Opinion Integrity,not incentives
The year draws to a close in a morally unsettling way. The horror of the Ruchika case draws not simply from the original crime and...
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The year draws to a close in a morally unsettling way. The horror of the Ruchika case draws not simply from the original crime and the fact that it remains,for practical purposes,unpunished. It is that the whole saga ought to be associated with a tyrannical and depraved republic,not a healthy and vibrant democracy. There is the association of power and impunity that only a tyranny could produce. There is the psychological torture and inversion,where more violence seems to be inflicted on the victims than on the perpetrators. There is the evasion of responsibility at so many levels. The invocation of the simple but suffocating word system is always a sure sign of the insidious presence of tyranny. There are silver linings: a brave family and small group of friends fighting. On the face of it there is also a growing public outcry. But in a sense the tragedy seems to be that the more nobly the family behaved the less chance it stood. The public campaign may achieve justice; and that will be some consolation. But you wonder about a society where victims have no chance of justice except through participation in a public spectacle. They have to be robbed of the option of reticence and privacy to achieve a modicum of consolation.
But this case,like so many others during the last week,raises the profoundly unsettling question: what will be the place of the moral imagination in the new India? What are the norms that will sustain us? In almost every crisis that evokes this question,the answer is almost always: fix the system. And at one level,there is something in this: the shields that forms,laws,regulations and procedures provide often stymie the most robust moral intent. Individual virtue is often helpless. Institutional design is important. But you cannot help shake off the feeling that perhaps we are looking for external fixes too quickly; that blaming the system has become not much an explanation of our predicament as much as an alibi. Even in this case,the issues are not merely who manipulated the CBI and when. It is also about the social norms and strictures that allowed such a public official not just to be received but felicitated in high society. It is about several chief ministers not showing the slightest bit of moral outrage or delicacy when the occasion called for it. It is that doing the straightforwardly moral thing seemed optional to a large number of people involved.
And it is here that perhaps even our dominant ideologies of reform stymie the moral imagination rather than enlarge it. One line of thought places faith in institutions. Getting the right outcome is simply a matter of getting the balance of power,checks and balances,instruments of accountability,right laws and regulations in place. But this reasonable line of inquiry has been converted almost into a self-defeating fetish. We know that formal properties of institutional design matter,but only up to a point. The best-designed institutions can be subverted by those who do not have a sense of right or wrong; imperfect ones can be elevated by acts of moral leadership. We should design better institutions. But it will be morally obtuse to think that those will do away with the need for moral judgment,interpretation,integrity and better exercise of discretion. New rules or institutions,without an underlying moral framework,displace the problem,not solve it. A focus on external fixes also prevents us from recognising how much space there is,within existing rules,to do the right thing without incurring huge penalties.
The second and related line of thought is the focus on incentives,on rewards and punishments. First of all,we need to recognise that forms of social regulation that depend wholly on incentives and penalties will,under the best circumstances,produce only a fragile compliance,not integrity. Second,even penalties and incentives operate effectively only against a backdrop of internalised morality. Otherwise the costs of eliciting compliance are simply too high. But more insidiously,the language of reward and punishments militates against integrity.
Integrity,whether in personal life or in an official position,depends upon taking seriously the thought that there are certain ends and values that are simply not for sale,dispensable for instrumental purposes. Reputation,income recognition,status,should act more as a societys acknowledgment of an individuals commitments; they should not be the reasons for individual action.
The fundamental contradiction in our approach to reform is this. The more a society legitimises the thought that anything you do must be for the right incentives,not for intrinsic reasons,the more likely that society is to produce people who respond only to external incentives. But a society in which individuals are governed largely by external incentives will be one that does not display integrity in the minimal sense.
In almost every current controversy these motifs recur. New mechanisms for judicial reform are necessary,but we are living in a fools paradise if we dont acknowledge this. The current system was itself an institutional innovation to redress prior infirmities. Many of its problems can still be fixed within existing norms with some exercise of leadership. In no system can you do away with virtue. You want people to vote,but do you want them to vote only because they are coerced? Society thinks teachers will teach only if they are treated as if they were in a police state.
Institutional quick-fixes are easy to conjure up. And we often want to talk about those because it is harder to confront a deeper topic. What are the social pathologies producing the kinds of perversity we are so publicly witnessing now? Is the project of aligning ambition with social virtue dependent solely on external inducement? What produces a sense of justice and moral delicacy in a society? I suspect the biggest challenge for us in the New Year will not be economics or politics,but taking our own moral measure. A society in which moral discourse is reduced largely to coercion or inducement is a society which will produce two successful character types: tyrants or hustlers,those who enjoy the impunity of power and those willing to instrumentalise anything. To think of morality largely in terms of reward and punishment,without exploring deeper sources,is to be penny-wise,pound-foolish.
The writer is president,Centre for Policy Research,Delhi
express@expressindia.com
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