Performance Appraisals

In Management Today (March 2011), Dr Tim Baker presents a suggestion about how to improve the employee performance appraisal process. He proposes that the following five 10-minute conversations be repeated each six months:

Topic	Content	Key Questions
Climate review	Job satisfaction, morale and communication	How would you rate your current job satisfaction? How would you rate morale? How would you rate communnication?
Training and development	Development over the next 6 months	What are some skills you would like to learn? What courses would you like to undertake?
Innovation and continuous improvement	Ways to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the business	What's one way you could improve your own working efficiencies? What's one way we could improve our department?
Improved performance	Improving performance and standards	What are some opportunities for improved performance? How can I assist you to do that?
Career	Career direction and guidance	What part of your job do you enjoy? What would we need to do to help you develop?

I like the idea of a continuous process rather than a scary once-a-year meeting. This needs to be balanced, however, with a couple of things. First, it is essential that these are conversations - not just the manager asking questions. The questions should lead to agreed goals. And second, the process needs to be augmented with specific times when the manager rates progress and advises about salary increases.

Ecclesiastical g-strings

In the podcast A Love Supreme: Jazz, Justice, Democracy, Otis Moss III builds a model for leadership on aspects of jazz. He makes some interesting connections, albeit extremely American. But I couldn't pass up this gem:

Church is not concerned about the love ethic any more ... but a market-driven ministry ... that turns the preacher into an theological exotic dancer, looking for someone to put a dollar in their ecclesiastical g-string.

How do illegal immigrants get into Australia

In a radio interview about her candidacy for the Australian Senate, Lin Hatfield Dodds claims that only 3 - 4% of Australia's illegal immigrants arrive via the boats that we hear so much about. The rest fly in on normal commercial planes.

If that's true, it makes a mockery of the endless political wrangling about protecting our shores from people smugglers. The few who arrive in boats are almost certainly genuine refugees who have risked their lives to escape an unliveable oppression. They deserve our compassion and care more than the other 96% who have the money to fly here in safety.

Intentional Action and the Praise-Blame Asymmetry

Recent research suggests that it is easier to blame someone than to praise them. Joshua Knobe shows this clearly in the following two thought experiments:

Suppose that a vice-president goes to the chairman of the board and says OK, we've got this new policy. It's going to make huge amounts of money for our company but it's also going to harm the environment. And the chairman says, look, I know this policy is going to harm the environment but I don't care at all about that, I only care about making as much money as we possibly can. So in fact they initiate the new policy and the environment is indeed harmed. Now the question is, did the chairman of the board harm the environment intentionally? So what would you say in that instance?

Like 85% of people, I say he is to blame.

The second vignette is very similar to the first one. What differs is just the moral status of what the person is doing. So suppose we keep everything exactly the same but we just change the word 'harm' to 'help'. So now suppose the vice president goes to the chairman of the board and says, OK, we've got this new policy, it's going to make huge amounts of money for our company and it's also going to help the environment. And the chairman of the board says, look, I know it's going to help the environment but I don't care at all about that, all I care about is just making as much money as we possibly can. So let's implement the new policy. And sure enough it helps the environment. In this case did the chairman of the board help the environment intentionally?

This is From Joshua Knobe (2009). The philosophy of good intentions (podcast on ABC Radio National) but see also Joshua Knobe, Adam Cohen & Alan Leslie (2006). Acting Intentionally and the Side-Effect Effect: 'Theory of Mind' and Moral Judgment. Psychological Science 17:421-427.

Frank Hindriks seeks to explain this asymmetry by saying that praise depends on being appropriately motivated, whereas blame does not. Seems to me that just generalises the phenomenon rather than explaining it. (Frank Hindriks (2008). Intentional Action and the Praise-Blame Asymmetry. Philosophical Quarterly 58, 233: 630-41.)

Jesus the Comedian

I recently read this section of Peter Kreeft's "Before I Go: letters to our children about what really matters" (p. 94).

Jesus had a fantastic sense of humor. Even if you don't detect it in the Gospels (but how can you miss it?), you can detect it in nature. He's the mind ("logos") of God who designed nature, after all. How can you look at a basset hound and not know Jesus is a comedian? And some of those deep-sea fish -- absolutely over the top and of the wall.

The two greatest jokes of all time were the incarnation and the crucifixion. They were the two great jokes God played on the devil. The incarnation was the great disappearing act and the crucifixion was the great judo act.

Even if you don't get it now, you will in Heaven, where you will have the last laugh forever.

I love the "great judo act" image!

With regard to humour in the Gospels, I think Kreeft is pointing to the laughs Jesus probably got from the audience when he used hyperbole like passing a camel through the eye of a needle. A web search found these ...

1. Matthew 23:24 "You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel." NIV. Now that's funny!Here's the same verse from The Message:"Do you have any idea how silly you look, writing a life story that's wrong from start to finish, nitpicking over commas and semicolons?" Living Bible:"Blind guides! You strain your water so you won't accidentally swallow a gnat; then you swallow a camel!"
2. Examples or irony, sarcasm, puns, hyperbole and situation comedy in the Old Testament
3. From Terry Goodrich 
• Jesus suggested the critic should get the log out of his eye before being obsessed with a speck of dust in someone else’s.
• When Peter told Jesus that religious leaders questioned whether Jesus paid the tax, Jesus told him to reel in a fish and check its mouth. In it was enough money to pay both Jesus’ and Peter’s tax.
4. Pictures of Jesus laughing

Tips for senior business management about web site development

Eric Reiss' The 10 dos and don’ts of website development are excellent suggestions for scared or confused CEOs.

"Not Penal Substitution but Vicarious Punishment"

In Faith and Philosophy (July 2009), Mark C. Murphy poses the old question of just what it means for Jesus to die for our sins. He criticises the “penal substitution” view, not for its moral repugnance but its conceptual failure. Then he proposes a view of “vicarious punishment” which, he claims, is just as faithful to the Biblical witness, but just different enough from penal substitution to avoid its failure.

Let me see if I can simplify his argument …

First, he points out that the Atonement is a rich concept that probably can't be explained by any one theory or analogy. Furthermore, the concept raises varies difficulties and its unlikely that any one theory will deal successfully with them all.

The penal substitution theory of the Atonement says that we deserve to be punished on account of our sins, but that Jesus was punished in our place. To a well-trained Evangelical ear, that sounds very clear and straight-forward, but it raises a few questions, like:

• Why should it be that my sin is such an obstacle to my union with God? It's not such an overwhelming obstacle in my relationship with my wife or kids.
• Was Jesus punished in the place of every human, or just punished in the place of some of us?
• Isn't it morally wrong to punish one person for another's wrong-doing?
• Even if it's not morally wrong, what good does it do? If the goal of punishment is retribution, then punishing the wrong person simply fails to bring down any retribution on the guilty person.

Murphy's point, however, is something different. He claims that punishment has four essential characteristics:

1. Punishment is hard treatment, i.e. there must be some suffering.
2. Punishment must be imposed by someone in authority; it's not just revenge or vigilante justice.
3. Punishment is imposed for some failure to meet a required standard.
4. Punishment is a condemnation of the person punished.

Note that the first three are insufficient without the fourth. As an example, someone playing basketball may violate a rule and as a result the ball is handed to the other team. This is hard treatment, authoritatively imposed, for the failure to meet some standard. But a penalty like that is not a punishment, precisely because there is no moral condemnation of the player. The player broke a rule, but awarding a penalty is not a moral judgement.

A consequence of the fourth characteristic is that punishment is not transferable. You can't morally condemn one person for another's failure any more than you can praise someone for another person's success. (You might of course say “You must be proud of your son” to the mother of an Olympic medallist. Or you might say “You did a great job of training her” to the medallist's coach. But you wouldn't say “Congratulations on winning the medal” to any one other than the athlete herself – she is the only one who could be honoured for winning.) If Jesus is harshly treated by God for our failure, it could never be classified as “punishment” because the act doesn't meet the fourth criterion. Jesus could never be morally condemned for our failure.

What about the famous sermon illustration in which a person is found guilty of speeding and fined by the Judge, but then the fine is paid by the Judge (who turns out to be the person's father)? This of course may be a good analogy of the Atonement, but it is not captured under the penal substitution theory. This story is more about the punishment being eliminated rather than re-directed. The guilty party is not punished, but neither is the Judge. The Judge incurs the harsh treatment but is not condemned, while the guilty party incurs the condemnation but bears no harsh treatment.

So what's the alternative?

Murphy suggests that “vicarious punishment” is not a lot different from penal substitution, but sufficiently so that it gives a better account of Christ's Atonement. In this theory, A deserves to be punished, B undergoes hard treatment and that hard treatment constitutes A's being punished.

Are there other instances where one person is punished by having someone else treated harshly? One that Murphy never mentions is the classic whipping boy of the 17th and 18th centuries: where a close companion of a prince would be beaten for the prince's failings.

Murphy asks us to imagine a legal system where a murderer is punished by having their own spouse killed. This may be any even harsher punishment (and greater deterrent) than being killed oneself. It is not just that one's loved-one is suffering, but that one's loved-one is suffering because of one's wrongful actions.

Another example Murphy offers (from Steven Porter) is an athletic team in which the captain is made to run extra laps if anyone in the team misbehaves. This is somewhat like a CEO having to take responsibility for actions of other employees in the company. I wonder if there is an implication here that God, as universal CEO, is accepting that s/he bears responsibility for what went wrong with the world?

Murphy then deals with several objections to vicarious punishment, but I'll jump forward to how this applies to Christ.

First, note that vicarious punishment requires some sort of special relationship between the guilty party and the suffering innocent. It wouldn't work if the hard treatment was meted out to an anonymous or unrelated person. In the Atonement, our punishment is vicariously assigned to our Lord. If that special relationship is taken seriously, then this is very hard treatment indeed – that I am responsible for my Lord's suffering.

In a footnote, Murphy leaves an interesting question open. Does Jesus bear this special relationship of being Lord with just those who recognise that Lordship? If so, then those who do not have that special relationship with Jesus are, as yet, unpunished. Or is Jesus every person's Lord regardless of their acknowledgement of the fact – in which case all have been punished by his suffering?

Some implications of this view:

• Note that there are few cases where vicarious punishment could be applied without being seen as simply unjust. How can it be just to cause one person to suffer for another's wrong-doing? The only exception really is when the suffering innocent accepts the hard treatment voluntarily, and that of course if exactly the case with Christ.
• We do not get away with not being punished. It is not that Jesus was punished instead of us, but that we are punished by the fact that our Lord suffered.
• Vicarious punishment is a form of retribution: “It is far worse, incomparably so, for my Lord to be killed, and killed for my offences, than it is for me to be killed for my offences.”
• Like the team whose captain is caused to suffer, the church experiences a strong sense of unity through the fact that all of us are punished by the one act of suffering of our common Lord.
• Vicarious punishment is also form of deterrent Although we can't undo the fact that Christ has already suffered for us, we may now think “If I do this wrong thing, then it will be true that Christ's death occurred in order that I might be adequately punished for my wrong-doing.” – and that may give me good reason for not doing so.

I think Murphy misses an important point about the nature of the hard treatment in vicarious punishment. There are really two separate “hard treatments” in his examples. There is the hard treatment of the suffering innocent (such as the spouse who gets killed), but also a separate hard treatment constituted by the psychological suffering that the guilty party goes through in watching the spouse suffer, grieving for the loss, and feeling the guilt from their own responsibility for the spouse's suffering. In Murphy's example, all four criteria of punishment are met by the guilty party's suffering, quite independently of the spouse's hard treatment.

This calls into question Murphy's conclusion about the case of the Atonement. It does seem to me that his account still requires each of us to suffer for our own sins. If it wasn't for the psychological pain of us knowing that we caused our Lord's suffering, then there is no vicarious punishment. If we could brush off that pain – as it would be in the case where we had no special relationship to Christ, or if we were pathologically unable to feel empathy – then surely the "punishment" is void. But if vicarious punishment still requires the guilty to suffer, then a significant chunk of the "vicarious" part is lost, and the work of Christ is diminished.

Finally, Murphy poses the question of what role is left for forgiveness? Under any theory of Atonement in which the punishment that we deserve is applied, doesn't the punishment remove the offence? So what's left to be forgiven? On the other hand, if God can pardon us then by definition no punishment is left to impose.

Murphy draws on the distinction between criminal law and tort law to show that being punished for our sins does not remove all the obstacles to union with God. Criminal law involves some violation which is answered by punishment; tort law involves some violation that is answered by compensation. It makes sense to talk about a victimless crime, but no sense to talk about a victimless tort. One action may be both a crime and a tort, and just because one is sent to jail as punishment for a crime does not prevent the victim seeking compensation via a separate process. The one act may bear two independent liabilities – one to punishment and one to compensation – and being freed from liability in one respect does not entail being freed from liability in the other respect.

If we apply that to the case between us and God, our crimes against divine law may be dealt with by the vicarious punishment of Jesus. But we have also wronged God, and how can we provide compensation for that when everything we have is God's already? That is why we also require forgiveness.