One of the irksome features of modern life is the consumer survey. Increasingly, most larger purchases we made, most queries we direct to some public or private body, result in a follow-up questionnaire. We are asked to supply a rating or leave a review, or in some other way indicate our satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the service rendered.
No doubt, a large part of this rise of what I will call consensus ethics for want of a better term has to do with the coming of the computer age and the ease with which surveys and related matters can be arranged at little cost and propagated to vast swathes of people. Moreover, the task of extracting the data from such surveys can now be handed over to specialised computer software. But this is only part of the explanation.
Taking Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue as my point of reference, it seems to me that the consumer survey is yet another example of the breakdown of the traditional system of ethics in the West such that virtue is replaced by value or, to put it another way, objective values are replaced by subjective ones. Part of this breakdown can be explained by the loss of what MacIntyre calls functional concepts. This is a direct consequence of Enlightenment philosophy, most especially ‘Hume’s Guillotine’. Hume supposed that from any bare factual statement it was not possible to derive a value. In other words, you cannot get an ‘ought’ from as ‘is’. But as MacIntyre points out, we use functional concepts all the time, albeit unconsciously in most cases. So for instance from the statement ‘this person is an airline pilot’ we immediately supply an ‘ought’ – we expect that she or he will know how to fly a large aircraft in a safe manner.
Now the same reasoning ought to apply to any business, company, government department, practitioner of a trade, and so on. In other words, when we ring up the plumber to come and fix our taps, we have an expectation that he or she will not only do the job but do it expertly. In an earlier age, there would be no question of rating the job. We would automatically assume that the work was carried out to the best of that tradesperson’s ability. It may not be the best job in the world, but it will aspire to be the best, and we are happy to accept that. Thus the question of satisfaction does not arise.
The remnants of this earlier system of virtue ethics, MacIntyre agues, are still with us, but they are no longer in a coherent form and have been unsuccessfully supplanted by other approaches – utilitarianism, ‘rights’ theories, Kantian deontology, consequentialism etc. So, for instance there are still ‘Master Plumbers’ or ‘Master Builders’ etc., but the link to the old guild system, with its attendant system of virtue ethics, is gone.
Closely related to the modern phenomenon of the consumer survey is the equally pestiferous ‘Mission Statement’. Admittedly, such ‘statements’ are now less common than they were a few decades ago (the zenith of the Mission Statement), but they are still ubiquitous. They are promulgated because the organisations involved feel, somehow or other, that they must re-examine the reason for their existence. This would have been unthinkable a few hundred years ago. The Mission statement is another example of the loss of a functional concept. I have even seen Mission Statements posted on church notice boards! It is difficult to imagine a more ludicrous situation. Here, in a Christian church, whose purposes and goals are reiterated each week in Scripture readings and formal ceremony, is a procedure, borrowed from the world of big business which seems to question the very foundational nature of its purpose.
Now, at the bottom of this blog post will be an opportunity for you to reply. Lest I am found guilty of abandoning my own position on this matter, I make it clear that I am not seeking an evaluative reply – not even an emoticon!
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