Morality, Leadership, and Public Policy (review)

In Morality, Leadership, and Public Policy, Eric Thomas Weber argues that leadership is inseparable from morality and the development of public policy. He develops an experimentalist approach to the formulation and implementation of public policy that is designed to reduce, if not eliminate, endless political maneuvering disconnected from the problems citizens face.

The book is divided into three parts. In part 1, Weber provides an overview of the book (chapter 1), offers specific suggestions as to the contributions philosophers can make to leadership and public policy debates (chapter 2), and considers the divide between religious fundamentalism and political liberalism that plays so large a role in public policy discussions in the United States (chapter 3). These chapters prepare the way for part 2 (chapters 4, 5, and 6), in which Weber develops his experimentalist approach. In part 3, Weber applies this approach to two current and relevant issues, the ownership of Internet bandwidth (chapter 7) and judicial activism in the U.S. Supreme Court (chapter 8). He concludes his work (chapter 9) with a brief look at issues and challenges that ought to be considered in future work on leadership and ethics.

Although he engages in dialogue with such philosophers as Rawls, Gaus, Hook, Kurtz, Lachs, Lakoff, and Sterba, as well as a variety of religious and secular writers, Weber's experimentalist approach is inspired in large part by the American pragmatist John Dewey. For experimentalists, inquiry begins with the awareness of problems or felt difficulties. In many cases, these problems will have existed long before they were noticed, and when they are noticed at last they may seem at first to be inchoate. In such cases, the problems will need to be conceptualized and made clear. As a part of this process, it may be discovered that the problems are more complicated than at first appeared and that priorities must be set in working toward their resolution. To illustrate and clarify this point, Weber distinguishes five categories of approaches to prioritization (chapter 6) and observes (chapter 8) that Supreme Court justices in effect establish priorities in deciding which cases they will hear in a particular term.

When problems have been conceptualized and priorities have been set, experimentalists turn their attention to the formation of hypotheses or plans for their possible resolution. These are then put to the test and, in accordance with their results, modified as necessary. Since hypotheses, by their nature, are unproven possibilities that may turn out to be of little or no help in resolving the problems at hand, experimentalists must be ready to formulate fresh hypotheses informed by what they have learned from the failure of previous ones. This requires that experimentalists recognize their own fallibility.

In this connection, we can see why Weber emphasizes (chapter 2) that experimentalists will not accept theories simply because their proponents claim that they are grounded in an unquestionable authority. In public policy debates in the United States, various religious groups sometimes make such claims, but this creates problems when the claims made by one group conflict with those of another in spite of the fact that the authorities in which each is grounded are presumed to be infallible. Weber argues that the solution to such dilemmas is to recognize that two or more conflicting views cannot all be correct and that some means other than appeal to an infallible authority must be found to support the views. We may observe that this point of Weber's is not hostile to religion. Saint Anselm (1033-1109), for instance, believed that truths of Scripture could be demonstrated on independent grounds, or grounds open to all reasonable persons, and constructed the Ontological argument for the existence of God in this spirit.

Another stumbling block to inquiries aimed at the development of public policies is the unyielding assertion of absolute principles (chapter 3). At first, this may seem to be a surprising statement, since we often find individuals who "adhere to principle" to be...