The second essay I wrote for Building Just Institutions.
For your second short paper, you will need to do a “problem oriented policing” simulation module found here: http://www.popcenter.org/learning/prostitution/intro/ (TECHNICAL NOTE: In the past, I’ve had issues using Chrome, so if it seems buggy, try another browser.) Although this simulation is intended for training police officers, you should have no problem getting through it. The “problem oriented policing” approach is certainly an interesting and important development (for further reading, see here: http://www.popcenter.org/about/?p=whatiscpop), but the details of the approach are not of central importance for our purposes.
For your paper, I want you to view your experience in the simulation through the lens of this class. Provide a brief synopsis of what you did during the research/analysis stage, your plan of action, and the results provided by the simulation—and then analyze your own performance. (NOTE: This simulation isn’t perfect, but, for the sake of this exercise, please just take the simulation’s responses to your plan—which are based on extensive research—at face value.) I don’t care how well or how poorly you do on the simulation. I am not asking you to try to analyze the simulation through one or more of the course readings. There is no right answer here.
The goal of this assignment is for you to engage in critical and thoughtful self-reflection. This does not mean that I want to hear about your feelings. Rather, I want you to critically examine your own assumptions at each stage in the simulation process and think through what the simulation results reveal about how you thought about the problem. What worked? What didn’t? And why? What did you miss and why? What might you do differently if you did it a second time? Reflect on what assumptions you made about the problem, about how to fix it, what good(s) was/were at stake, and what kind(s) of justice was at stake in the problem. What, if anything, does the “morally messy” world offered in the simulation tell us about the challenges of “doing justice”?
Life is chaotic. Even the smallest conflicts are difficult to resolve while upholding the standards of justice and morality. Bureaucracy, rules, and other constraints will inevitably cause mistakes to occur with consequences that range from the miniscule to the enormous. Presumptions color actions; it is of utmost importance to evaluate the decision making process that occurred in hopes of learning methods of avoiding similar mistakes in the future. The Center of Problem-Oriented Policing’s Street Prostitution simulation, an admirable imitation of a realistic problem offers all of the key constraints that lead to ethical blind spots. Given a limited budget, I was presented with a situation with imperfect information and incomplete knowledge. With a mock, but sympathetic, narrative, the Street Prostitution simulation had plenty of room for practical wisdom and practical mistakes and left the opportunity for presumptions to affect actions and imagined citizens’ lives. Using Jonathan Haidt’s theory of innate moral foundations, of which he describes five, as an evaluative tool, I layer in aspects of the work of Bazerman and Tenbrunsel as well as Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe to trace the development of the mistakes I made in the Street Prostitution simulation to the assumptions I made before completing the simulation.
The need for review stems from two different sources of subconscious human behavior. Though I possessed knowledge of human irrationality before undergoing the simulation and was careful to conduct the simulation in a manner with as much intellectual foresight as possible, it was difficult during the simulation to accurately gauge my judge as anything but correct. As Bazerman and Tenbrunsel write, “The human tendency to make inaccurate predictions about our own behavior is well documented by behavioral ethics and other research. We firmly believe we will behave a certain way in a given situation. When actually faced with that situation, however, we behave differently” (2011:63). Though I might have intended to economically redevelop the area where street prostitution was the worst, when it was my decision to make, I did not redevlelop the area. With so many possible decisions and the impossibility of making all of the correct ones, assumptions about the nature of prostitution drove most of my decisions. Reviewing those decisions requires a review of the lens I viewed the problem through. As Schwartz and Kenneth write about practical wisdom, “… we understand our own lives as stories, as narratives, with narrative ‘arcs.’ Where we are in our own life story provides the context within which we evaluate relationships and experiences and make decisions”. Thus, they conclude, “We can’t understand ourselves as frozen in time. Self-understanding is a narrative construction” (2010:67). Bazerman and Tenbrunsel urge the critical review of decisions which Schwartz and Sharpe claim stem from the narrative identity. To properly discover the root cause of decisions and errors, it is imperative to center in on the actor.
With so many different parties with shares at stake in any situation, it is no wonder that it has been quipped that a good compromise leaves everyone unhappy. Many people have different odds at stake and the frame the actor takes reveals their personal narrative arc. The simulation offered many such frames. The Mayor, whose reelection is at stake, and the community, which is demanding mayoral action, is hoping to remove prostitution from the neighborhood. Achieving justice for these individuals is clear; justice would be achieved for the neighborhood because it suffers from the presence of prostitution and crime that reduces the community’s safety, livelihood, and overall health. However, the prostitutes had their claim to justice as well. Newspaper reports and interviews revealed murders and physical assault by johns. Additional interviews revealed that many prostitutes faced problems such as poor education or bad family conditions. Achieving justice for prostitutes was an entirely different problem than achieving justice for the community. Consideration had to be given to local businesses, whose businesses ironically attracted the factors that drove away their own business. Furthermore, nearby neighborhoods would be impacted if prostitution was exported there as it had been to Scott Avenue. It was clear that justice did not simply involve lowering the crime numbers and placating civilian complaints, nor would justice be readily achieved for everyone. While the goal, and the hypothetical commission, was centered around reducing prostitution in the area, a numerical, statistical goal, I aimed to do what I thought to be the right thing.
As Schwartz and Sharpe write, “Aiming at the right thing doesn’t tell them exactly how to do it—that takes practical skill, not just will. But knowing what to aim at frames and guides their choices—it enables them to choose wisely. (2010:16)” But, Schwartz and Sharpe are unable to piece together what the “right thing” is, simply ambiguously saying “A wise person knows the proper aims of the activity she is engaged in. She wants to do the right thing to achieve these aims—wants to meet the needs of the people she is serving (2010:25)”. The frames that Schwartz and Sharpe talk about are influenced heavily by our emotions. As Jonathan Haidt explains, morality is different across continents, across regions, across cultures, across neighborhoods, and, perhaps most importantly when acting as a safety consultant to the mayor, across political parties. “Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second” (2012:163). The simulation is built on strategic reasoning, yet my intuition was present long before I was able to make any decisions.
Haidt provides a framework to analyze decisions. While Haidt’s moral foundation theory is certainly not universally accepted, using Haidt’s principles such as care, loyalty, and fairness can help trace decisions to their narrative roots. My decision to help prostitutes transition back into society through the use of community service sentences in lieu of incarceration or fines, helping prostitutes to quit, educate and warn high-risk prostitute and client populations are in line with the care module in Haidt’s moral foundation theory. He writes, “It makes no evolutionary sense for you to care about what happens to my son Max, or a hungry child in a faraway country, or a baby seal” (2012:133). Those same solutions that I chose were heavily linked with the fairness model that Haidt speaks to. “Everyone cares about fairness, but there are two major kinds. On the left, fairness often implies equality, but on the right it means proportionality—people should be rewarded in proportion to what they contribute, even if that guarantees unequal outcomes” (2012:138). I assumed that prostitutes resorted to prostitution because circumstances beyond their control had pushed them to do so. In believing this, I robbed these prostitutes of part of their humanity, the acknowledgement that they had moral agency. Thus the decisions I pursued attempted to make their lives equal, instead of, fairly, rewarding or punishing people based on their contributions to the good of society.
Haidt’s three remaining foundations of morality loosely apply to the remaining solutions I chose. By choosing to warn property owners about the use of their premises for prostitution, in hopes of decreasing the reports of bartenders helpings clients find prostitutes, I applied the loyalty/betrayal foundation of morality to the problem. As Haidt writes, “Far worse than lust, gluttony, violence, or even heresy is the betrayal of one’s family, team, or nation” (2012:141). I saw the property owners and the workers as a group that also was part of the community. By reinforcing the business of prostitution, these workers were acting against the overall health of the community and by warning property owners, I would be able to allow property owners to correct the overall injustices to the community. In lieu of solely focusing on improving the economy in the area which was predicted to run the stores out of business and move them and prostitution to another part of the city, I believed that this solution would help keep the current community together. Finally, my four remaining responses: restricting clients’ ability to drive, encouraging prostitutes to report serious offenses to the police, distributing information about dangerous clients and identifying and targeting the worst offenders were a product of both the narrative I perceived myself in as well as the authority/subversion foundation in Haidt’s moral framework. “The current triggers of the authority/subversion foundation, therefore, include anything that is construed as an act of obedience, disobedience, respect, disrespect, submission, or rebellion, with regard to authorities perceived to be legitimate. Current triggers also include acts that are seen to subvert the traditions, institutions, or values that are perceived to provide stability” (2012:144). As the legitimate authority, I found it appealing to use that authority to restrict and prevent johns from soliciting prostitutes. Certainly, however, I was weary of using my authority to falsely accuse people who may have been innocent, and thus I avoided options of publishing information about johns or informing their supervisors. While these all seemed to be reasonable fixes to the problem, they were not ultimately the best. I missed the responses of imposing curfews on prostitutes, closing streets and alleys, as well as others, which were all more effective in preventing prostitution than I believed at the time. I believe this to be in part due to my aversion of punishing those who I believed were not actively contributing towards the crime, though the evaluation of contributions was certainly biased. Unfortunately, my view of the prostitutes as blame-free clearly prevented me from responding in the most efficient manner possible.
In my analysis of the different groups who had claims to justice, I inherently began with a social justice perspective, being fair by righting wrongs that were clearly, in my perspective, unjust. Similarly, I was focused on punishing those who seemed to consciously make decisions that were unjust. While this bias did not affect my process of collecting information, it did color my opinion of the data that I did collect. I paid particular attention to methods of transitioning prostitutes into functioning citizens, rationalizing that life had dealt them an unfair hand without the opportunity to succeed. I also focused on methods of punishing johns, who I believed were making conscious decisions to support the industry. While my method of collecting data was methodical, as I spent an almost even amount of my budget in each of the areas, as well as in each of the subcategories, my ultimate proposal was biased.
I was unable to respond in the most efficient manner because my view of the situation was skewed by my particular interpretation of justice and fairness. By viewing prostitutes as decision-less subjects in an unjust world, I was unable to mete out appropriate justice to the community, who suffered from the drug proliferation and the unsafe environments generated by having prostitution on their streets, and others. Using Haidt’s moral foundation as a guide to evaluate my decisions shed light into my personal matrix of morality. Even understanding one’s personal biases is not enough to prevent one’s decisions from being skewed, because our own biases are rooted in part in our identities. Making mistakes is part of life, but only if the mistakes generate lessons to be learned. It is only in retrospect that, as Schwartz argues, practical wisdom can be learned. Tracing my mistakes to the identity and narrative I bring to a situation allows me to see where my biases lean and how my moral or immoral my actions are. The knowledge generated helps develop the wisdom to use in the future.
This is a paper that does not show a satisfactory level of insight into the exercise. As a result, the analytical connection between the simulation and course question is not deep. The author repeatedly mentions the shortcomings of his assumptions but they are not spelled out in detail. More information about the simulation results in needed throughout the paper.