www.linkedin.com/pulse/morality-plays-lessons-forstater-peter-daly
Really interesting the above though a long read. Particularly interesting if you are the victim of group think in your organisation or if you are a manager. On the probelms for organisations that see themselves as inherently moral. Schools are good example of this - there's another thread that's come back to life today about group-think amongst staff. 'We're teachers, giving our all, we must be good, our view is must be good, others views must be bad ...' - hence the drip drip of teachers' views on brexit, the royal family, TWAW, or an other issue that kids hear (and staff hear who don't agree but can't make their feelings known). And the irrational anger of some teachers to Katharine Birbalsingh and her successful school.
I think this part of what Peter Daly argues is key:
"In The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided By Politics and Religion, the moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt refers (p.312) to “moral capital” (p.312) as “the resources that sustain a moral community”. He writes:
“More specifically, moral capital refers to the degree to which a community possesses interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, and technologies that mesh well with evolved psychological mechanisms and thereby enable the community to suppress or regulate selfishness and make cooperation possible.”
These moral communities are overwhelmingly the locus of disputes around sex and gender. Examples include a barristers’ chambers known for its radical work against the state (claimant: Allison Bailey), Girlguiding (claimant: Katie Alcock), a Labour-run Council (claimant: Julie Bindel), the Green Party of England and Wales (three separate claimants, with potentially more to follow), and so on. In those organisations facing allegations of gender critical discrimination, there is an over-representation of organisations in the arts, academia and the third sector. In none of the gender critical cases of which I am aware is there a hardnosed, capitalist, profit-driven, corporate defendant.
I am aware of one case of a dispute between gender critical and gender theory employees in such an organisation, a FTSE-listed PLC. It was resolved quickly, effectively and without litigation.
There are two possibilities arising from this pattern. Either a string of morally-motivated organisations. with little in common other than an underlying ethos of anti-discrimination, have somehow been infiltrated by deeply immoral people and are only now recognising this fact; or the compasses used to determine morality in those organisations have gone significantly awry. Evidence and logic would suggest that the second of these is the more likely.
This pattern is emerging not because there is something inherently wrong with progressive causes or institutions, or with organisations choosing to pursue socially beneficial moral aims; or because corporate profit-driven entities are morally better than those whose purpose goes beyond the balance sheet. It is not even because there is anything wrong with the pursuit of moral capital, or with applying a moral dimension to organisations.
Instead, the problem is that many organisations that are moral communities are required, but fail, to undertake the requisite intellectual exercise to interrogate the contours of their own moral code. They fail to understand the complexities of their own particular philosophical position – be it gender identity theory or anything else – or the implications for those who do not ascribe to it or are opposed to it. Without that interrogation, an assumption is all too easily made that the reason they hold their moral code is because it is – and by extension they are - morally right. The extension of this is that anyone who doesn’t share the moral code is as. a matter of ineluctable logic, inevitably morally wrong. Such organisations avail themselves of, as Sonia Sodha terms it, “the luxury of childishly dividing the world into goodies and baddies”.
Further, by adopting the language and identity of morality, accusations against them of discrimination strike at the core of their corporate identity and threaten their moral capital. Evidence of the immorality of those whose views are at variance with the moral community is not only that those views are at variance with the community, but that they challenge the morality of that community. Such allegations – even where made correctly – are more fundamentally wounding than would otherwise be the case because they strike not just at what an organisation does, but what an organisation is."