Subtitles section Play video
-
In his inaugural address,
-
Barack Obama appealed to each of us to give our best
-
as we try to extricate ourselves from this current financial crisis.
-
But what did he appeal to?
-
He did not, happily, follow in the footsteps of his predecessor,
-
and tell us to just go shopping.
-
Nor did he tell us, "Trust us. Trust your country.
-
Invest, invest, invest."
-
Instead, what he told us was to put aside childish things.
-
And he appealed to virtue.
-
Virtue is an old-fashioned word.
-
It seems a little out of place in a cutting-edge environment like this one.
-
And besides, some of you might be wondering,
-
what the hell does it mean?
-
Let me begin with an example.
-
This is the job description of a hospital janitor
-
that is scrolling up on the screen.
-
And all of the items on it are unremarkable.
-
They're the things you would expect:
-
mop the floors, sweep them, empty the trash, restock the cabinets.
-
It may be a little surprising how many things there are,
-
but it's not surprising what they are.
-
But the one thing I want you to notice about them is this:
-
even though this is a very long list,
-
there isn't a single thing on it that involves other human beings.
-
Not one.
-
The janitor's job could just as well be done in a mortuary as in a hospital.
-
And yet, when some psychologists interviewed hospital janitors
-
to get a sense of what they thought their jobs were like,
-
they encountered Mike,
-
who told them about how he stopped mopping the floor
-
because Mr. Jones was out of his bed getting a little exercise,
-
trying to build up his strength, walking slowly up and down the hall.
-
And Charlene told them about how she ignored her supervisor's admonition
-
and didn't vacuum the visitor's lounge
-
because there were some family members who were there all day, every day
-
who, at this moment, happened to be taking a nap.
-
And then there was Luke,
-
who washed the floor in a comatose young man's room twice
-
because the man's father, who had been keeping a vigil for six months,
-
didn't see Luke do it the first time,
-
and his father was angry.
-
And behavior like this from janitors, from technicians, from nurses
-
and, if we're lucky now and then, from doctors,
-
doesn't just make people feel a little better,
-
it actually improves the quality of patient care
-
and enables hospitals to run well.
-
Now, not all janitors are like this, of course.
-
But the ones who are think that these sorts of human interactions
-
involving kindness, care and empathy
-
are an essential part of the job.
-
And yet their job description contains not one word about other human beings.
-
These janitors have the moral will to do right by other people.
-
And beyond this, they have the moral skill to figure out what "doing right" means.
-
"Practical wisdom," Aristotle told us,
-
"is the combination of moral will and moral skill."
-
A wise person knows when and how to make the exception to every rule,
-
as the janitors knew when to ignore the job duties in the service of other objectives.
-
A wise person knows how to improvise,
-
as Luke did when he re-washed the floor.
-
Real-world problems are often ambiguous and ill-defined
-
and the context is always changing.
-
A wise person is like a jazz musician --
-
using the notes on the page, but dancing around them,
-
inventing combinations that are appropriate for the situation and the people at hand.
-
A wise person knows how to use these moral skills
-
in the service of the right aims.
-
To serve other people, not to manipulate other people.
-
And finally, perhaps most important,
-
a wise person is made, not born.
-
Wisdom depends on experience,
-
and not just any experience.
-
You need the time to get to know the people that you're serving.
-
You need permission to be allowed to improvise,
-
try new things, occasionally to fail and to learn from your failures.
-
And you need to be mentored by wise teachers.
-
When you ask the janitors who behaved like the ones I described
-
how hard it is to learn to do their job,
-
they tell you that it takes lots of experience.
-
And they don't mean it takes lots of experience to learn how to mop floors and empty trash cans.
-
It takes lots of experience to learn how to care for people.
-
At TED, brilliance is rampant.
-
It's scary.
-
The good news is you don't need to be brilliant to be wise.
-
The bad news is that without wisdom,
-
brilliance isn't enough.
-
It's as likely to get you and other people into trouble as anything else.
-
(Applause)
-
Now, I hope that we all know this.
-
There's a sense in which it's obvious,
-
and yet, let me tell you a little story.
-
It's a story about lemonade.
-
A dad and his seven-year-old son were watching a Detroit Tigers game at the ballpark.
-
His son asked him for some lemonade
-
and Dad went to the concession stand to buy it.
-
All they had was Mike's Hard Lemonade,
-
which was five percent alcohol.
-
Dad, being an academic, had no idea that Mike's Hard Lemonade contained alcohol.
-
So he brought it back.
-
And the kid was drinking it, and a security guard spotted it,
-
and called the police, who called an ambulance
-
that rushed to the ballpark, whisked the kid to the hospital.
-
The emergency room ascertained that the kid had no alcohol in his blood.
-
And they were ready to let the kid go.
-
But not so fast.
-
The Wayne County Child Welfare Protection Agency said no.
-
And the child was sent to a foster home for three days.
-
At that point, can the child go home?
-
Well, a judge said yes, but only if the dad leaves the house and checks into a motel.
-
After two weeks, I'm happy to report,
-
the family was reunited.
-
But the welfare workers and the ambulance people
-
and the judge all said the same thing:
-
"We hate to do it but we have to follow procedure."
-
How do things like this happen?
-
Scott Simon, who told this story on NPR,
-
said, "Rules and procedures may be dumb,
-
but they spare you from thinking."
-
And, to be fair, rules are often imposed
-
because previous officials have been lax
-
and they let a child go back to an abusive household.
-
Fair enough.
-
When things go wrong, as of course they do,
-
we reach for two tools to try to fix them.
-
One tool we reach for is rules.
-
Better ones, more of them.
-
The second tool we reach for is incentives.
-
Better ones, more of them.
-
What else, after all, is there?
-
We can certainly see this in response to the current financial crisis.
-
Regulate, regulate, regulate.
-
Fix the incentives, fix the incentives, fix the incentives ...
-
The truth is that neither rules nor incentives
-
are enough to do the job.
-
How could you even write a rule that got the janitors to do what they did?
-
And would you pay them a bonus for being empathic?
-
It's preposterous on its face.
-
And what happens is that as we turn increasingly to rules,
-
rules and incentives may make things better in the short run,
-
but they create a downward spiral
-
that makes them worse in the long run.
-
Moral skill is chipped away by an over-reliance on rules
-
that deprives us of the opportunity
-
to improvise and learn from our improvisations.
-
And moral will is undermined
-
by an incessant appeal to incentives
-
that destroy our desire to do the right thing.
-
And without intending it,
-
by appealing to rules and incentives,
-
we are engaging in a war on wisdom.
-
Let me just give you a few examples,
-
first of rules and the war on moral skill.
-
The lemonade story is one.
-
Second, no doubt more familiar to you,
-
is the nature of modern American education:
-
scripted, lock-step curricula.
-
Here's an example from Chicago kindergarten.
-
Reading and enjoying literature
-
and words that begin with 'B.'
-
"The Bath:" Assemble students on a rug
-
and give students a warning about the dangers of hot water.
-
Say 75 items in this script to teach a 25-page picture book.
-
All over Chicago in every kindergarten class in the city,
-
every teacher is saying the same words in the same way on the same day.
-
We know why these scripts are there.
-
We don't trust the judgment of teachers enough
-
to let them loose on their own.
-
Scripts like these are insurance policies against disaster.
-
And they prevent disaster.
-
But what they assure in its place is mediocrity.
-
(Applause)
-
Don't get me wrong. We need rules!
-
Jazz musicians need some notes --
-
most of them need some notes on the page.
-
We need more rules for the bankers, God knows.
-
But too many rules prevent accomplished jazz musicians
-
from improvising.
-
And as a result, they lose their gifts,
-
or worse, they stop playing altogether.
-
Now, how about incentives?
-
They seem cleverer.
-
If you have one reason for doing something
-
and I give you a second reason for doing the same thing,
-
it seems only logical that two reasons are better than one
-
and you're more likely to do it.
-
Right?
-
Well, not always.
-
Sometimes two reasons to do the same thing seem to compete with one another
-
instead of complimenting,
-
and they make people less likely to do it.
-
I'll just give you one example because time is racing.
-
In Switzerland, back about 15 years ago,
-
they were trying to decide where to site nuclear waste dumps.
-
There was going to be a national referendum.
-
Some psychologists went around and polled citizens who were very well informed.
-
And they said, "Would you be willing to have a nuclear waste dump in your community?"
-
Astonishingly, 50 percent of the citizens said yes.
-
They knew it was dangerous.
-
They thought it would reduce their property values.
-
But it had to go somewhere
-
and they had responsibilities as citizens.
-
The psychologists asked other people a slightly different question.
-
They said, "If we paid you six weeks' salary every year
-
would you be willing to have a nuclear waste dump in your community?"
-
Two reasons. It's my responsibility and I'm getting paid.
-
Instead of 50 percent saying yes,
-
25 percent said yes.
-
What happens is that
-
the second this introduction of incentive gets us
-
so that instead of asking, "What is my responsibility?"
-
all we ask is, "What serves my interests?"
-
When incentives don't work,
-
when CEOs ignore the long-term health of their companies
-
in pursuit of short-term gains that will lead to massive bonuses,
-
the response is always the same.
-
Get smarter incentives.
-
The truth is that there are no incentives that you can devise
-
that are ever going to be smart enough.
-
Any incentive system can be subverted by bad will.
-
We need incentives. People have to make a living.
-
But excessive reliance on incentives
-
demoralizes professional activity
-
in two senses of that word.
-
It causes people who engage in that activity to lose morale
-
and it causes the activity itself to lose morality.
-
Barack Obama said, before he was inaugurated,
-
"We must ask not just 'Is it profitable?' but 'Is it right?'"
-
And when professions are demoralized,
-
everyone in them becomes dependent on -- addicted to -- incentives
-
and they stop asking "Is it right?"
-
We see this in medicine.
-
("Although it's nothing serious, let's keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn't turn into a major lawsuit.")
-
And we certainly see it in the world of business.
-
("In order to remain competitive in today's marketplace, I'm afraid we're going to have to replace you with a sleezeball.")
-
("I sold my soul for about a tenth of what the damn things are going for now.")
-
It is obvious that this is not the way people want to do their work.
-
So what can we do?
-
A few sources of hope:
-
we ought to try to re-moralize work.
-
One way not to do it: teach more ethics courses.
-
(Applause)
-
There is no better way to show people that you're not serious
-
than to tie up everything you have to say about ethics
-
into a little package with a bow and consign it to the margins as an ethics course.
-
What to do instead?
-
One: Celebrate moral exemplars.
-
Acknowledge, when you go to law school,
-
that a little voice is whispering in your ear