Abstract
Most people would agree that leaders need ethics. There is disagreement on the kind of ethics leaders need but not about the fact that leadership requires ethics. This paper challenges this agreement. Leaders need ethics, but does ethics necessarily call for leadership? How ethical is the concept of leadership really? In this paper I argue for ethics that, rather than requiring leadership, entails what I call 'bearership'. First I examine some concepts, questions and challenges of leadership ethics. Then I explore and advocate with examples a conception of 'bearership ethics' in critical comparison to leadership ethics.
Leaders need ethics, thus far most people would agree. In fact, leaders are to be a head above everyone morally, some would add. People disagree about the kind of ethics leaders need but not about the fact that leadership requires ethics. I venture to challenge this agreement. Leaders need ethics, but, so I would like to ask, does ethics really call for leadership? Leadership requires ethics, but does ethics necessarily demand leadership? To put it more emphatically, how ethical is the concept of leadership really? In this paper I shall argue for ethics that, rather than requiring leadership, entails what I call ‘bearership’. The first two sections briefly examine some concepts, questions and challenges of leadership ethics. The remaining sections advocate and explore with examples a conception of ‘bearership ethics’ in critical comparison to leadership ethics.
Leadership and ethics
Leadership ethics is a relatively new and unexplored field of study. This section briefly introduces some concepts and questions of leadership ethics. My focus is on works of Joanne Ciulla because I would like to examine the view that there is a strong relationship between ethics and leadership and she is a major advocate of this view.
Leadership is defined in many ways. Rost (1991: 7–102) offers no less than 221 definitions of leadership. In these definitions the leader is a person representing others in all kinds of ways, from dictating them to moderately influencing them. Ciulla (2011: 513) argues that all of these definitions are about the nature of the leader–follower relationship. Definitions of leadership thus seem to focus on the question: what is leadership and why and how do leader–follower relationships work; in other words, what is the relation between leaders and followers?
Until fairly recently most studies of leadership ethics have taken ethics as an appendage to leadership. As Ciulla (2005: 333) observes, references to ethics were fragmented, superficial, and no particular field of ethics is studied thoroughly. Some of the more significant studies even find ethics inadequate to serve their concepts of leadership. Joseph Rost (1991), for example, finds traditional ethical models useless to apply to leadership. 1 By closer examination, so Ciulla points out, the definitions of leadership basically presuppose normative questions. ‘How should leaders treat followers? And how should followers treat leaders? Who decides what goals to pursue? What is and what ought to be the nature of their relationship to each other?’ (Ciulla, 2011: 509) These questions suggest that, on the whole, leadership is defined in terms of ethical dispositions such as the recognition of autonomy and participation in the relation of leader and follower. Her contention is therefore that, in essence, definitions of leadership grant ethics a place at the heart of leadership. As she puts it: ‘We assume that ethical assumptions, expectations, and implications lie deeply embedded in every facet of the concept of leadership – from the way that leaders behave, to their relationships with followers, to the results of their initiatives.’ (Ciulla and Forsyth, 2011: 227).
Ciulla (2011: 509) goes further and states that there are two overarching and overlapping questions that drive most leadership research. These questions are: What is leadership? And what is good leadership? The first question is about what leadership is. This is a descriptive question about how effective leaders are. The second question is about what leadership ought to be. This normative question is about how ethical leaders are. There is, according to her, indeed a growing number of advocates of the centrality of ethics in concepts of leadership. Ciulla states that progress in leadership studies rests on the ability of scholars to integrate the answers to these questions.
What it means more exactly to take ethics to be central to leadership is perhaps best understood by examining the distinctive set of ethical challenges related to an occupation or role of a leader.
Challenges of leadership ethics
In the following section I focus on what I take to be three central ethical challenges to leadership: justice, power, sustainability. There is, of course, a huge range of ethical challenges to leadership. My claim is not to exhaust the list, but rather to focus and integrate some of the challenges which seem to be most decisive. 2
Justice
The demand for justice is the cornerstone of society and its leadership. Thus spoke Plato, and I think that he was right. Plato offered the first and arguably foremost classic portrayal of the way society originates on the basis of a just consideration of interests. As he poignantly showed in his Protagoras and Politeia, the bigger social groups become, the more the personal needs of individuals are apt to clash, and the more there will be the demand to manage the tension between self-interest and collective good. This demand calls for justice. Everyone should come to his or her own right. The bigger the groups are, the more there might be a need that one or more individuals represent the group in order to manage the tension between self-interest and collective good. Where justice needs to be guarded, guardians are needed to represent and protect common interests. We might call guardians leaders. This means leadership originates from the quest of social justice: the fair management of the interests of all the members of a group of people living together – in Plato’s case in a setting like a city-state. Thus, the quest of justice is the most basic challenge to a society and its leadership.
Plato’s view poses a major challenge of, but also to, the concept of leadership. He juxtaposes the tyrant of self-interest with a city of ‘good men’, in which the citizens would ‘compete to avoid power’ (Plato, 347d). A good ruler doesn’t by nature seek his own advantage but that of his subjects. And everyone knowing this would rather be benefited by others than take the trouble to benefit him or herself. Plato’s ‘good men’ would rather fight in order not to rule, because who rules is burdened with the quest of justice, the justice of protecting common interests. Plato’s good people would eventually assume leadership, yet not because of the urge to lead but the need to guard the group against the hardship of rule by an incompetent, unjust leader (Plato, 347c). As in Plato’s time, we are still concerned about the use of leadership positions for the sake of self-interest. 3 We cannot trust people who are too eager to rule. But how can we put trust in the ideal of a city of people who are so good that they don’t want to rule? Plato’s view goes beyond the challenge of just leadership by challenging the justification of leadership as such. Good people want justice, not leadership. Plato became sceptical about his own idea of good men in his later work, Statesman, by putting more trust in the rule of law than in good men. Laws should guard us, also, against the guardians. All in all, Plato’s sceptical position raises a fruitful challenge to the justification of the concept of leadership as such. I shall argue this in more detail by introducing my conception of bearership ethics in the sections below.
Power
In his Republic Plato also offers one of the most classic versions of the problem of power. I am referring to his account of the ‘Ring of Gyges’, the story of a shepherd boy who discovers a ring that makes him invisible and consequently gives him the opportunity to seize the power from the king (Plato, 359d–360d). Leadership can be compared to wearing the Ring of Gyges. The more leaders become invisible to their followers, the more they can do what they want, manipulate resources and hide their actions. Another classic is the example of David and Bathsheba. 4 King David was untouchable rather than invisible. He had the power to manipulate his followers without being questioned. However, also his use of power was that which Plato would call tyranny. History has drawn a long list of tyrants. Our globalized movement towards democracy resists such forms of dictatorship like never before. At least leaders who seize power in such abusive ways have become notorious exceptions. But power remains a vital and underestimated problem to any kind of sociality or politics that is based on representative leadership.
Let me explain this by means of a very brief detour through the history of politics. As is well known, the term ‘politics’ stems from Plato’s and Aristotle’s ideas of a polis, a city-state (Rodee et al., 1983: 3). They thought of any public social interaction as political. 5 As such interaction was practically inevitable Aristotle famously claimed that ‘man is by nature a political animal’. Later, Montesquieu und Rousseau separated the public sphere from the institutional sphere of politics. Today most political scientists entertain a broad understanding of politics and take it to include any aspect of society that directly or indirectly affects the institutions of the state. 6 This broad understanding is yet confined to institutional politics. For the old Greeks, however, public social interaction sufficed to qualify for politics. They situated politics in the confined logistical framework of a city-state such as ancient Athens. The polis was a model for a strong form of participatory politics. Everyone took responsibility to play a part of what keeps a city going. Representative politics has replaced participatory politics. The most favourite model of representative politics worldwide is the parliamentary democracy of republics. This is politics based on law (republics), executed by representative members of parliament. These politicians are what we would call our leaders.
Now let us return to the problem of power. Representative politics has an inherent hierarchical structure that inevitably constrains participation and remains vulnerable to power abuse. You might argue that representatives are forced by all kinds of political checks and balances to execute the will of the people. But once elected, leaders have enough institutional space to abuse their power against whomever and whatever they represent.
The problem of power challenges the core of representative politics, and thus, the concept of leadership qua representation as such. How should we best meet the challenge of power? I shall come back to this question by arguing for a stronger form of participatory politics based on my conception of the ethics of bearership.
Sustainability
The problem of sustainability is treated as one of our major contemporary social, economical, and, in particular, environmental challenges. Like never before leaders are challenged to deal with the question of the future impact of their present actions on the society, environment and economy. In particular, the global awareness of the environmental and social impact of economical development impels leaders to look beyond short-term success at the sustainability of their actions. The good leader, to put it in terms of Ciulla and Forsyth (2011), is challenged to be both technically good, i.e. effective at getting the job at-hand done and morally good, i.e. responsible for what he or she has done.
In one way or the other, all the major ethical theories address the question of sustainability. This is, for instance, reflected by the utilitarian focus on the consequences of actions and the deontological emphasis on universal duties. But the question of sustainability as such is, of course, introduced by and perhaps best articulated in terms of Aristotle’s virtue ethics according to his Nicomachean Ethics. His view is thereby probably the most challenging as well. Let me give a brief outline of his ethics and its challenge to leadership.
Aristotle’s well-known contention is that the purpose of life is happiness (eudaimonia). A happy life is a life based on moral virtuousness (areté). Moral virtuousness is defined in terms of practical rationality (phronesis), which means a continuous effort to attain a sustainable habit or disposition (hexis) in right decision making. Right decision making is described as finding the golden mean between the extreme options at hand. The right decision characterizes a person, so it is important that a person makes sustainable decisions. Practical rationality results in intellectual wisdom (sophia), which means to find a sustainable disposition towards choices in the long run. The result is the virtuous or good or happy life. The search for the good life is no individual pursuit. The good life is a life in the state. As the virtuous life concerns the state as a whole, the virtuous agent will also always have to consider the broad social impact of his or her decisions and actions. In other words, the question is finally as much about the character of the state as it is about an individual person. The virtuous agent will take into account both what is socially effective in a particular context and the long-term moral effect of decisions and actions on society.
This radical demand on virtuous agency places all citizens on the same moral basis. In Aristotle’s terms, everyone is concerned with the good life of the state. The question is not about who is good enough to take the lead, or about the character of a good leader, but rather about the character of society and leading the good life altogether. Followers and leaders are equally challenged to be virtuous agents. As Ciulla (2011: 534) rightly points out, Aristotle does not abandon the concept of leadership. Legislators ought to make citizens virtuous agents by forming the right habits or dispositions in them. However, the ultimate challenge is that everyone leads morally. This challenge comes down to what I shall explore in more depth: an ethics of bearership – an ethics of the reciprocal care of bearing together rather than leading each other. The question is how far this challenge is to be met and what it tells about our understanding of ethical leadership. This brings me to the conception of ethical ‘bearership’.
Bearership
‘Bearership ethics’ is another term for what can also be called humane ethics. 7 I begin by exploring the concept of ‘bearership’ with regard to ‘humaneness’. Consider the term ‘humane’ first. The Oxford and The Random House dictionaries distinguish between ‘human’ and ‘humane’. Human refers generally to ‘human being’. Humans can be humane and inhumane. ‘Humane’ means ‘tenderness, compassion, and sympathy for men and animals’. Humaneness is characterized by compassion and sympathy. Consider the term ‘sympathy’ first. It is significant that the Greek terms pathos and sym-pathos are related. ‘Sym’ means ‘with’. The term pathos (from the verb paschein) means undergoing, bearing or suffering. 8 Our most basic human experiences are characterized by pathos, by bearing the effect of objects and others in particular positions or situations. ‘Sym’ together with pathos means ‘to bear with’. To sympathize thus means to bear with somebody. The same applies to the word compassion; ‘com’ (from the Latin cum: with), and ‘passion’ (from the Greek pathos).
Everyone bears his or her own position or situation. We can bear with, but not for each other. In this sense we can only partly share the way we are affected by whatever positions and situations we deal with in society. Sympathy for others has its limits. However, human nature is formed by societal positions and situations (Olivier, 2011a). We are not alone in the world, but rather, we are naturally societal beings and society consists of positions, which individuals bear together. Bearing (passion) and doing so together (com), means that, as societal beings we are naturally compassionate, or if you want, sympathetic.
This brings us to examining the term ‘bearing’ more closely. ‘Bearing’ offers a rich description of the meaning of sympathy as I interpret it. Firstly, ‘bear’ has the meaning of ‘birth’. Someone bears a child and, similarly we are borne together as societal beings, thus, human birth does not only have a biological but primarily also a sociological meaning. Secondly, to bear means to abide, to be located and situated. We bear together by abiding by the positions and situations we inevitably dwell in. These positions and situations become the formative abode of our social human nature. Thirdly, to bear means to be affected. Our human nature bears on or upon our alignment to and thus affectedness by positions and situations. Finally, to bear means to forbear. This brings us back to the particular meaning of sympathy. To forbear means to bear with. 9 Our shared alignment to positions and situations connects us in a way that makes forbearance a natural human feature. What we call ‘human’ is thus naturally characterized by ‘humaneness’: compassion and sympathy.
There is a similarity but also decisive difference between this and other major conceptions of sympathy, such as those introduced by Max Scheler and Emanuel Lévinas. Scheler wrote the first and perhaps the most significant work on the phenomenology of sympathy (Mitleid) entitled Wesen und Formen der Symphatie. Scheler maintains that sympathy should not be mistaken for an identification (Einsfühlen) with or imitation (Nachfühlen) of the other (Scheler, 1973: 19ff, 105ff.). Sympathy does not mean to try to suffer the feeling of the other (identification) or to feel like the other (imitation), but instead to keep the distance of someone that recognizes and acknowledges and, in this sense feels, with the other. Such identification also comes into play in Lévinas’s conception of compassion in Useless Suffering. Lévinas (1982: 159) argues for compassion in an empathetic sense: you cannot suffer in my place, yet you can suffer together with me by projecting your feelings into my position and so my suffering can gain a new meaning.
I agree that we cannot bear for each other. I differ as far as to turn the relation ‘I–We’ as generally proposed in literature such as the above cited works into a ‘We–I’ relation. The latter refers to the fact that the positions and situations that we all share give each of us a sense of an ‘I’. We do not need to project into the other to be able to bear with each other. Unless we turn against each other, we always share, as it were, the mutual project of bearing with each other societal positions and situations, regardless how different these positions are. 10 Of course, we cannot take over each other’s positions, so sympathy carries with it an inherent distance. I know what it is like for you but cannot undergo what you are like. However, the conception of the We–I relation allows for a stronger form of forbearance than suggested in the kind of I–We relation that views such as Scheler’s and Lévinas’s generally offer.
But then again, the concept ‘human’ is broader than the concept ‘humane’. Humans are not always humane; humans do not always bear with each other, and humans do not always bear each other. On the contrary, though humans are societal and formed by the social positions they take, they are affected by and thus fill their positions in their very own individual ways. Positions in society have different effects on each of us. We experience the same positions differently, which means we bear our positions differently. The implication is that we are shaped by society but also free enough to fashion the positions we take according to our own preference. In fact, once we assume our roles, we tend to forget our positions and play our own parts. We seem to be free enough, after all, to forget each other and act as if we were alone. The sympathy becomes auto-pathy: self-passion. The next step is often anti-pathy: the with-each-other becomes an against-each-other.
Antipathy is not synonymous with inhumaneness. We assume competitive positions in society without being inhumane. Antipathy becomes only inhumaneness if it replaces sympathy. Therefore we can say: Humans are borne to be humane: sympathetic and compassionate. This is what we bear upon by being together. However, we play our own parts and tend to break free. Sympathy is quick to turn into autopathy or delivers us to antipathy. Auschwitz and other political atrocities have taught us a distressing lecture: inhumaneness lies dormant inside all of us. To protect our humane roots, we need ethics, ideally, ‘bearership ethics’.
Bearership ethics
Humans are naturally humane, but are free to be inhumane. The inhumaneness of being human is the reason for our quest for ethics; for humane moral conduct. I also dub this ‘bearership ethics’ and use it interchangeably with the term ‘humane ethics’.
It should be made clear from the beginning that I am not claiming that our natural humaneness entails moral humaneness. Such a claim would amount to a kind of naturalistic fallacy – the fallacy of confusing a natural object (i.e. our natural humaneness) with something that is not a natural object (i.e. our moral notion of humaneness). My contention is that we are naturally humane by virtue of the positions that we bear with each other. However, we could also choose to be inhumane by acting against each other. From this freedom follows the moral appeal to protect our humaneness. I would like to argue for a humane approach to ethics. The terms ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’ are used interchangeably and defined in so many different ways that it has become almost impossible to reach a minimal definition (Rachels, 1986: 11). Most introductions to ethics remind us of the Greek and Latin origin of these terms and allow us to call ethics (from ethos, the Greek for custom, habit, disposition or more) a study of morality (from the Latin moralis meaning the same except for the additional meaning of duty). 11 In particular, the Socratic conception of ethics as the study of how we ought to live seems to be a minimal conception most philosophers would probably allow. 12 This moral quest is demanding, especially because of the subjective and cultural relativity of life and the doubt whether there are or should be universally shared values that guide how we all ought to live. 13 The appeal to universal prescriptivism does not seem to save us from ethical relativity, after all there seem to be different cultures of reasoning. 14 In light of this difficulty, how do we find out how we ought to live? My aim is not at all to naively try to offer a super two-page ethical formula. What I do want to do, however, is to show that a meaningful way to get to the core of this question might be to formulate it in terms of a humane approach. Then the question would be, how ought we humans to live humanely. A humane approach considers ethics to be fundamentally the studying of moral codes of conduct that help humans to bear with each other in order to protect their common humaneness.
Why should a humane approach to ethics be helpful? The strength of this approach lies in the fact that it roots the subjectivity of choices in the objectivity of positions and situations that we naturally bear with each other. Thus, we can argue that how we ought to live is not primarily a subjective quest, but rather, originally a societal affair. If we are naturally humane by bearing together positions we bear upon, then the way we ought to live to protect this humane basis is not primarily a subjective or even cultural issue but a societal affair that we all share as inhabitants of our environment and, for that matter, the world. I confine my discussion largely to human society here, but a humane approach includes society in the broader sense of all co-inhabitants with whom we naturally have shared, share or will share our world. This approach provides ethics with a broad socio-ecological basis. Every time anyone asks what he or she ought to do, it reverberates through all social positions and situations, which form the way our minds work. In other words, every particular moral decision becomes a general socio-ecological act. By giving ethics such a socio-ecological underpinning, the humane approach removes the stumbling block of subjective or cultural relativity and instead demands the quest for ‘bearership’, i.e. to align to and along with each other by bearing the positions and situations that we mutually have to share. If you want to, this could be called a form of humane determinism, since the claim is that morality is based on the social positions that form our subjective decisions. 15 On the other hand, this does not at all mean that subjectivity is dissolved. Again, each person bears his or her own position, each person has the possibility not to bear with others and be inhumane instead, and each moral decision comes down to a personal choice to be humane, i.e. to act upon the society that we all share. However, because we know what it is like to be in such positions, other persons are never simply a matter of indifference to us. If we act inhumanely, we actually act against the social way we are formed to be. This social genesis of human nature is almost a natural protection against inhumaneness, and one that goes far beyond cultural barriers. One culture will eventually have to bear with other cultures to be able to sustain itself. This, as I argue in the last two sections, requires a global sense of orientation and a particular form of supportive leadership. Regardless, though, we can choose to break out and act against our society. We actually need to make the choice between humaneness and inhumaneness. Thus, we are free to act as moral subjects who search for moral values, guides and codes of conduct to protect our common humaneness. Sometimes we actually need to break free where a society or culture acts inhumanely against its own members or members of another culture. Such freedom to choose between the options of humaneness and inhumaneness we do have. In this sense we are determined but also free enough to choose to break away from that which determines us socially.
Another strength of this position is that it can be used to give normative models of ethics an inclusive underpinning. The underpinning is the quest of humaneness or bearership. I venture to contend that the same basic pursuit of humaneness goes for all major ethical models, whether virtue ethics, utilitarianism or deontology. Whether we ask, what character do we want ourselves or our society to have?, how should we avoid suffering and promote happiness as far as possible?, or what maxims do we want to function as universal laws?, the underpinning of all these questions remains the quest to promote social sympathy and rule out antipathy, to protect humaneness against inhumaneness, in short, the pursuit of a humane society. This does not mean that I equalize all ethical notions with a humane ethics of sympathy, but rather, I contend that a humane ethics is the basic foundation on which different normative ethical models operate. As such, a humane ethics functions as a critique of normative or also applied ethics.
Bearership ethics and leadership ethics
Let us return to the initial question of this paper. Leadership requires ethics, but does ethics also call for leadership? How ethical is the concept of leadership? In the following section I offer two arguments for prioritizing the ethics of bearership. As will be shown, I do not reject the concept of leadership ethics but rather view it as a supplement to the ethics of bearership.
A. The first argument for the priority of bearership
1. Let me start with a preliminary outline of the argument – the premises of the argument will be informed by the other parts of the argument below. My contention is that whilst we can argue that leadership requires ethics, we cannot in turn state that ethics necessarily demands leadership. Ethics entails bearership rather than leadership. An entailment is a logical relation between or among propositions such that the truth of one proposition is determined by the truth of another proposition or other propositions, and this determination is a function solely of the meaning of the propositions concerned. The core of ethics, as I have argued in the previous section, is captured by what I call bearership. Ethics qua ‘bearership’ (‘humane’ ethics) essentially involves our bearing with and not our leading of each other – even though our bearing with each other might require some form of leadership, as shown in the other parts of the argument discussed below. In this particular sense, ethics entails bearership rather than leadership. Hence, we can conclude, provisionally, that bearership rather than leadership is at the heart of ethics.
This outline of the argument needs to be refined. I do so by using two major concepts of ethical leadership to accommodate objections (parts 2 and 3 of the argument below) and use these objections to improve the argument (part 4 of the argument below).
2. One objection could be raised from the perspective of the concept of transforming leadership. Burns (1978) distinguishes between transformational and transactional leadership. 16 Transformational leadership means to raise the moral consciousness of people and thus turn them into leaders so that the leader becomes a moral agent, whilst transactional leadership means using existing values which help leaders and followers to reach their goals. Burns opts for transformational leadership. Hence, we need leaders to transform persons into moral agents who lead others towards morality. 17
A humane ethics does not exclude the idea that some people might lead others in a transformative sense. But the goal of humane ethics cannot be to produce leaders but rather to engage bearers. This might involve transitional transformational leadership: leading people by raising their moral consciousness of the meaning of bearership. Such transitional leadership has the supportive purpose of leading people to become bearers rather than leaders. Thus, the concept of bearership ethics does not as such imply leadership, but rather, leadership is an important supplementary to bearership ethics. Leadership in this sense is, so to say, ‘moral support’ to and not the core of bearership ethics, and for that matter of all ethics.
3. Another objection can be phrased in terms of the classic concept of servant leadership, introduced by Greanleaf (1977). ‘The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. 18 Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead.’ Servant leaders lead because they want to serve. People follow them freely because they trust them for serving well as leaders.
In a humane ethics there is no asymmetry such that some serve others or lead in serving others. Rather, there is the symmetry of bearing together. Therefore, ethics qua bearership does not entail leadership qua ‘servantship’. However, also leadership qua servantship is a supplementary to bearership, as it were, a transitional moral support. Transitional servantship is needed, for instance, where some serve others by educating them towards bearership, or where some serve in particular positions in a community by taking lead in supplying medical, legal, financial or other facilities, which a community needs for its bearing together. Bearership ethics appeals for such services to be seen in support of our bearing with and not against each other. People who give the lead by supplying qualified services should neither be servants nor superiors, but ought to play their distinct and distinguished roles as equal bearers of a humane society. Altogether servant leadership roles are not to be established as independent positions, but rather they should remain transitional functions performed in accordance with or for the sake of bearership. Thus, leadership qua servantship is an important auxiliary to but not the essence of an ethics of bearership.
4. The above two objections could accordingly be used to refine the argument. One could, on the one hand, argue that a strong concept of ethics qua humane or bearership ethics makes the concept of leadership ethics superabundant. To resume, ethics qua ‘bearership’ (‘humane’ ethics) essentially involves our bearing with and not our leading of each other. Humane ethics entails bearership rather than leadership. Hence, where we have a strong ethic of bearership, we shall ideally have no leadership. But, on the other hand, we need leadership as a moral support to bearership. This might involve (a) transitional transformational leadership: leading people by raising their moral consciousness of the meaning of bearership, or (b) transitional servant leadership ethics: leading people by serving in positions such as educating them towards or supplying qualified services in accordance with bearership. Again, such servitude does not allow any asymmetry such that some serve others or lead in serving others, but rather it implies normative support towards the symmetry of bearing together. On the basis of these forms of leadership we can speak of transitional ‘bearership leaders’. These are participants of a society, who lead by helping their society to achieve bearership. In this sense, both transformational and servant leadership are intermediary auxiliary functions for the sake of bearership. As the aim of such leadership is bearership, it remains a secondary function and no independent position to bearership. Thus, whilst leadership is not at the centre of ethics qua bearership ethics, it is required to achieve ethical bearership.
B. The second argument for the priority of bearership
1. I argued in the section ‘Challenges of leadership ethics’ that, according to Plato’s classic notion, leadership arises from the development of the need to manage the interests of groups. The bigger a group becomes, the more there might be a need that one or more individuals represent the group in order to manage the tension between self-interest and collective good. 19 However, Plato’s polis is a model for a strong form of participatory politics. Everyone is to take responsibility to play a part in managing the common interests of a society. Once more, representative politics has replaced participatory politics and the most favourite model of representative politics worldwide is the parliamentary democracy of republics. This is politics based on law (republics), executed by representative members of parliament. These politicians are what we would mostly call our leaders today. Hence, one can say that the notion of the leader as representative is, at least politically, the most popular manifestation of leadership.
There are three reasons, or rather sub-arguments, for favouring bearership to such leadership.
Firstly, if we contend that our bearing with each other of social positions and thus participating in society is what makes us humane, then any kind of representative leadership will remain to some extent untrue to what we call humane. As bearership does more justice to humane interaction and participation, it is to be prioritized to leadership.
Moreover, as I argued above, to bear means to abide, to be located and situated. We bear together by abiding by the positions and situations we inevitably dwell in. This is a bodily confinement to our bearing together. The more people there are to be represented, the less leaders will be capable to be present where these people actually dwell. Indeed, worldwide we have the problem of leaders who forget their people after elections or who do not appear during states of emergency because they represent too many people to be able to be present at the right time and place. 20 An ethics of bearership requires that people are present and participate in rather than represent their communities as leaders. This is another reason to prefer bearership to leadership.
Finally, I argued earlier that representative political leadership has an inherent hierarchical structure that naturally impedes on participation and is vulnerable to power abuse. Regardless of political checks and balances, once elected, leaders have enough institutional space to abuse their power against whomever and whatever they represent. Even a ‘servantship’ model, whose leaders are called servants, implies leading from the bottom, which remains a delusive form of hierarchy and constraint to participation. Again, in a humane ethics there is no asymmetry such that some serve others or lead in serving others. Thus, as bearership does more justice to symmetric participation than leadership qua representation, the former is given priority over the latter.
2. The first part of the argument offers reasons in support of bearership; bearership is more true to the humane ideal of social participation than leadership qua representation. However, this does not exclude the concept of leadership. There is a practical level of politics that demands us to refine the argument by taking leadership on board as a supplementary to bearership.
The more complex the participation in a community becomes, the more it will be necessary that such participation is properly monitored, or to use Plato’s term, guarded. According to the Platonic idea, the guardian ‘oversees’ that the participants of a society each comes to its right in participating in their society (see ‘Challenges of leadership ethics’). However, contrary to Plato’s model, guardianship within the framework of bearership should not form a prestigious representative class, but rather be rotated among the participants. It is in order to explain the role of such guardianship in comparison to Rost’s (1991) idea of ‘headship’. Rost distinguishes between headship (a formal position) and leadership (taking lead within or without position). The kind of guardianship required in a model of bearership is something like a ‘headship’ of a small community. This means a confined form of leadership. The head is a coordinator or facilitator. The headship is to be temporally occupied by and exchanged between members of a community. Everyone capable of doing so should head the community for a while. Another term for such headship that is perhaps closer to bearership is that of curatorship. The word curator goes back to cura, the Latin for ‘care’. The curator is a guardian in the sense of a ‘caretaker’. ‘Care’, so I showed, can be understood in terms of bearership, in particular, forbearance. Forbearance means caring as well as watching that care is taken. A curator is such a guardian or ‘caretaker’ of our ‘taking care’. The ‘caretaker’ cannot care in the place of others but rather, as it were, cares that each can take his or her own share of care. Also the person who acts as caretaker will have to be replaced so as to return to her personal share. Like guards that change shifts, the guardianship is to be rotated. The principle is one of Kantian reciprocity: you guard others as you wish all to be guarded. This leaves you with no choice but to guard well. Hence, the caretaker is a rotating participatory function and no independent representative position.
Leadership in this sense of guardianship seems to cohere well with the ethic of bearership. However, although we need guardianship, it remains a supplementary to and for the sake of bearership. Hence, we can state that bearership has priority over leadership, but we need transitory guardian leadership in order to protect bearership.
To conclude the above two arguments, we can state that bearership has priority over leadership, but also, that we do require transitory ‘bearership leaders’ as a transitory supplement to achieve and protect bearership.
Examples of ethical bearership
In the following section I would like to illustrate these arguments for the priority of bearership by means of examples taken from the South African context. I shall apply the first argument to examples concerning education and labour and the second one environmental conservation.
1. The first example pertains to education. Every morning that I drive my children to school I encounter a black family, a mother and father together with their child, waiting at a T-junction for the taxi to take their child to school. Mostly the taxi will be late. My children visit a very good governmental school, and as is the case with a number of such schools, we need to pay high school fees to ensure the appointment of good teachers and the provision of the necessary educational facilities. The school can only afford to waive the fees of some needy families. The family at the T-junction cannot afford school fees and, like most families in South Africa, has to revert to a governmental school of poor quality. This scenario is well known. For most children post-apartheid has brought no better chances to receive good education. The government has committed itself to changing the situation, but a minority of children in the country is still enjoying privileged access to education, whilst the majority is yet disadvantaged. The crossroads of the T-junction prevails. How does a conception of bearership apply to such an example?
Consider the first argument that bearership has priority over leadership, but that we do require transitory ‘bearership leaders’ as a supplement to achieve bearership. The second part of the first argument states that this might involve transitional transformational leadership: leading people by raising their moral consciousness of the meaning of bearership. Such transitional leadership has the supportive purpose of leading people to become bearers rather than leaders. This argument is particularly relevant for the situation of education. Education can play a major role in raising the moral consciousness of the meaning of bearership. Such education must be transformational in the strongest sense of the word. Firstly, transformational leaders must teach children that a humane society is only possible where all have equal access to and bear together the positions that constitute a society. If some enjoy privileged access, for whatever reasons, we deal with an inhumane society. The ‘struggle’ has been for the sake of a humane society, often phrased with the term, ‘ubuntu’. If education is to be transformational, it will have to raise the consciousness of children towards the radical need of the humane transformation that the struggle stands for. This is an uncomfortable truth, the truth that the struggle is going on and the walk to freedom long. Secondly, transformational leaders will have to teach children not to become leaders but bearers of transformation. They have to learn that, not special leaders, but all citizens are to transform the society to one in which we bear together instead of leading each other. The T-junctions, the crossroads of heritage, power, money, etc., should not separate people into leaders and followers. If we do not learn that we are all bearers, we shall never achieve the humane society that the struggle represents. The struggle starts with childhood – children will already have to learn to take the lead towards bearership themselves.
2. Take as another example the situation of domestic workers. During apartheid a majority of white South African families employed black domestic workers in their private households. Domestic workers were known as servants. As is well known, many servants had to work like slaves. You worked dawn to dusk, weekends too. You lived in a shack and you could not afford a school uniform for your children. Your children went to school on foot, often barefoot. Out there on the farms, in the heart of the country, things have not changed much since, but rather, it seems that the ‘heart of darkness’ has found its way right into the midst of the towns and townships, into the centre of many black families. You don’t need to go to the T-junctions to find the servants. You will find them, some with a matric 21 , in small, modern black households where the parents are medical doctors and their two to three children attend prestigious private schools. Their servants work from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., get R1000 per month and have one weekend per month free. Like in old times, domestic workers need these jobs; it is even said that the jobs give them pride, especially if they work for leading people who serve in significant positions in society, people who are too important to find the time to clean up their own private households.
The second example pertains to the third part of the first argument that deals with the relationship between servantship and bearership. I argued that ethics qua bearership does not entail leadership qua ‘servantship’, but rather that servantship can be a supplementary to bearership, for instance, where some serve in particular positions in a community by taking lead in supplying medical, legal, financial or other services, which a community needs for its bearing together. Moreover, I argued that in a humane ethics there is no asymmetry such that some serve others or even lead in serving others, but rather, there is the symmetry of bearing together. Do domestic workers serve a community by bearing with others in a symmetric way?
Obviously, where domestic workers become servants in the traditional manner, as the example above illustrates, there is no such symmetry. But what if there were a reciprocity of need (a domestic worker needs a job and the servant leader needs a worker), and domestic workers would be treated fairly and well? Then the argument could be that domestic workers might help some people to serve in leading positions such as supplying medical services, and in such cases at least indirectly play an important role in a humane society.
This argument hides problems, which a country that is still undergoing the ‘struggle’ for a humane society should pierce critically. Firstly, if one person is constantly bound to serve another person who serves as leader, we deal with the asymmetric relation of ‘servant’ to ‘servant leader’. Such asymmetry is inconsistent with bearership, unless the roles can be rotated regularly. Secondly, people can only bear together humanely where they acknowledge each other as equal bearers of a society. There is no such acknowledgment if one person were to keep the role of serving another person in order to lead. Thirdly, we need to distinguish between private and public services. It is one thing to serve the private interests of persons, another, to serve in positions that directly constitute what makes us bear together a society. If you clean up my private household because I am too tired or idle or indolent or busy to do so, then you do not bear with me a society, but rather, you serve my very personal interests. My clean household does not serve any public role. A private cleaner is not a public bearer of society. It is yet another thing to serve and thus bear a society by being involved in public cleaning services like the maintenance of streets, schools and hospitals, and thereby directly help bear the needs of a society. Fourthly, imagine you discuss future careers with children and some opt to become private servants – if you want – domestic workers. Of course, you cannot imagine that. The need for jobs forces people to accept such options. In such a relationship some people, the workers, are at the disposal of other people, their employers. The asymmetry of this relationship is evident. But what if someone really needs a job and you only try to help. If you help another person to do what he or she does not really want to do, then your help is of a dubious character. However, an easy way to test if you really wish to help is to see if you are prepared to arrange payment but let the person who looks for domestic work be employed in public services of an equal bearing with others. Examples of such a public service were cleaning up the environment (see the third example below) or town or helping the elderly. Pay someone to do so and you bear together with the person a humane society. Again, people who serve a society in whatever way should neither be servants nor superiors, but rather, they should play their distinct and distinguished roles as equal bearers of a humane society and allow others to do the same. Also this way towards a humane society seems to be very long. In particular, it will be up to the children, the new generation, who still discuss their careers at school, to establish a society where we do not need servants because we are all bearers in our own right.
3. The third example involves an environmental project. I live at the west end of the Wild Coast close to Bonza Bay. Our coast is a central part of the city, and yet has remained for the most part rather pristine. However, the last couple of years our coast has suffered badly from human pollution. The mess caused by careless visitors, boisterous beach parties and floods of dogs, has increasingly invaded a large part of the beautiful coastal area. Recently a ‘white and black’ couple set up a small beach cafe and simply started to clean up the mess. Moreover, they started to involve people to help look after the shore. They did not tire of telling people about the reciprocal need to regain the exquisite qualities of this space of retreat. They gained support to the ‘domino’ effect that, after less than a year, our shore has become pretty clean again; litter found its way to waste bins, the parties went elsewhere, dog owners began to abide by the rules, and the coast has found its old charm. I dedicate this passage to these best of coastal guardians, call them guardian angels.
This is an example of what I have called guardianship as a form of leadership for the sake of bearership. The guardianship demonstrated by our coastal guardians shows two important elements. Firstly, there is the element of reciprocity: to get convinced of the need to guard your living space as you wish others to guard it. Our coastal guardians could not do that without support. And they will yet need more help, which means we have to involve caretakers of the whole community to rotate the guardianship. Secondly, there is the element of participation. The municipality and local government forsook the conservation of this coastal area long time ago. Appeals to restore it were to no avail. Sometimes some representatives would do some things. But you cannot expect representatives to take care of everything, to be where they are needed at all times and in all places. In this sense, representative politics structurally fails actual affairs, and consequently sustainable development. Nothing happened until the people themselves took the lead and together started bearing forth a major change. Leadership here takes the form of a transitory guardianship, coming from the bottom of caring participants rather than from the top of removed representatives. Nobody represents the coast, but rather all of us share and thus have to care for the shore – eventually by rotating shifts. Interestingly enough, the more people take part in projects such as the one above, the less important the role of guardian becomes. And now that things are taken care of by the citizens themselves, the municipality has adopted an easier role that is more likely to be fulfilled. This example of guardian bearership is one that gives hope – hope that we do not need to wait for the government or future generation to accomplish change, but rather that sustainable change is possible for the present. Ultimately, it gives hope to meet the challenges of bearership.
Challenges of bearership ethics
Earlier, I discussed three major challenges of leadership ethics: the challenges of justice, power and sustainability. I indicated that these challenges raise structural problems inherent to leadership as such. My contention is that these challenges are best met in terms of ethical bearership, or to put it more strongly, they are really challenges of ethical bearership. Let me close by indicating why bearership offers an answer to these challenges.
I formulated the challenges of leadership ethics by taking the ancient Greek philosophers as a point of departure. I maintained, firstly, that like the ancient Greeks, we are still concerned with the unjust abuse of leadership positions for the sake of self-interest. Plato’s – and one could add, Aristotle’s – ‘good humans’ would compete to avoid to rule, because who rules is burdened with the challenge of giving common wealth priority over self-interest. Every citizen should be empowered to come to his or her right. It is significant that the Greek term for justice, díke, can be translated with the term ‘joint’ (Heidegger, 1980: 350). Justice in this sense pertains to a joining and bonding element between two parties. In other words, justice means to attune two or more parties to each other such that they bear together and each comes to its own right. The contrary is adikia, injustice, where one party takes the right of disposal over another party. This is indeed what the appeal to bearership pertains to: bonding participants of a community in the symmetric way justice calls for. It is for this reason that I call justice really a challenge of bearership. The moment one party is made superior to another party, we deal with potential injustice. This is illustrated above by the example of one party taking the lead by virtue of its privileged education. Leadership does not necessarily involve injustice. Rather, as I have argued, as a transitory supplement to bearership, leadership is needed to achieve or protect bearership. But this amounts to a secondary role to bearership and not an independent ideal form of leadership.
The challenge of just bearership is directly linked to the problem of power. Bearership is an appeal to the justice of symmetric power relations. Consider the Ring of Gyges. The Ring points to the power of injustice, that is, where one party takes the right of disposal over another party. Again, bearership challenges the core of representative leadership because of its inherent hierarchical structure that, however fairly it be performed, inevitably grants one party the power of disposal over another party. Perhaps the worst of asymmetries remains the ‘servant–master’, or rather ‘servant–serving leader’ relationship, illustrated above by the example of domestic workers acting as servants in the private households of people who represent society by offering leading public services. The conception of bearership advocates the symmetric participation of all the parties of a community. People are not to represent one another, but to be empowered to participate equally by all taking full responsibility for the abode they share and bear together.
Finally, bearership is aligned to sustainability. Using Aristotelian virtue ethics, I have argued that the virtuous agent will take into account both what is socially effective in a particular context and the long-term moral effect of decisions and actions on society. Sustainability means first and foremost taking responsibility for one’s place in the socio-ecological abode one bears with others. The more people are directly liable for the flourishing of their society, the less they will leave concerns to representatives and the more one will expect them to take care of sustainable decisions and actions. I tried to demonstrate this point by means of the example of the Wild Coast guardians. The idea is thus that each person takes care of societal affairs in the long run instead of entrusting the wellbeing of society to leaders elected for short terms. You will ask how feasible this idea of bearership politics is. In effect, we already have structures in the form of city councils and municipalities worldwide that could be utilized as bearership societies. The point is to give such councils back humane power, in other words, to empower all the people living and participating in such communities to govern themselves in a just and sustainable way. Ultimately, if we are naturally humane by bearing together positions we bear upon, then the way we ought to live to protect this humane basis is an eco-societal affair that we all share as inhabitants of our closest environments right across our globe.
Conclusion
How ethical is leadership? Leadership requires ethics, but does ethics also call for leadership? I addressed these questions by arguing for ethics that, rather than requiring leadership, entails what I call ‘bearership’. I developed and used South African examples to illustrate two main arguments for the priority of bearership to leadership. Firstly, ethics qua ‘bearership’ (‘humane’ ethics) essentially involves our bearing with and not our leading of each other. In this sense ethics entails bearership rather than leadership. Secondly, bearership does more justice to humane social interaction and participation than leadership qua representation; also for this reason, bearership is to be prioritized over leadership. However, though bearership is given ethical priority to leadership, I also argued that leadership ethics is required as a transitory supplement to bearership. Firstly, we need transitory transformative and servant leadership ethics to transform persons and to serve qualified roles towards bearing with each other. Secondly, we need transitory guardian leadership in order to protect bearership. Thus, whilst leadership is not at the centre of ethics qua bearership ethics, it is required to achieve and protect ethical bearership. Ultimately, the argument for bearership poses demanding challenges of justice, power and sustainability. Bearership advocates justice understood as the alignment of all participants of a community such that each comes to its own right instead of being at the disposal of another. Consequently, bearership is an appeal to the justice of symmetric power relations. People are not to represent each other, but rather they are all to take full responsibility to sustain the abode they share and bear together. Thus, each, according to his or her own interests and capacities, is to be empowered to participate as a bearer of sustainable justice. Ideally, people would compete not to rule, and the Ring of Gyges should lose its power. As we are human, all too human, the Ring will remain powerful. The ethics of bearership advocates that we all wear, or as it were, bear with each other the ring.