Opportunism
In the class, we looked up the definition of "opportunism" on dictionary.com. I want to duplicate it in the blogpost to facilitate further discussion: "opportunism - the policy or practice, as in politics, business, or one's personal affairs, of adapting actions, decision, etc., to expediency or effectiveness regardless of the sacrifice of ethical principles; action or judgment in accordance with this policy".
This seems to be the definition we used in our class discussion; however, the notes to this assignment introduce the reader to opportunism the following way "opportunism - taking advantage of circumstances". Although the notes further expand and recreate the definition from the dictionary, this excerpt made me think whether there exists a term tangential to opportunism that describes a policy in accordance with which you do take advantage of the circumstances as long as there is no sacrifice to the ethical principles.
"Taking advantage of circumstances" sounds like a policy worth pursuing -- I don't think there is such a thing as exploitation of circumstances; you either use them to your benefit, or you don't; circumstances themself don't care. Now, it is clear why some people choose not to act opportunistically -- opportunism implies exploitation, putting your self-interest above others. It is not clear to me, though, why some people choose not to take advantage of circumstances when there is no violation of moral principle involved. I will leave this as an open question to which I don't have an answer.
Going back to acting opportunistic as per the original definition, I want to frame my own thinking. I can't recall acting opportunistic in the negative connotation of the word, and in retrospect of some "opportunities" (although I would rather not call them so) I know exactly why. In personal decision-making, I think moral evaluation comes beforehand of "cost" evaluation; for instance, if a seemingly compelling opportunity might cause moral violations, I would not even proceed to evaluating its cost and/or benefit, I would just pass on it. Hence any opportunistic options don't even make it to the consideration part of the thinking funnel.
Now that I put it into words, I think this is the right approach to avoid being overloaded on a day-to-day basis. There is a lot of thinking involved in life, and it is crucial to filter out unnecessary decision-making as soon as possible.
On a deeper level, although I will not provide specific examples, I think the best decision-making comes from thinking decades down the line, with 2nd-3rd order effects in mind. And given that long-term thinking framework, accordance to moral policies guarantees higher return over time than opportunism.
This seems to be the definition we used in our class discussion; however, the notes to this assignment introduce the reader to opportunism the following way "opportunism - taking advantage of circumstances". Although the notes further expand and recreate the definition from the dictionary, this excerpt made me think whether there exists a term tangential to opportunism that describes a policy in accordance with which you do take advantage of the circumstances as long as there is no sacrifice to the ethical principles.
"Taking advantage of circumstances" sounds like a policy worth pursuing -- I don't think there is such a thing as exploitation of circumstances; you either use them to your benefit, or you don't; circumstances themself don't care. Now, it is clear why some people choose not to act opportunistically -- opportunism implies exploitation, putting your self-interest above others. It is not clear to me, though, why some people choose not to take advantage of circumstances when there is no violation of moral principle involved. I will leave this as an open question to which I don't have an answer.
Going back to acting opportunistic as per the original definition, I want to frame my own thinking. I can't recall acting opportunistic in the negative connotation of the word, and in retrospect of some "opportunities" (although I would rather not call them so) I know exactly why. In personal decision-making, I think moral evaluation comes beforehand of "cost" evaluation; for instance, if a seemingly compelling opportunity might cause moral violations, I would not even proceed to evaluating its cost and/or benefit, I would just pass on it. Hence any opportunistic options don't even make it to the consideration part of the thinking funnel.
Now that I put it into words, I think this is the right approach to avoid being overloaded on a day-to-day basis. There is a lot of thinking involved in life, and it is crucial to filter out unnecessary decision-making as soon as possible.
On a deeper level, although I will not provide specific examples, I think the best decision-making comes from thinking decades down the line, with 2nd-3rd order effects in mind. And given that long-term thinking framework, accordance to moral policies guarantees higher return over time than opportunism.
I would have liked to see you push this further. Taking advantage of opportunities, without the ethical issues entailed, might have some downside to it. We talked about the risk of failure with regard to your learning in the classroom and why more students don't ask questions in class. Might that carry over to other decision making? Did it occur to you to make that sort of connection?
ReplyDeleteOn the opportunistic side, perhaps you might consider your classmates rather than ourself. Do you think some are acting opportunistically when they don't make it to class? Or would you put that in the non-ethical category?
Incidentally, this is the week when I supposedly wouldn't comment on students in Group 1. I'm commenting here because there aren't other posts for me to read and comment on at the moment. I wonder, however, if knowing you are in Group 1 mattered in how you wrote this post. Would you have been more expansive in your thinking had you known I would be commenting? If so, that's a kind of opportunism. The ethical harm might not be great, but shirking because of less monitoring, which some other students wrote about, is definitely opportunistic.
This is thought-provoking. I would guess the reason why few students ask questions is not due to risk -- class is essentially a risk-free environment, there's clearly no downside.
DeleteI don't see how skipping class is unethical either, so I wouldn't call that opportunistic. You might say that they are not being good citizens and bring down the value of the class, yet it isn't obvious to me that presence of an uninvolved student would in any way increase the utility of the education I'm paying for. If I had to guess again, I would expect you to disagree here.
With regards to specificity of blog posts, it didn't occur to me to expand and cover more. In terms of going deeper, I did think that lack of specific examples bring the quality of my post down, but I would still rather avoid using specific examples from my life because sharing too much feels uncomfortable.
Many students are shy in the classroom. There is risk for them in overcoming that. I thought we discuss this during the very first class session.
DeleteThe last time I taught one student argued that since her parents paid her tuition she had an obligation to them to come to class, unless of course there was a legitimate reason to do otherwise. Of course the parents can't monitor this. And some students may not feel this sense of obligation is there. I will say that I can monitor it and the high rate of students skipping class is discouraging to me.