SELF-TEST QUESTIONS

1. What are a person’s spiritual and moral guidelines, what is their role in his activities?

A person’s spiritual and moral guidelines are what a person strives for spiritually and morally. Their role in human activity is very great, because his actions and actions will directly depend on his spiritual and moral guidelines. A person who has a developed spiritual life, as a rule, has an important personal quality: his spirituality means striving for the heights of ideals and thoughts that determine the direction of all activities, therefore some researchers characterize spirituality as the morally oriented will and mind of a person.

On the contrary, a person whose spiritual life is not developed is spiritless, unable to see and feel all the diversity and beauty of the world around him.

2. What is the essence of the categorical imperative?

The categorical imperative is an unconditional compulsory requirement (command), not allowing objections, mandatory for all people, regardless of their origin, position, circumstances. And as Kant argued, there is only one categorical imperative: “always act in accordance with such a maxim, the universality of which as a law you can at the same time desire” (maxim is the highest principle, the highest rule). The categorical imperative affirms a person’s personal responsibility for the actions he has committed and teaches not to do to others what you do not wish for yourself. Consequently, these provisions, like morality in general, are humanistic in nature, for the “other” acts as a Friend. This is the essence of the categorical imperative.

3. What are moral values? Describe them.

Moral values ​​are the most important moral values, what is dear to a person in himself and in others: life, honor.

4. Why is the development of a person’s moral qualities impossible without self-education?

If a person lacks self-education (self-control), then he will not be able to gain the “experience of good deeds”, and therefore become morally rich.

5. What is the essence of worldview? Why is worldview often called the core of a person’s spiritual world?

The essence of a worldview consists of the totality of a person’s views on the world that surrounds him, therefore it is often called the core of the spiritual world of the individual. Worldview is the basis of human spirituality.

6. What types of worldview does science distinguish? What characterizes each of them?

Science identifies the following types of worldview: 1. ordinary - built on one’s own experience, formed spontaneously; 2. religious - the basis of this worldview is religion and 3. scientific - based on the achievements of science.

7. What do the concepts of “morality” and “worldview” have in common? What is their difference?

General - both morality and worldview are a totality and a system. And the difference is worldview different people may be different, but morality is the same.

8. What is the significance of worldview for human activity?

Based on a worldview, a person can act one way or another, because... he comes from his own views.

TASKS

1. Do you think morality forces a person to act in a certain way or does it give freedom? Give reasons for your answer.

Morality always acts as moderation, the ability to self-restraint; at all times and among all peoples it has been associated with restraint, close to asceticism (asceticism is a person’s ability to limit himself, to impose a ban on his natural desires, if necessary). From this concept we see that morality forces a person to act in a certain way.

2. Scientists argue that value orientations determine a person’s life goals, the “general line of the individual.” Do you agree with this statement? Give reasons for your position.

Yes, I agree with this opinion; indeed, value orientations determine a person’s life goals, because value orientations are the core of a person, those guidelines that guide a person’s activities.

3. The English thinker Adam Smith noted the importance of a wise and creative course of action, a combination of prudence with valor, with love for humanity, with sacred respect for justice, with heroism. “This prudence,” said Adam Smith, “involves the union of an excellent head with an excellent heart.” How do you understand the author’s thesis about “combining an excellent head with an excellent heart”? What, in your opinion, is the connection between this provision and moral values?

U good man Everything must be excellent, both mind and heart. Any person should think with his head and listen to his heart before doing anything. On the moral side, if a person listens to his heart, he will not act cruelly and selfishly.

4. Academician B.V. Rauschenbach wrote: “Isn’t it alarming that the characteristics of “a successful businessman”, “a good organizer of production” sometimes turn out to be more important than the assessment of “a decent person”? Do you agree with the scientist's opinion? Give reasons for your position. Try to formulate your own definition of the concept of “decency”.

Decency is the moral quality of a person who always strives to fulfill his promises and does not intentionally harm others. The characteristics “successful businessman” and “good production organizer” are not always more important than the assessment “decent person”, because both a businessman and a production manager can also be decent people. Of course in modern society It is very important that people who occupy certain positions are decent.

5. Russian sociologists conducted a study of students’ values. Students named the following value orientations as the most important for them in life: to obtain a good education- 29% of respondents; have an interesting job - 34%; get a prestigious job - 26%; achieve material wealth - 42%; have good health - 50%; my family - 70%; enjoy life - 26%. Named something else or found it difficult to answer - 5% of the students surveyed. How do you feel about these results? Which values ​​from the list above do you consider most important to you? What would you add to this list?

From this list of values, family comes first; second place is taken by health, third place by material wealth.

For myself, I would also keep this sequence. It is very important that in modern society family and spiritual values ​​are valuable, and material wealth fades into the background.

There are three main factors that managers face in the decision-making process: certainty, risk and uncertainty. What characterizes each of them?

Certainty

Certainty. A situation in which a manager can find correct solution, because he knows the results of choosing each option.

The ideal condition for decision making is the condition of certainty, when the manager can make the right decision due to the fact that he knows exactly the consequences of choosing each of the available options.

For example, when the treasurer of Missouri decides which bank to store the state's surplus funds, he knows exactly what interest each bank is offering and how much he can earn from it, that is, he knows exactly what the results of choosing each option will be. As you understand, this condition is in no way typical of the situations in which most management decisions are made. This condition is more ideal than real.

Risk. Conditions under which a decision maker can assess the likelihood of certain outcomes.

Much more often we are faced with a risk condition.

By risk we mean conditions under which the decision maker can assess the likelihood of a particular option or the consequences of his choice. The ability to assess the likelihood of certain consequences depends on personal experience manager and the availability of secondary information. Under risk conditions, the manager has relevant historical data that allows him to assess the likelihood of different options. We invite you to consider the following example.

Let's say you manage a ski resort in the Colorado Rockies and are considering adding another ski lift. Obviously, your decision will largely depend on the amount of additional income you will receive as a result of building a new lift, and this income, in turn, will depend on how snowy the season turns out to be. The decision problem is made a little easier when you are reminded that you have fairly reliable historical rainfall data for your region. Weather data shows that in the last 10 years there have been three years of heavy snowfall, five years of normal snowfall and two years of light snowfall. Can you use this information to determine the amount of income you can expect after building a new lift? If you have accurate information about the amount of annual income over a relatively long period, the answer to this question will be positive.

You could, for example, create a formula to calculate expected value; in other words, calculate the conditional cash receipts for each possible outcome by multiplying the expected profit by the probability of snowfall. As a result, you will get the average expected return, provided that the degree of probability remains unchanged. As shown in table. 5 the expected income from the construction of an additional new ski lift will be 687.5 thousand dollars. This data may justify either a positive or negative decision, which will depend on the costs required to generate additional income, such as the cost of building a new lift, additional annual running costs on its content, interest rate on the loan, etc.

Table 5: Expected revenue from building a new ski lift

Expected income (thousand dollars)

Probability = Expected cost for each option (thousands of dollars) Heavy snowfalls 850 0.3 255 Normal snowfalls 725 0.5 362.5 Light snowfalls 350 0.2 70 687.5

Uncertainty

Uncertainty. A situation in which the person who makes the decision can neither accurately nor with any degree of probability assess the possible results of a particular decision

But what happens when you need to make a decision, but you are not at all sure of its outcome and cannot even accurately assess the likelihood of one or another result? This decision condition is called uncertainty.

Managers, when making decisions, encounter these conditions very often. The choice of any option in this case depends on how limited the amount of information is at the disposal of the person who makes the decision.

There is another factor that influences the choice of options under conditions of uncertainty - the psychological orientation of the person who makes the decision. Yes, an optimistic manager will make a choice that can give the so-called maximax result (one that provides the maximum of the maximum possible income), a pessimist manager will choose the maximum-minimal option (one that will provide the maximum of the minimum possible income), and a manager who wants to minimize its maximum “losses”, will make a minimax choice. We propose to consider these different approaches to choosing solutions using the following specific example.

We bring to your attention a situation in which a marketing manager at Visa International (New York) found himself. As directed by company executives, he identified four possible strategies (S1, S2, S3, S4) to stimulate demand for Visa cards throughout the Northeastern United States. However, he knows that one of his company's main competitors, MasterCard, intends to implement one of its three competitive programs (CA1; CA2, CA3) to distribute its cards in the same region. It is possible that Visa specialists do not have data from previous years that would allow them to determine the likelihood of success if each of the four strategies is chosen. Based on the available facts, the Visa manager constructs a matrix (Table 6) to display Visa's different strategies and the possible profits from their implementation depending on MasterCard's various competitive efforts.

IN in this example If the Visa manager is an optimist, he will choose strategy S4 because it promises the highest possible profit of $28 million. As you can see, this choice will approximately provide the maximum maximum profit (maximum choice).

Table 6. Return distribution matrix (in millions of dollars)

Marketing strategy of Visa Reaction of MasterCard CA1 CA2 CA3 S1 13 14 11 S2 9 15 18 S3 24 21 15 S4 18 14 28

If our manager turns out to be a pessimist, he will proceed from the assumption that the most likely worst result for each strategy is: S1 = 11, S2 = 9, S3 = 15, S4 = 14 million dollars. These are the most pessimistic results for each possible strategy. According to the maximum-minimal choice, the pessimistic manager would maximize the minimum income; in other words, he would choose strategy S3.

Managers of the third psychological type believe that once a decision is made, it will not necessarily provide the most beneficial outcome. Yes, there is a possible loss of a certain amount that could have been gained by choosing some other strategy. Managers calculate such losses by subtracting the sum of all possible options minus for each category from the amount of the maximum possible return for each available event, in our case - for each competitive program. In the Visa manager example, if MasterCard were to implement one of the three competitive programs - or CA3 - the maximum return to Visa International would be $21, $24, or $28 million, respectively (i.e. highest value in each column of the table). Subtracting the return indicators given in table. 6, from these values, we obtain the results presented in table. 7.

Table 7. Loss matrix (in millions of dollars)

Marketing strategy of Visa Reaction of MasterCard CA1 CA2 CA3 S1 11 7 17 S2 15 6 10 S3 0 0 13 S4 6 7 0

As we can see, the maximum losses when choosing one or another strategy are S1= 17, S2= 15, S3= 13, S4= 7 million dollars. The minimax choice minimizes the maximum loss, so our Visa manager would choose strategy S4. In this case, under no circumstances will the loss of profit exceed $7 million. This is clearly a much better outcome compared to the $15 million in losses that would be possible if Visa's manager chooses S2 and MasterCard decides to implement the competitive CA1 program.

However, although managers try to analyze different options whenever possible using gain and loss matrices, the factor of uncertainty often forces them to rely more on their hunches, intuition, creativity and “inner voice”.

Regardless of the conditions in which a decision must be made, each manager uses his own style in this process.

1. What characterizes decision-making under conditions of certainty?

2. Describe the characteristics of decision making under risk.

3. How can a manager make decisions under conditions of uncertainty?

Listing possible types of social action,

Weber points out the following four: goal-rational, value-rational, traditional and affective. What characterizes each of the listed types of action?

If the subject acts purposefully, he clearly understands what he wants to achieve, what ways and means are most suitable and effective for this. The individual anticipates the possible reactions of others, determines how and to what extent they can be used for his own purposes, correlates goals and means, calculates the positive and negative consequences of his actions and finds a reasonable measure of the combination of personal goals and social obligations. Thus, goal-oriented action is entirely based on rationalization and modeling social life individual and the criterion of rationality is success. That is why M. Weber classifies this type of social action as an “ideal type.” The closest to goal-oriented actions will be the actions of a businessman who tries to calculate the actions and reactions of partners and competitors and thereby adjust his actions in order to achieve the goal as quickly as possible.

Concerning value-rational action, then M. Weber characterizes him as follows: “A purely value-rational act is the one who, regardless of foreseeable consequences, acts in accordance with his convictions and does what, as it seems to him, duty, dignity, beauty, religious prescriptions, etc.” Thus, If for purposeful-rational action the motive is primarily the individual’s goal, regardless of the means and tools with which it is achieved, then for value-rational action the means of achieving the goal are primary. These means are precisely the values ​​of individuals that guide them when choosing a course of action. An example of a value-rational action is the actions of a patriot.

Defining characteristic affective action is one or another emotional state of the subject (anger, joy, passion, inspiration, fear, etc.). The main thing in such an action is pursuit To immediate gratification of the passion possessing the individual. That is, an action committed in a state of passion and directed at another or others will be affective.

And finally traditional action, or action through tradition or habit. This type of social action is formed on the basis of imitation of certain patterns of behavior enshrined in cultural tradition. IN in this case the individual acts according to the principle “like everyone else,” “as it has always been.” Traditional actions include any customs and traditions accepted in a given society, which we often follow out of habit and unconsciously. For example, a greeting ritual such as shaking hands is an action through tradition.

It should be noted here that the last two types of actions are not social in the strict sense of the word. The point is that neither affective nor traditional actions are often conscious and, therefore, not planned by the subjects. Meanwhile, awareness and rationality of actions are precisely one of the fundamental principles of performing social actions.

M. Weber notes that people most often act purposefully and value-rationally. Moreover, an increase in the rationalization of social processes is a trend in the historical development of society.

One of the essential components of the “rationalization of action” is the replacement of internal adherence to familiar mores and customs with systematic adaptation for reasons of interest. In addition, there is a displacement of value-rational behavior in favor of goal-oriented behavior, in which people no longer believe in values, but in success. Rationalization is thus understood as a sign of Western European civilization. First of all, the way of farming, management in all spheres of social life, the way people think, their way of feeling and their way of life in general is rationalized. All this is accompanied by a colossal strengthening of the role of science, which is the pure embodiment of the principle of rationality. This is how the modern industrial type of society has developed, which differs from the traditional one.

So, M. Weber identifies four types of social action, which are most often found in the joint life activities of people. IN different types societies, certain types of actions may be predominant. As humanity develops, the movement moves from traditional and affective actions, which were the basis of traditional society, to purposeful and value-rational ones, which are the basis of industrial and post-industrial types social structures. Moreover, goal-oriented relationships are increasingly replacing value-rational ones.