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My alumni magazine from Harvard University came recently.  By chance, it included two short articles, each of which supported the conclusion that we human persons have a moral sense, whether we want to or not.

The first article reports that Harvard professor of biological anthropology, Joseph Henrich, argues that human intellectual brilliance emerged from generations of sharing information in communities and networks.  We humans, he says, are uniquely able to engage in collective information processing.

We can do this because we are moral creatures.  Aristotle made this point centuries ago, calling us zoon politikon – creatures driven by social and political needs for association and mutual understanding.

The threefold expansion of the size of our brains over the last two million years was driven, Professor Henrich says, by the need to acquire, store and organize cultural information.  From this, he concludes that societies which best capture and transmit inherited culture enjoy greater success.  Successful cultures facilitated specialization and intergenerational transfer of intelligence and skills.

Specialization, with its creation of a demand for cooperation and intergenerational interdependencies, depend on morality in the mind of individuals, tied together by those relationships and reciprocal responsibilities.

The second article reported on research identifying who are the best team players.  Professor David Deming at the Kennedy School ran simulations of team collaboration looking for clues as to who most enable success for the team.  A measure of teammate strength was developed to generate data for analysis.  The data led to identification of those better at teamwork.  Then, the researchers looked for traits those more proficient teammates had in common.

The most interesting commonality was a high score in the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET).  This is a test for social intelligence developed to test for autism and Asperger’s.  The subject is shown photographs of human eyes and is asked to identify the emotions revealed by those eyes.  Being able to correctly infer another’s emotions just from looking at their eyes is a skill that leads to excellence in working with others in a team.

But that skill, in turn, is made possible by a mind that has moral awareness of others and of emotions.

The most common and universal skepticism about the possibility of a moral capitalism is that people can’t be trusted to be responsible for others that, as Herbert Spencer and other social Darwinists believe, we human persons are thoroughgoing egoists without any moral sense or at least with only very intimidated ones.

If, on the other hand, we are each born capable of developing a robust moral sense, as Adam Smith believed, then moral capitalism is a very practical alternative economic system.

Recently, I read the following pessimistic assessment of the state of humanity:

“In the future, …. we will surrender ourselves to our entertainment. We will become so distracted and dazed by our fictions that we’ll lose our sense of what is real. We will make our escapes so comprehensive that we cannot free ourselves from them. The result will be a populace that forgets how to think, how to empathize with one another, even how to govern and be governed.” – Megan Garber, “We Are Already Living in the Metaverse,” — The Atlantic, March 2023

I was re-reading Cicero’s De Officiis (On Moral Responsibility) after our recent Global Dialogue.  I trust you have received a copy of the statement of participants in those dialogue discussions on the immediate need to promote responsibility across cultures and sectors, from individuals to organizations.

Our Caux Round Table Principles for Government rest on a premise of responsibility using the concept of office as a trust.

I was reading Walter Miller’s translation from the Latin and was quite surprised to see, for the first time, that Cicero had advocated the same moral vision for those in government as does the Caux Round Table.

Cicero wrote:

For the administration of the government, like the office of a trustee, must be conducted for the benefit of those entrusted to one’s care, not of those to whom it is entrusted.  Now, those who care for the interests of a part of the citizens and neglect another part, introduce into the civil service a dangerous element—dissension and party strife (Book I, XXV, 85).

Our Principles for Government start with this standard of conduct:

Fundamental Principle: Public power is held in trust for the community.

The state is the servant and agent of higher ends.  It is subordinate to society.  Public power is to be exercised within a framework of moral responsibility for the welfare of others.  Governments that abuse their trust shall lose their authority and may be removed from office.

It is reassuring to discover that our approach has an excellent precedent.

I have forwarded, from time to time, mention of new technologies which can reduce the threat of excessive global warming.  My thought has been that there is a special genius in capitalism to seek out and scale-up in use technologies which meet human needs and aspirations.

I read recently of a new invention at Harvard to radically change the technology of air conditioning (I am a bit sheepish at touting something from Harvard, as I have two degrees from that university).

Current air conditioning technology uses a lot of energy and uses chemicals which have an amazing capacity – far more than CO2 – to warm up our atmosphere.  It is said by some that between now and 2050, installing air conditioning to keep pace with warming temperatures will require 10 new air conditioning units every second for the next 30 years.  It is also predicted that by 2050, countries such as Indonesia and India will use as much as 75% of their current energy consumption on cooling.  But a multi-disciplinary team at Harvard has thought up a very different approach.

Rather than shuttle a refrigerant between liquid and vapor modes in order to remove heat and moisture from incoming air, they built, as I understand it, a large flat device about the size of a window containing tubes inside a terracotta housing.  Some of the tubes are coated, but cooled by adjacent tubes, where water evaporation has lowered the temperature.  Fans blow air into the coated tubes to cool it down, but with no absorption of water moisture.  The room on the other side of the unit cools down with little use of electricity, no humidity to remove and no use of refrigerant (How the physics work is above my pay grade, but you have a general sense of how the inventors have, once again, put natural laws to work on our behalf).

Now, a pertinent question is: if this technology really works and can be manufactured at scale for a reasonable cost, who is most capable of turning a lab experiment into a viable consumer product?