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La dimensión moral (Biblioteca Palabra nº 33)
Brillante crítica a la economía liberal que busca superar su egoísmo latente y apuesta por la relevancia de las comunidades intermedias.
La dimensión moral se redactó en la Escuela de Negocios de Harvard, en los años en que Amitai Etzioni investigaba y enseñaba en Boston. Su punto de partida lo constituye las notables reticencias que suscitan los planteamientos éticos en las escuelas de negocio liberales, sobre todo, porque en la medida en que los investigadores consideran el propio interés como el único motor del comportamiento humano, cualquier otra perspectiva es sistemáticamente rechazada.
Amitai Etzioni realiza un importante esfuerzo por argumentar que las consideraciones morales no sólo son un elemento imprescindible para explicar el comportamiento sino que además, lejos de entorpecer la eficiencia de las personas y de los grupos, la potencian.
Este libro es ya un clásico de las ciencias sociales. Supuso la puesta en marcha de una corriente de pensamiento sociológico y económico de indudable interés: la socioeconomía o comunitarismo sociológico.
La dimensión moral se redactó en la Escuela de Negocios de Harvard, en los años en que Amitai Etzioni investigaba y enseñaba en Boston. Su punto de partida lo constituye las notables reticencias que suscitan los planteamientos éticos en las escuelas de negocio liberales, sobre todo, porque en la medida en que los investigadores consideran el propio interés como el único motor del comportamiento humano, cualquier otra perspectiva es sistemáticamente rechazada.
Amitai Etzioni realiza un importante esfuerzo por argumentar que las consideraciones morales no sólo son un elemento imprescindible para explicar el comportamiento sino que además, lejos de entorpecer la eficiencia de las personas y de los grupos, la potencian.
Este libro es ya un clásico de las ciencias sociales. Supuso la puesta en marcha de una corriente de pensamiento sociológico y económico de indudable interés: la socioeconomía o comunitarismo sociológico.
- GenresEconomicsPhilosophy
368 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 1, 1988
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 12, 2019
In the preface to this 1988 book, Etzioni explains that he’s looking for a happy medium between the dominant “utilitarian, rationalistic-individualistic, neoclassical paradigm” and its “main challenger” that “sees individuals as morally deficient and often irrational, hence requiring a strong authority to control their impulses, direct their endeavors, and maintain order.” He claims that the quality of people’s choices depends on “how well they are anchored within a sound community and sustained by a firm moral and emotive personal underpinning,” especially a community whose members perceive it as “a ‘We,’ rather than as an imposed, restraining ‘they.’” (Later, Etzioni invokes Martin Buber as his “master-teacher” on this point of I-Thou intersubjectivity, and he introduces the term responsive community to “accord full status both to individuals and to their shared union.” Given that “individuals are not well formed unless they are members of collectivities,” these collectivities must predate “individual self-awareness and action.”) And, since people are often irrational, he wants to look at the conditions under which they make their most rational decisions.
Neoclassicists continually assert “that individuals know what is best for them.” They seem afraid to admit “that people make unwise or morally deficient choices, and to suggest that they can be manipulated,” because the admission might lead someone to recommend “government intervention.” Etzioni counters that freedom is not absolute or inevitable; there are “sociological and psychological conditions under which people are free.”
The tired neoclassical paradigm, as he explains it in more detail, makes some assumptions: people “seek to maximize one utility” (that is, they are motivated solely by their own pleasure or self-interest) and “render decisions rationally.” “The individual is the decision-making unit.” “The market economy can be treated as a separate system.”
Pleasure is indeed “a major motivating force,” Etzioni concedes, and, in the proper context, it is also “a legitimate one.” For that very reason, however, socio-economics should spend more time examining that “broader context of human nature, society, and ultimate values” in which selfish pleasure can have any meaning or worth. In Etzioni’s new, preferred paradigm, people “pursue at least two irreducible ‘utilities,’ and have two sources of valuation: pleasure and morality” and “typically select means, not just goals, first and foremost on the basis of their values and emotions.” “Social collectivities…are the prime decision-making units.” “The economy is a subsystem of a more encompassing society, polity, and culture.”
He believes that four criteria are needed to qualify an act as moral. “Moral acts reflect an imperative, a generalization, and a symmetry when applied to others," he says, "and are motivated intrinsically.” Furthermore, ”conflict between the pleasure valuation and the moral valuation of an item — whether the specific psychic mechanism that is activated to create a conflict is guilt, denial, or some other — is expected to result in intra-psychic stress, which in turn exacts costs that are not typical information or transaction costs: they diminish the capacity of the actor.” In other words, when we perceive that what we want to do isn't what we ought to do, we get stressed out and spin our wheels a bit, wasting time and energy until we can make a decision.
Yes, I like these ideas. They aren’t controversial to me. I didn’t need 250 pages of academic doorstop text to convince me. The book is agreeable to me, but it is not beach reading. Someone who is writing a PhD might want all these citations. They are, though, over thirty years old at this point.
Neoclassicists continually assert “that individuals know what is best for them.” They seem afraid to admit “that people make unwise or morally deficient choices, and to suggest that they can be manipulated,” because the admission might lead someone to recommend “government intervention.” Etzioni counters that freedom is not absolute or inevitable; there are “sociological and psychological conditions under which people are free.”
The tired neoclassical paradigm, as he explains it in more detail, makes some assumptions: people “seek to maximize one utility” (that is, they are motivated solely by their own pleasure or self-interest) and “render decisions rationally.” “The individual is the decision-making unit.” “The market economy can be treated as a separate system.”
Pleasure is indeed “a major motivating force,” Etzioni concedes, and, in the proper context, it is also “a legitimate one.” For that very reason, however, socio-economics should spend more time examining that “broader context of human nature, society, and ultimate values” in which selfish pleasure can have any meaning or worth. In Etzioni’s new, preferred paradigm, people “pursue at least two irreducible ‘utilities,’ and have two sources of valuation: pleasure and morality” and “typically select means, not just goals, first and foremost on the basis of their values and emotions.” “Social collectivities…are the prime decision-making units.” “The economy is a subsystem of a more encompassing society, polity, and culture.”
He believes that four criteria are needed to qualify an act as moral. “Moral acts reflect an imperative, a generalization, and a symmetry when applied to others," he says, "and are motivated intrinsically.” Furthermore, ”conflict between the pleasure valuation and the moral valuation of an item — whether the specific psychic mechanism that is activated to create a conflict is guilt, denial, or some other — is expected to result in intra-psychic stress, which in turn exacts costs that are not typical information or transaction costs: they diminish the capacity of the actor.” In other words, when we perceive that what we want to do isn't what we ought to do, we get stressed out and spin our wheels a bit, wasting time and energy until we can make a decision.
Yes, I like these ideas. They aren’t controversial to me. I didn’t need 250 pages of academic doorstop text to convince me. The book is agreeable to me, but it is not beach reading. Someone who is writing a PhD might want all these citations. They are, though, over thirty years old at this point.
December 13, 2014
Etzioni did a wide gathering on the loosing arguments of the neoclassical perspective about the deep complexity of the world and the nature of the phenomenons. Indicate the dimensions of the new economic paradigm, focusing on the inclusion of the deonthological factors, and procuring not the extremists points of view on no one of them.
Etzioni recoge con bastante amplitud las imprecisiones del enfoque neoclásico sobre la complejidad del mundo y la natureleza de los fenómenos. Expone las dimensiones del nuevo paradigma económico, enfatizando en la inclusión de los factores deontológicos, procurando siempre que ninguna perspectiva adquiera un carácter obtuso.
Highly recommended!!
Etzioni recoge con bastante amplitud las imprecisiones del enfoque neoclásico sobre la complejidad del mundo y la natureleza de los fenómenos. Expone las dimensiones del nuevo paradigma económico, enfatizando en la inclusión de los factores deontológicos, procurando siempre que ninguna perspectiva adquiera un carácter obtuso.
Highly recommended!!
September 11, 2013
Science is not a prescriptive enterprise. This is just woe-is-modernity moralizing.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews