in my mind with first hand research and thinking.  When multiple perspectives exist on a subject, I must independently evaluate each perspective to discover the truth of falsity of those perspectives using logic and the facts.
• Honesty: adherence to the facts of reality. In this sense, honesty applies to both with myself and with others.  It includes having the courage to face difficulty, danger, pain, etc. without undo fear, particularly in being true to truth.
• Self-confidence: being true to my own consciousness.  

Productiveness - consciously chosen pursuit of a productive career, in any line of rational endeavor, great or modest, on any level of ability.

• Purposefulness: The systematic identification of goals and objectives to achieve.
• Ambitiousness: The systematic pursuit of achievement and of constant improvement in respect to one’s goal.
• Efficaciousness: The systematic pursuit of the knowledge and skills necessary to produce desired effects
• Self-Discipline: the ability to get myself to take action regardless of my emotional state.

Integrity - loyalty to rational principles.  Never comprise on my morals.

• Principled: the pursuit of living by principles.  In my case, I refer to this as the systematic identification of principles for optimal living.
• Responsible: Strive to be accountable and respond rationally to principles consistently.
• Moral ambitiousness: Always strive to be as moral as possible.  This includes discovering what my values and virtues are and pursuing them with all of my effort.  Ayn Rand described this as "pride", but it makes more sense in my own mind when I refer to it as moral ambitiousness.
• Joyfulness: pursue joy in the little things so as to make the pursuit of the big things bearable.

Justice: Improve my judgment capabilities of others and apply that judgment consistently. I will "regard strangers as innocent until proved guilty, and grant them that initial good will in the name of their human potential. After that, [I will] judge them according to the moral character they have actualized." ~ Rand, VOS, "The Ethics of Emergencies".  My focus is on identifying and rewarding the good in people.

Career versus family

If you were to take any time to watch me throughout my day, you would probably think that I am a typical family man.  I average 40 hour work weeks, except in the summer when I sometimes cut it down to 30 or less.  Many Fridays, I cut out of work early to spend extra time with my family.  On the weekends, I spend a large amount of time with my family.  We go to sport practices and play in the backyard.  We go on bike rides together.  I read them books and they play tackle the daddy.  I take them sledding in the winter and swimming in the summer.  We make dinner a family meal every evening.  I cherish the time I spend with my wife and kids. So it may come as a surprise to some, as a recent comment did on my hierarchy of values post, that I rate my career higher in value than my family.

Let me explain why.

To me, my career is not just my current job.  My career is a long-term productive interest that culminates in my central purpose in life.  It is something that motivates me to get up in the morning and challenges throughout the day.  In 2003, I decide after many months of introspection and research, that I wanted a career as an academic.  I made this decision before I had children or even knew my wife.  Shortly after I met my soon to be wife, I informed her that my career path was going to take me far away from St. Louis.  It was unlikely that I would be accepted to a grad program in St. Louis or that I would find an academic position near there.  However much I loved her and wanted to marry her, I did not and could not give up that part of me.  I was fully willing to manage a long distance relationship, if that was the our path, but I certainly wanted her with me.  A month before I left for grad school, we were married and I was fortunate enough that she came with me.

After 4 years of grad school, three multi-state moves, and 3 kids later, we are now comfortably living in Michigan.  Throughout that period, I managed 40 hour work weeks (for the most part) in study, research, teaching, and other jobs.  I rarely budged on that practice because my career was that important to me.  However, after that 40 hours of often times intense work, I want to spend a good chunk of the remainder of my time with my family.

Two common objections to choosing career over family center on the needs and wants of others (namely your spouse and/or kids) or the possibility of emergencies demanding a change in careers.  What would I do if my wife wanted to pursue her career goals?  What would I do if my kids' school play was at the same time as an important meeting?  What if my wife became deathly ill?  And my answer would be without hesitation to support her decision, to foster my children's dreams, and to care for her, regardless of the effects on my job.  The difference is that I do not equate my job with my career.  Certainly, my career entails various jobs, but my job is not synonymous with my career.  I can change jobs, rearrange schedules, and take a leave of absence.  If my wife chose a career that carried us to a different city, I would continue my career in that city. If my wife wanted to go back to school, I would wholeheartedly support her even if that meant spending more time at home caring for the kids.  If one of my kids was in a play that conflicted with my work, I would put the child first.  If my wife became ill, I would take as much time off of work that was necessary to care for her.  My career is amendable and can even be put on hold.  And while I have many ambitions, they can wait (and often do have to wait as I have far more possible projects that I could pursue than time in a day.)  

What I would not do is continue down a path where that I could no longer pursue my passions.  If my wife wanted to move to a remote jungle forest, I would not follow.  If my kids demanded I stay home or that I follow (or drive) them everywhere, I would tell them no.  Not only for the immediate practical concern of income, but from the personal satisfaction I get from working.  This job makes me happy.  I will not give it up.  While my family makes me happy as well, they are individuals who want to pursue their own values.  I let them and they let me.  We share our successes and commiserate our failures.  While we do things for each other and with each other, its our productive passions that drive us as adults.  Anything less is unacceptable.

Ultimately, I see the two values of career and family as complimentary, not conflicting, but our careers are the primary driver of happiness.   Living a life doing something other than this career would be a life half lived.  My wife and to some extent my kids understand how important my career is for me and do not ask me to give it up for their sake.  I would certainly not ask them too.  My wife, whose current career is taking care of our children, may choose to pursue another career in a few years.  When she does, we will negotiate a means of caring for the children, caring for our house, and caring for each other in such a way that we can both achieve our ends and still be happy.  While there may be changes, delays, postponements, temporary set-backs, and even emergencies, pursuing our passions must come first.  Approaching life with reason allows us to overcome issues in time and resource management.

And this, my friends, is how I apply Ayn Rand's conception of rational selfishness.  We should all strive to be happy in our lives.  And having an appropriate hierarchy of values allows happiness to flourish.

Are irrational values of value?

Last night at our monthly GLO meeting, we discussed the first 1/4 of Ayn Rand's The Objectivist Ethics.  One of our members raised the following question:  "Are irrational values of value?"  After almost 30 minutes of conversation, we hardly resolved the issue. The major confusion stems from the dual sense that values is used within Objectivism.  According to Rand, a value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep.  Based on this sense of value, even a junky pursuing his latest fix is pursing a value - since they are acting to gain something.  However, in the second sense, values must support the objective standard of life.  The concept of life is what makes the concept of value possible. 

Clearly, however, a junky acting to gain a fix is pursing an irrational action because it is ultimately self-destructive.  If the value chosen ends the life in question, it must be irrational.  Yet, humans do sometimes chose self-destructive actions.  Can we call these irrational actions "of value" in the objective sense?

As Rand reminds us, whenever we talk of value, you must ask of value to whom and for what?  In other words, you have to understand the context.  So the question "Are irrational values of value?" must demand an answer to "To whom?" and "For what?"  The full question should be "Are irrational values of value to man for living?"  The answer is obviously "NO!!!"   Is a junky seeking a fix a value to him for living?  No.  However, using a different context such as "Is a junk seeking a fix of value to him for a temporary joy?"  You might answer yes, with a major disclaimer - to what end?  Certain, the fix will meet an immediate desire, but does nothing to help the long-term survival of the individual. 

My take away - the question "Are irrational values of value?" can only be answered by "depends on the context", but according to an objective standard - No.

Understanding the two senses of value is by no means an easy task.  But after last night, I believe I have a better grasp of the concepts involved.  Many thanks to Robert Nasir, Alex Hrin, and the other GLO members who helped me think through this question.

EMU Ethos week

Yesterday I attended the final luncheon for our College of Business Ethos week.  While I have a number of thoughts on the purpose and effectiveness of the week, today I'll talk about the last speaker, Robert Bobb, the emergency financial manager of the Detroit Public Schools.  Mr. Bobb started his talk off on the right foot with a quote from Aristotle.  But, as I expected, the majority of his talk was a mixed bag.  He mixes Aristotle's ethics with Christian philosophy (through St. Thomas Aquinas) and tries to justify Faith, Hope, and Charity.  He then tries to tie these Christian values with our Ethos statement virtues of integrity, honesty, trustworthiness, respect, learning, and work ethic.  Given the impossibility of the challenge, it is not surprising that the speech was disintegrated and difficult to follow.

He made some interesting points about organizational transparency (which reminded me of Diana Hsieh's discussion of privacy) that I need to think more about.  He also made some blatantly biased observations when discussing Aristotle's Rhetoric and his notions ethos, pathos, and logos. During this discussion, he claims that the Tea Party uses pathos - emotional appeal - to convince people of the dangers in Obama's policies.  While I do not deny that some in the Tea Party have used occasional emotional appeals, it is not their primary means of persuasion.  But consider Obama's use of individuals without insurance, with severe financial problems, and with medical problems requiring large amounts of money to cure.  The intent is clear - to make people feel sorry for that poor soul and vote them some money.  That is clear pathos.

But overall, I was impressed with Mr. Bobb's attempt to address ethical philosophy and explain its role in our decision-making.  Even if he misses the mark, the approach is one that too few people attempt. 

Business ethics research - a good sign

A little update on my research. With the help of a couple research partners, we developed and tested an instrument for measuring ethical perspectives. These six perspectives are altruism, utilitarianism, tribalism, Machiavellianism, Hedonism, and Rational Egoism. In the case of rational egoism, the items are consistent with Objectivism's ethical beliefs.

This instrument is designed to measure the amount participants agree or disagree with various statements consistent with each ethical perspective. Philosophers, such as Diana Hsieh, vetted the statements for accuracy (I do not presume that she supports or does not support the final version of the instrument, but she did have many valuable comments that helped to improve it).

Of over 200 business students, split evenly between undergraduate and graduate, the rational egoist perspective had the highest average ranking of the six perspectives (although most individuals still utilize mixed perspectives.)

Overall, I see this as good news. While its true that most individuals are confused about ethics, I believe that business students in particular are receptive to Objectivist ethics.

I also plan on expanding on this research stream, by improving the instrument, discovering how well it fits within current theory, and how well it predicts behaviors of business folks.

The Selfish Giver

Is life worth fighting for? Absolutely.

It is days like these, when my son gives my daughter a beautiful Tulip to make up for the dandelion of hers that he stepped on, that make me proud to be a father. Although I wanted to get mad at him for picking one of our flowers without asking, his head was in the right place, which was taking responsibility for his actions (stepping on her flower) and trying to make amends (giving her a new, prettier flower). It is so exciting to see him utilize proper values and virtues for living a full, happy life.

Perhaps the greatest confusion people have with the Objectivist's ethics is their failure to understand how selfishness can lead to positive personal relationships. For me, this picture captures the concept of selfishness perfectly. My son wants to play with my daughter and does not want her sad because she will stop playing with him when he does make her sad. So it was perfectly selfish of him to want her to stay happy, hence the flower. Whenever people think of selfishness, think of this picture.

But why stop there. Its not just my kids that I want to life full, happy lives. I want to live in a world where everyone treats others as my son (selfishly) does here. As a parent, I want my children to live in a world where other people take responsibility for their own screw-ups (instead of asking for others to bail them out). It is in my own self-interest that everyone take responsibility. That everyone acts with the same selfishness that my son does in this picture.

I am willing to fight for a future where these values are taken seriously.

Perfect sacrifice

No matter how much you think you can sacrifice, there is always more to sacrifice.  What are the moral and political implications of such an idea put into practice?

I started listening to an Onkar Ghate lecture about such a question.  And the logical conclusion is chilling.

NY Times and the housing crisis

The housing crisis according to the NY Times.

It hurts the immigrants.

It hurts the elderly.

But how did it happen? Certainly there are numerous writers and editors at the NY Times, but the overall impression I received after reviewing articles for the past hour is that the Republicans are at fault for having lax oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In an editorial this past September, the Editorial Board felt it compelling to blame Bush and the Republicans for the current economic mess and gave the Democrats a complete pass.

Now, I have no love for the Republicans and agree with Professor Thompson on the decline of the party. They are no longer the small government leaning, protector of individual rights that they once were (or at least approached better than any other party). However, us to blame the Republicans for the entire housing bubble begs the question, what policies led to the crisis.

While I am no expert on the current crisis nor an expert in economics, I do understand the basics well enough to realize that cause and effect can be traced if you follow the bouncing ball (in this case the historic trail).

So what is the major problem today? Too many defaults on home loans. And as the number of defaults increase, the housing prices continue to fall. As housing prices fall, more home owners with low down payments realize their home values are lower than their mortgage. Some of these home owners go into default because they cannot afford to sell.

These risky loans were not always available. Traditionally, banks stayed away from these loans. What changed?

As many liberals argue, some reductions in banking regulation during Bush's administration caused changes in banking practices, which ultimately led to today's financial mess. However, this does not make sense. In all the history of business markets, I have never witnessed a total collapse of an industry due to deregulation. At worst, I have seen problems arise when its only a partial deregulation, causing conflicting pressures on industry that takes some years to figure out, as during the energy crisis in California a few years back. But never have I witnessed an industry collapse due to total deregulation. In fact I have seen just the opposite.

Did, in fact, the partial deregulation conflict with existing policies that perpetuated the financial collapse? The deregulation helped spur growth in banks initially, but the banks were still being pressured with policies established years earlier. What were they? The answer lies in the NY Times stories.

Fannie Mae Seeks to Ease Home Buying 1994
"President Clinton is tentatively scheduled to attend the announcement. The Administration is urging that loans be more broadly available to poor and lower-middle-income Americans."

Fannie Mae eases credit to aid mortgage lending 1999
"Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits."

Indeed, going back even further, the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977 encouraged more lending to poor and minorities. Essentially, affirmative action for mortgages. NY Times has gone to bat for this act, and here, and here.

To be clear, I think it is stupid for banks to ignore qualified minorities and poor individuals from obtaining mortgages. Its the bank's mistake to make, but stupid none-the-less.

However, CRA pushed banks to make riskier loans than they normally do. It encouraged banks to make loans to applicants that did not meet minimal mortgage standards. And while there were safe guards established to limit the effects of this increased risk, the banking culture changed. Banks began taking greater and greater risks, with the thought that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would cover their butts if the housing market started to crumble. But that changed with the meltdown of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Now the banks' saftey net was destroyed, and the risky loans they were habitated into taking starting eating them from the insides. And the rest is history.

The NY Times would like to claim that the Republicans are to blame for everything. They are wrong, although I will not give the Republicans a complete pass. They could have tried to overturn CRA. In the end, the fault lies with the failed philosophy of the politicians, a mixture of altruism, tribialism, and socialism. Both Republicans and Democrates fall victim to theses philosophies.

My purpose in life

Is it that important to identify the purpose of your life? Absolutely! As Ayn Rand says:

Man cannot survive, like an animal, by acting on the range of the moment. An animal's life consists of a series of separate cycles, repeated over and over again, such as the cycle of breeding its young, or of storing food for the winter: an animal's consciousness cannot integrate its entire lifespan; it can carry just so far, then the animal has to begin the cycle all over again, with no connection to the past. Man's life is a continuous whole: for good or evil, every day, year and decade of his life holds the sum of all the days behind him. He can alter his choices, he is free to change direction of his course, he is free, in many cases, to atone for the consequences of his past-but he is not free to escape them, nor to live his life with impunity on the range of the moment, like an animal, a playboy or a thug. If he is to succeed at the task of survival, if his actions are not to be aimed at his own destruction, man has to choose his course, his goals, his values in context and terms of his lifetime. (Ayn Rand, VOS, p. 26)

In other words, he needs a purpose.

Steve Palina suggests you can discover the purpose to your life in about 20 minutes to an hour. Although I disagree with Steve on a number of issues, he generally has useful things to say about purpose, goals, consciousness, awareness, and productivity. Well, I decided to try his method, in part because they reminded me of Nathaniel Branden's sentence completion exercises, which I have found helpful before. (FYI, I have a very negative opinion of Branden in general, particularly the way he treated Rand and continues to misrepresent Objectivism, but some of his psychological practices has been useful in my life.)

Steve was right, within 30 minutes I had converged on my purpose in life. While I was not crying, like he suggested I should be, I was overwhelmed with emotion at the acknowledgment of the correctness of this purpose.

This purpose is: To say at the end of my life that I lived rationally, productively, and proud to the best of my abilities.

When the full context of that statement finally sunk in, I knew that I had found the answer. That is my purpose. That is what tantalizes and tickles my passions in both a fiercely emotional and intellectual manner.

After discovering my purpose, I stumbled upon various other passions that helped me to define my mission statement:

Three primary passions drive my actions: to love only what is worth loving, to discover the answers to the mysteries around me, and to bring order into my life.

To love only what is worth loving is founded on the principle of justice. I have always been ruthless in my drive to pick friends that are worth my effort. I have always been ruthless in loving only those items that facilitate my joy and happiness. Wasting time and effort on things that do not deserve it endangers my own happiness and long term survival. A corollary to this principle is to hate only what is worth hating. To hate something requires significant effort and should be reserved to things that genuinely hurt my life and values. Such hatred should be reserved to only those things that deserve that hatred. I would much rather spend my time and effort loving things than hating things.

At heart, I am a scientist. I love to learn how and why things work. This is the reason why I studied physics as an undergrad and why I later earned a doctorate and continue to conduct research. I want to learn. I love to learn. And I love to explain what I’ve learned to others. I cannot see myself in any other position. One of the reasons why I choose to study MIS for my PhD is because the field is so dynamic and ever changing, requiring a continuous study of the state of the art. This is an environment in which I thrive.

And lastly, I want order in my personal life. By this, I mean I enjoy well organized environments, but especially environments that flow with my habits and expectations in a reasonable and productive manner. To me, order facilitates high productivity by eliminating all the miscellaneous odds and ends that slow down work towards my goals. If I have to spend minutes or hours looking for something I need, that time is wasted. In a well ordered environment, the search is extremely fast and efficient so I can spend time on things of greater value.

While I have many lesser passions as well, these three are the primary values that I have used throughout my life. The primary passions may change over time, but it is most unlikely they will be inconsistent with my purpose in life.

My understanding of Kelley's error

With clarity, I finally understand the major error in David Kelley's approach to moral judgment. And oddly enough, the integration came from re-reading my systems analysis and design book. My goal in this post is to outline my thought process that lead to this understanding.

In systems development and design, their are different methodologies for understanding an information system. Traditionally, these have been through either data-driven methodologies and process-driven methodologies. In data-driven methodologies, analysts attempt to understand reality by identifying things (entities) that have properties. These things have specific states that may change over time, but not through any identifiable force. These things are only weakly related to other entities through relationships. In process-driven methodologies, analysts attempt to understand reality by identifying actions that must be performed. These actions refer to work that must be done, but are only weakly tied to people or data. In each of these cases, there is an implicit division between what is and what should be done. A division between consequence and motive. A division between facts and values. While it is true that these two methodologies attempt to cover both sides of data-process dichotomy, each is weak and requires an enormous amount of effort on the part of the analyst to tie them together. This effort has been manifested in my students who have attempted put them together for my class.

A similar dichotomy exists in types of programming languages. Some languages are procedural (Fortran, BASIC in its original form, C) while other languages are state-oriented (RPG, HTML, XML). While both styles of language have purpose in creating information systems, they both fall short in their ability to do so efficiently and effectively. Few people today still use a procedural or pure state-oriented languages (HTML was soon augmented with JavaScript for processing after a pages had loaded).

Today, there exists programming languages called object-oriented languages with a related analysis and design technique called Unified Modeling Language (UML) that rejects the implicit state-process dichotomy. Object-oriented programming emerged back in the 70s with the invention of SmallTalk, where inventor Alan Kay explicit tried to model human thought with a programming language that focused on objects that contained both attributes and methods (measurements and actions). Objects (which are real instantiations of a class of things, just like an object in reality is an instantiation of a concept) could "inherit" attributes and methods from broader abstractions and apply them where appropriate.

In a comparison between Ayn Rand's Objectivist epistemology with object-oriented methodology, Adam Reed discovered that there are a number of striking similarities (as a warning, this article is posted on the Atlas Society's website. The irony is that Reed's article helped me to understand why Kelley is wrong). While I haven't had time to throughly compare and contrast Reed's findings with my own understanding of reality, my brief read leads me to support his basic comparison.

While there are some striking similarities, the analogy only goes so far. Procedural languages and process-oriented methodologies are not inherently better or worse than object-oriented languages and methodologies. It depends on context. Objectivism's epistemology and ethics, however, are fundamentally "better" than other philosophies because it is true in all contexts.

What was important to my understanding of Kelley's error however is that an object-oriented approach to programming is a fundamentally different way of thinking about information systems and a fundamentally different approach to logic when designing applications. You simply can not combine procedural and state-oriented languages to get object-orientation languages. Just like you cannot combine process-oriented and data-oriented methodologies to get UML. An IT friend of mine, Jeff, showed me to some code that perfectly demonstrated this fundamental mistake from a new programmer who, while programming in Java, created a class that contained over 20 nested if-statements. Although he was using object-oriented language, he was thinking in terms of procedural languages. The vast number of if-statements gave evidence of an inability to understand inheritance (abstraction in philosophic terms). By adopting the procedural mind-set he was unable to use an object-oriented language appropriately.

While re-reading Diana's post about Kelley introducing the mind-body dichotomy into his analysis of moral judgment, I thought about this new programmer. Kelley, by starting with the mind-body dichotomy became stuck in that mind set and could not reconcile it with Objectivism, no matter how much fancy foot-work he attempted. This is what leads Kelley to reject the fact-value relationship, embrace the mind-body dichotomy, and evaluate motive and consequences differently. As Diana shows, this is fundamentally at odds with Objectivism. You can't understand Objectivist ethics if you start with the wrong mind-set, in his case from the mind-body dichotomy.

Viable Values

For one of my class assignments, I have decided to write an article that uses Tara Smith's meta-ethical discussion in Viable Values as a foundation for analyzing ethics in IT.

First let me compliment Smith on a job well done. Her masterful analysis of various ethical theories is a treasure to behold. Although there are several places I think her arguments could be stronger (given my limited knowledge of these theories), it is the overall product that is important. More than anything I'm surprised, not that Smith could do this, but that it took this long for an objectivist philosopher to offer such a devastating critique of alternate theories. While I know Rand laid the foundation, she obviously had no interest in digging into the particulars. But with so many PhDs in philosophy associated with the objectivist movement, I figured there would be more in depth analysis would have been done the same. Instead, I saw a lot of me too-isms, essentially focusing on just Ayn Rand's words and ignoring the rest of the world. While developing Objectivism is a worthwhile cause, many philosophers outside the objectivist movement have little or limited respect for Rand because her articles tended to be short and not detailed. If Objectivism is to take prominence in field of ideas, critiques such as Tara's will put it there. That is why I'm able to write my article, because her book gave me the tools necessary to complete an argument.

Trust

I'm trying to find a better definition and description of trust than the one typically used in management and organizational behavior research. While there are many variations on the definition, they generally fall into "Firm reliance on the integrity, ability, or character of a person or thing." This definition doesn't sit right with me. I know there is a better definition for it, it just alludes me right now. I just need to sit down and have my little brain think through it.

A definition of trust should capture the essential nature of that concept. When I use the phrases:
"I trust my doctor's diagnosis."
"I trust my kids to make the right choices."
"I lose trust in you when you lie to me."
"I trust you'll do what you say you'll do."
"I trust my order at the store will be delivered in a reasonable amount of time."

What do they have in common?

It goes beyond just a firm reliance on integrity, ability, or character. Certainly these moral traits are important, but are they essential? Are there other virtues that are involved with trust? Some of the scholarly papers that discuss trust lump honesty with integrity. Yet these two virtues are distinct.

Discussion of ability begs the question, what makes someone able? Its a combination of rationality, productivity, and their current knowledge base. While having a large store of knowledge isn't itself virtuous, that knowledge when applied to solving problems is virtuous. But to solve problems requires rationality, internal honesty, independence, and integrity. So essentially, ability is heading down the right path, describing virtuous behavior, but is not essential to the definition of trust.

Is not an estimation of the morality of the object of trust needed? The rationality, honesty, integrity, justice, independence, self-esteem, and productivity are all part of trust. In order to trust someone, we must know their rectitude.

But trust assumes more than just an estimation of someone's morality. It assumes we are dependent upon, in some form, their morality. Solely dependent upon it. In other words, we must make a decision based solely upon the moral character of an individual, in the absence of facts to the specific context in question.

So my working definition of trust will be:
"Reliance upon the moral character of an individual when making decisions."