Clarifying the roles of purposes

Antidotes to six misunderstandings that motivate bad aims

Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos founder and CEO

This post clarifies several misunderstandings that lead us to shirk our responsibility for evaluating purposes.

Meaningness, the book, calls these misunderstandings “confused stances.” It discusses them mainly as they affect one’s personal life. Here, we’ll consider them in organizations and in technical work.

We have probably all adopted each of these confused stances at times. We may still sometimes, particularly when under pressure. In any case, because we almost always do our technical work as part of a social group, it’s valuable to understand the confusions in order to recognize when other people have adopted them.

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The discussions in Meaningness are from a very incomplete 2007 draft. This post treats the same topics in greater detail, but in the narrower scope of technical, entrepreneurial, or managerial work.

This is a draft chunk from my meta-rationality book. If you are newly arrived, check the outline to get oriented. (You might want to begin at the beginning, instead of here!) If you run into unfamiliar terms, consult the Glossary.

Like most of my posts, this one is free. If you find it interesting or useful, please consider supporting and encouraging my work with a paid subscription:

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The confused stances come in mirror-image pairs: eternalism and nihilism; reasonable respectability and romantic rebellion; mission and materialism.

Eternalism and nihilism

To begin: what could it even mean to “evaluate purposes”? What ultimate criterion could purposes be evaluated according to, other than purposes themselves?

This desire for an “ultimate criterion,” according to which a purpose could be Correct, is a natural impulse for those trained in rationality. There is no such criterion, however.

Rationalism may lead you to suppose that the True purposes in a situation are objective and definitive. In that case, evaluation is a non-issue; the only work necessary is to discover which those purposes are. One rational approach supposes that specific purposes derive from ultimate ones which justify them, plus objective features of the specific situation. The ultimate purposes are themselves unjustifiable axioms. For example, one might take utility maximization as the ultimate purpose that justifies all others. This, in the language of Meaningness, is eternalism. That is the insistence that some metaphysical eternal ordering principle gives everything a perfectly definite meaning.

This does not work in practice. Even if it were true, we seem not to be able to locate these supposed ultimate purposes well enough to achieve agreement about which they are. And even when we think we have, we cannot reliably reason from them to concrete actions. (More about this later, in our discussion of meta-rational ethics in technical and organizational work.)

If purposes are not objective, an alternative is to assume that they are subjective. Perhaps, for example, purposes are based only in emotions, or inscrutable personal preferences. Then we can just ask people what their purposes are. We saw earlier why that can’t work, in the discussion of “software requirements analysis.” People don’t know what their purposes are, because they aren’t subjective.

The subjectivist misunderstanding is particularly tempting for those trained in rationality, which depends on excluding considerations of purpose when Solving Problems. It is also a natural consequence of rationalist dual-process theories of cognition, which divide all mental activity into objective rationality and subjective irrationality.

It is possible to be wrong about purposes, so they aren’t just subjective. Suppose you’re assigned to carry out the “daily user page view data reconciliation procedure,” which means making a spreadsheet from a template, filling in data taken from three different web software packages, and saving it in a cloud folder. You assumed the purpose was for someone in management to get an accurate statistic. But after a few weeks, you discover that no one ever looks in that folder. Probably no one else in the business realizes this! Everyone who knows about the procedure had a wrong belief about its purpose.

This could happen, for example, if the original reason for the procedure was forgotten. As circumstances changed, it no longer serves that purpose, but everyone vaguely assumes it still exists for that reason. It’s actually continued just due to the wrong belief about its purpose! Or, perhaps it now serves some other purpose, but no one has updated their understanding. For example, your asking the software for this data causes it to do some work as a side-effect, and some other process depends on that happening. This purpose might be discovered only if your boss said “Oh, well, if no one is looking at it, I guess there’s no point in doing that reconciliation, so you can stop now,” and then something breaks.

Denigrating purposes as subjective, irrational, and arbitrary makes them effectively meaningless, and therefore not worthy of consideration. For an individual, taking this seriously can lead to nihilism, with its characteristic dynamics of rage, anxiety, sterile intellectualizing, demotivation, depression, and perhaps eventually catatonia or suicide.

If purposes were merely subjective, collaborative work in an organization would be difficult or impossible. There would be only your felt purposes and mine in conflict, and no way to reason together about which are better. Disputes could only be settled through exercise of coercive power.

If purposes were merely arbitrary and irrational, why pay any attention to them at all? When a work group, or entire organization, ceases to believe in its purposes, it falls into finger-pointing, unproductive strategic planning meetings to analyze future directions (that still seem pointless), loss of key personnel, plunging productivity, and perhaps eventually business failure and dissolution.

The mistaken metaphysical assumption underlying both eternalism and nihilism is that everything must be either objective and definite or subjective and arbitrary. Purposes are neither. They are interactional opportunities for action. They are not non-existent or meaningless, although they are nebulous and somewhat indefinite. They are not irrational or arbitrary; we routinely recognize and dispute them reasonably, rationally, and/or meta-rationally.

Reasonable respectability and romantic rebellion

Realizing that one cannot locate objective purposes oneself, a less extreme error is to take some authority’s pronouncements about purposes as a proxy. In a work context, this could be the attitude that “higher-ups” have decided what is good to do, and that it’s not your job to question it. (“Unless it’s obviously illegal or unethical, of course.”) Meaningness describes this as “reasonable respectability: the sheep’s stance to social authority.”

The higher-ups will have faced the same difficulties with the nebulosity of purposes that you evade with this attitude. They may have decided poorly. You may not have the power to intervene. But, to the extent that you have a position of responsibility, you may have both more power and more obligation to shape purposes than you realize, or want to admit.

The opposite error is to assume, as an axiom, that “higher-ups” always get purposes wrong. They are greedy capitalists, power-mad narcissists, or sadistic psychopaths. Whatever they intend should be challenged and resisted. This is the stance of romantic rebellion. It’s “romantic” because it’s imprecise and impractical. In a work situation, for example, indiscriminate rejection of authority just makes you a nuisance, and maybe eventually fired. The romantic rebel is usually little more effective at shaping purposes than the reasonably respectable employee. Recognizing that, the rebel merely mouths oppositional slogans, seeking to look cool in front of other “rebels” by being as obstructive as possible while evading punishment. This is often explained with reference to some popular political alignment, with a nebulous implication that it justifies resistance.

These confused stances are, however, not worked-out ideologies or systematic frameworks. They are simple, compelling patterns of talking, feeling, and acting with respect to purpose. They operate at the level of reasonableness, not rationality. It is accountably reasonable to adopt these stances. That is, you can present reasons for them that will usually be accepted without rational consideration.

Effective work in a social context must understand and orient to its power dynamics. That means recognizing the exercise of power, observing the purposes pursued by the powerful, and acknowledging the decisions they make. It does not imply taking them as necessarily accurate. You may choose to pursue other purposes—within the constraints of relevant power relations. That may include exercising your own power to reshape the purposes other participants pursue, and to reshape the power dynamics that influence them. (More about this later!)

Materialism and mission

Categorizing purposes as either “mundane” or “higher,” and denying the value of one or the other sort, produces another pair of confused stances.

• Mundane purposes are those we share with other social mammals: food, security, reproduction, and position in social dominance hierarchies. Altruism on behalf of one’s family or close associates also counts as a mundane purpose.

• Higher purposes are those that transcend animal existence, such as disinterested altruism and creative production.

• Materialism is the stance that only mundane purposes count; it denies the meaningfulness of higher purposes. We have no choice but to pursue sex, power, status, safety, pleasure, and possessions. Anything else is a delusion and wasted effort.

• Mission is the mirror image: it sees value only in higher purposes. It rejects the pursuit of mundane purposes—beyond the minimum required to accomplish higher ones, perhaps. Those are selfish and unethical, or at any rate without virtue.

As with reasonable respectability and romantic rebellion, materialism and mission are mainly merely-reasonable stances. Some rationalists do attempt to justify them rationally, though. For example, they may claim that evolutionary psychology implies that we can only ever have mundane purposes; or that utilitarianism is objectively correct, and therefore we must all adopt extreme self-denying altruism.

Materialism and mission are attractive because they simplify evaluation, whether reasonably or rationally.

For individuals, they eliminate the difficulty of deciding how much effort to devote to which sort of purpose. They are both all-and-none, so the choice is binary, and we can ignore trade-offs and relative weighting. Further, mundane ends mostly correlate, and can be pursued as a package. Wealth, power, security, status, and mating all support each other synergistically; so there are rarely crucial trade-offs among them.

Higher purposes have an opposite advantage: you get full credit for pursuing any one of them. So, choosing which may not matter much. In fact, ideally, you should have a unique mission that you invented yourself. And as long as it is unique and clearly “higher,” it doesn’t seem to much matter whether it makes any sense.

As individuals, it’s tempting to commit oneself wholly to either materialism or mission; and some people do. I recall conversations with entrepreneurs and executives who stated, aggressively, defiantly, that their only purpose was making money. I’ve also known several people who claimed to have wholly devoted their lives to some spiritual, altruistic, or artistic cause.

More realistically, most people oscillate uncomfortably between materialism and mission, over varying time spans. Sometimes it seems like only mundane purposes matter; sometimes it seems like only higher ones do.

In fact, obviously both do. In technical work, we want a high income and the admiration of our peers; and we also want our work to be genuinely useful to as many people as possible, to delight them even, and to improve the lives of strangers we’ll never know about.

Acknowledging both mundane and higher purposes means accepting the task of resolving conflicts between them. For this, neither reasonableness nor rationality suffices. Meta-rationality may help—although, of course, it offers no specific method or framework.

Ideally, we find contexts and activities that minimize the conflicts by combining mundane and higher purposes. A familiar example is taking stock options as an early employee in a startup company that develops a breakthrough product which succeeds financially because it’s genuinely beneficial.

Achieving an ideal combination may be difficult. Consequently, it’s common to fool yourself, and/or others, by exaggerating either the mundane or higher value of a single activity. Meaningness offers extreme examples at the individual level:

One might aim for fame and glory while leading a celebrity media campaign to save starving Africans from poverty; or make zillions of dollars (and acquire a harem of groupies) as an “alternative” “rebellious” musician; or wield the power of life and death over millions, in the name of Protecting The People, as a demagogic politician.

Most organizations formally commit themselves either to materialism or mission:

• Corporations are typically required to serve solely the purpose of making a profit for their shareholders. This materialist purpose is usually stated in a legally-binding document which serves as their constitution. Economic theories typically assume—mistakenly—that this actually is how corporations operate.

• Other legally-constituted organizations, such as nonprofits, schools, and branches of government, are usually legally required to serve only some specified higher purpose, such as eradicating malaria, ensuring that every student knows the Three Rs, or regulating air pollution. Idealistic social theories typically assume—mistakenly—that this actually is how they operate.

These legal commitments are, in both cases, largely fictional. Every organization pursues both mundane and higher purposes, regardless of its notional responsibility to ignore one or the other. This is usually entirely explicit.

For-profit corporations usually publicize a “mission statement” that says their purpose is something other than profit. Public relations professionals particularly admire Starbucks’:

Inspire and nurture the human spirit—one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.

This is preposterous. If it has any meaning at all—the more you analyze it, the less sense it makes—this is obviously not the purpose of Starbucks. Cynicism about mission statements is easy, and correct. Most are PR blather, devised to give customers and employees a vague sense that a company is devoted to higher purposes, with little effect on what it actually does. Customers and employees hope that this supposed virtue will rub off on them. Buying Fair Trade coffee from Starbucks means you are contributing to its higher purposes, at only $6.50 a cup. They are in the business of selling indulgences—of the sort Martin Luther railed against—absolving you of secular sins.

Just as commercial corporations usually pursue higher purposes as well as profit, other organizations usually pursue mundane purposes as well as their supposed mission. NGOs, universities, and government agencies aim in part, or even mainly, to increase their power, funding, reputation, and security.

Regardless of its formal constitution, every organization is also a social group in which members perceive and pursue many disparate purposes, both mundane and higher.

• Generally, few employees of a corporation devote their work solely, or even at all, to profit maximization. (To the dismay of shareholders, who have meager practical ability to sway corporate purposes in their direction.)

• Generally, few employees of any sort of organization devote their work solely to its mission statement. They are doing a job—enough to keep it, they hope, and maybe get a promotion. But cynicism can lead to overlooking those who believe. Antonio García Martínez, formerly a high-placed executive in Facebook’s advertising team, later wrote about the company’s:

militant engineering culture, the all-consuming work identity, the apostolic sense of devotion to a great cause. The cynics will read statements from Zuckerberg or some other senior exec about creating “a more open and connected world” and think, “Oh, what sentimental drivel.” The critics will read of a new product tweak or partnership, and think Facebook is doing it only to make more money.

They’re wrong.

Facebook is full of true believers who really, really, really are not doing it for the money, and really, really will not stop until every man, woman, and child on earth is staring into a blue-framed window with a Facebook logo. Which, if you think about it, is much scarier than simple greed. The greedy man can always be bought at some price, and his behavior is predictable. But the true zealot? He can’t be had at any price, and there’s no telling what his mad visions will have him and his followers do.

Whereas mundane purposes are vulnerable to the critique that they are crass selfishness, supposedly higher ones can be doubted for their desirability, coherence, or feasibility.

• As a cause, it’s a stretch to believe that inducing every human to use Facebook is “higher,” or indeed even ethically justifiable at all.

• Although “inspiring and nurturing the human spirit” certainly sounds good, it’s difficult to find any specific meaning in it. (What is “the human spirit”?) It’s hard to know how a coffee shop could do that, or how we’d know whether any activity had done it.

• The mission of the company Theranos was to dramatically improve individuals’ ability to assess their health, detecting disease before symptoms appear, to enable earlier, more effective treatment. It promised to do that by making blood tests dramatically easier, faster, and cheaper, with breakthroughs in phlebotomy, analytical chemistry, and laboratory automation. That’s great as a vision, because it promised both material rewards and widespread health benefits. It failed as a mission, because the company had no such breakthroughs, and was unable to deliver technically.

Purposes can’t be separated from capabilities. A wish without any means of satisfaction is a fantasy, not a purpose. Conveniently, however, fantastical projects can’t conclusively fail either. One can always say “we’re making progress” and “we just need more resources/inspiration/virtue/commitment/etc.” Theranos failed by lying. Otherwise, it might still exist as a venture-funded research company, perpetually promising breakthroughs “soon.” Or, what Theranos wanted to do may have been possible, and if they had put more resources into technology development and less into scamming investors and partner companies, they might have succeeded. Overemphasis on higher purposes at the expense of mundane ones was their downfall.

For both organizations and individuals, a meta-rational approach must explore their own diversity of aims, recognize most as valid, and acknowledge tradeoffs between mundane and higher purposes. There is no “correct” resolution to such conflicts. It is valuable to reflect on them nevertheless, because in particular situations and contexts we need to make choices.

There is no fixed standard or method for evaluation, and therefore no possibility of optimality. That means we can relax somewhat. We can stop agonizing about what to do, or searching for the best possible goal. We can aim for merely good outcomes.

We can aim for outcomes that are good-enough according to multiple criteria, including both mundane and higher ones. Although these may seem inherently in conflict, in a business context they often synergize. In fact, this binary categorization is itself mistaken. Employees are motivated to join and work effectively in a company serving higher purposes. Customers want to buy from companies serving higher purposes. Profits follow. Content-free “mission statements” attempt to conjure this dynamic into existence; but they fool few. The best companies genuinely serve “higher” purposes with effective “mundane” means.

Materialism looks to the next few quarters or a very few years. Mission aims at the distant future, or even eternity. Meta-rationality can recognize both short- and long-term purposes, but may emphasize a neglected middle duration—several years to a few decades. That is time enough for both purposes and activity to evolve. It is time enough to accomplish goals beyond the mundane, but does not postpone concrete action to an idealized fantasy future.