Values Don’t Matter

Everyone loves organisational values. Corporates, militaries, sports clubs, schools—any place where people collect in a serious way has a list of qualities they want everyone to embody. But values are just virtue ethics by another name. And virtue ethics suffer two rather troubling problems: virtues are hugely context-dependent, and the situation overwhelmingly drives behaviour anyway. So if you want people to act virtuously, design the context. Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/values-dont-matter-lecture And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/values-dont-matter. Stuff I mentioned: The Betterment article that inspired this Overview of the ethical landscape On catastrophic leadership failure Everything is choice architecture Making strong group dynamics Belief-consistent information processing MacIntyre’s After Virtue Situationist critique of virtue ethics Person-situation debate Milgram’s obedience experiments Stanford Prison Experiment John Doris on the ecological approach to ethics Maria Merritt on “humility ethics” Moore and Beadle on organisations as MacIntyrean practices Coming together - the pattern of friendship and love longtermism nature versus nurture question Your personality doesn’t belong to you Alert - IQ scores are meaningless Leadership consulting is usually more ‘feel good’ than ‘do good’ Malcolm Gladwell Shit Related stuff: On motivation