What do the following have in common?
- Doctors who view patients as “profit centers”.
- Chinese universities that open art departments because art students pay much higher tuition than other students. The classes in these departments have high student/teacher ratios and are taught by inexperienced teachers.
- Corrupt government officials.
- Katherine Weymouth, publisher of the Washington Post, organizing salons where, for a hefty price, important people would meet Post reporters.
All can be seen as cases where guardians abuse the trust they’ve been given by trying to profit from it. Jane Jacobs wrote about guardian/commercial ethical differences in Systems of Survival. Jacobs’s answer to why two ethical systems? why not twenty? was that there are two different ways to make a living: taking and trading.
Jacobs wasn’t trying to tell people how to act. She was trying to describe and explain differences in behavior she’d seen. As a one-pass view of how people make a living, taking and trading is a good division. Looked at more closely, teaching (education) and learning (science) are also central. They underlie both taking and trading. Following Jacobs’s logic, maybe they need different ethical codes to function well. Yesterday I spoke to a Tsinghua professor who complained that other Tsinghua professors simply taught what they wanted to teach, as opposed to what would help their students. I said, yeah, I’d blogged about it (“ For whom do colleges exist?“, “ For whom do law schools exist?“).
This was the direction of my first response to reading Jane Jacobs (on your recommendation). Since then, I’ve drifted back in the direction of the belief that she was right, and I was over-thinking it.