The Office and Philosophy

Scenes from the Unexamined Life

J. Jeremy Wisnewski

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781405175555
• eBook ISBN: 9781444357295
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Just when you thought paper couldn't be more exciting, this book comes your way! This book—jammed full of paper—unites philosophy with one of the best shows ever: The Office. Addressing both the current American incarnation and the original British version, The Office and Philosophy brings these two wonders of civilization together for a frolic through the mundane yet curiously edifying worlds of Scranton's Dunder-Mifflin and Slough's Wernham-Hogg.

Is Michael Scott in denial about death? Are Pam and Jim ever going to figure things out? Is David Brent an essentialist? Surprisingly, The Office can teach us about the mind, Aristotle, and humiliation. Even more surprisingly, paper companies can allow us to better understand business ethics. Don't believe it? Open this book, and behold its beautiful paper…

Join the philosophical fray as we explore the abstract world of philosophy through concrete scenes of the unexamined life in The Office. You may discover that Gareth Keenan is secretly a brilliant logician, that Dwight Schrute is better off deceiving himself, that David Brent is an example of hyperreality, and that Michael Scott is hopelessly lost (but you probably already knew that!).

MEMO 1 PAPER THIN MORALITY

1

Screws and Nails: Paper Tigers and Moral Monsters in The Office

J. Jeremy Wisnewski

We’re Screwed

The problem with doing what’s right is simple: there are too many ways to screw it up, and usually only one way to nail it. From the moment I get up in the morning, I’m ready for something to go wrong—and I don’t have to wait long for it to happen.

The odds are just against us. Given all the things that might happen in a day (and there’s a lot that happens every day), the likelihood that those things will not involve somebody screwing up in some way are just abysmally small. Even given the number of things that I do in a day—the number of possibilities I have to choose from—the chance that I’ll pick the thing that isn’t messed up is pretty much negligible. So, I’m screwed—but so are you—and for some reason, knowing that makes me feel better. I see vindication for my view everywhere— especially in The Office. No matter how much people try to get things right, no matter what their intentions are, things are always screwed up; no one seems to nail decency.

We fail to be decent for different reasons. Philosophers generally consider three categories of moral failure: evil (wanting to do wrong), weakness of will (not being able to stop yourself from doing wrong), and ignorance (not knowing that what you’re doing is wrong). Knowing the ways we mess up, philosophers often contend, might help us limit our propensity to screw things up so completely.

But there’s an important category of moral failure missing from this list—one that The Office helps us see clearly. This is the category of moral blindness. Even when we want to do what’s right, and know what rules we should follow, and have the strength of will to follow these rules, we still botch things up in tremendous ways. My solitary piece of evidence for this category of moral failure is found in one place: the manager’s office at Dunder-Mifflin, and his name is Michael Scott.

Getting to Know Yourself: Some Species of Moral Failure

The rather despairing view of our daily lives that I’ve been painting (we’ll call it the “we’re screwed view”) has prompted some great work in moral philosophy—the branch of philosophy that is fundamentally concerned with the nature of right and wrong, good and evil, and with our capacity to engage in one sort of action rather than another. Indeed, our most famous moral theories are dedicated to telling us what we can do to guarantee that we won’t screw things up.¹ Plato (c. 427–347 BCE), for example, thought that all moral failure was the result of ignorance. The reason people fail to do what’s right is just that they do not know what’s right. Once you know what the right thing to do is, you can’t help but do it.

Other philosophers have taken darker views of human motivation, recognizing that some people are just downright malicious. No amount of moral education will ever enable such people to do the right thing. There are a couple prime candidates for this kind of moral failure in The Office: Creed and Andy. Creed is routinely weird, but he’s also often surprisingly creepy, and sometimes in a downright malicious way. When Pam begins to dress less conservatively in the office, for instance, Creed loiters at her desk, staring at her chest for several moments. Pam is obviously distressed by Creed’s lustful looks, and she asks him to go back to his desk. He ignores her request, continues to ogle her breasts, and says “in a minute …” (“The Coup”).

In certain respects, Stamford’s Andy is even worse. It’s Andy, after all, who essentially engineers Dwight’s short-lived departure from the office. After botching up a sales call, Andy continues an attempt to convince Michael that Dwight is utterly worthless:

Andy: So sorry man. I really screwed that up.

Michael: Oh, don’t worry about it.

Andy: I really Schruted it.

Michael: What?

Andy: I Schruted it. It’s just this thing people say around your office all the time, like when you really screw things up in a really irreversible way: you Schruted it. I don’t know where it comes from though. Think it comes from Dwight Schrute?

Michael: I dunno. Who knows how words are formed … (“Traveling Salesmen”)

Earlier in the same episode, Andy had compared the staff to the “Superfriends,” insisting that in this regard Dwight was the odd man out: “It’s like everyone has their own special skill, you know, just like the superfriends … except for Dwight, who’s more of a super dud. I mean, he’d be a superfriend if there was a superfriend whose superpower was always being late.”

When these first efforts at bad-mouthing Dwight fail to get Michael’s attention, Andy ups the ante: he breaks into Dwight’s car, looking for something he can use against Dwight. He finds a receipt from a New York City toll booth, and uses this to convince Michael that Dwight is attempting another coup. This is obvious malicious self-service: Andy wants Michael’s affection to further his own career, and wants to ruin Dwight because Dwight stands in his way (and, well, because he’s Dwight).

Fortunately for us, malice is not the most common cause of inappropriate action. Much more common is our inability to refrain from acting on our desires. The term philosophers often use for such weakness of will is akrasia: when one’s desires overpower one’s rational decision-making. The Office is bubbling with akrasia—it occurs here and there in most of the characters on the show. Some of the more striking examples of this are Jan’s consistent giving in to her desires for Michael. She admits that he’s bad for her, that there’s something idiotic about him—but she nevertheless goes home with him time and again, reason be damned. (Eventually, of course, Jan decides to simply stop fighting her irrational and self-destructive desires for Michael, on the advice of her therapist.)

Meredith is an even more striking example of akratic action. Despite a decision to be done with alcohol, she repeatedly comes back to it. As the office is spring cleaning, for instance, we see her throwing out an empty bottle of vodka that she had been keeping in her desk (“The Secret”). Likewise, when alcohol is brought to an office party, she quickly gives in to her temptations, despite her decision to stay on the wagon.

The last of the common trio of moral failure is ignorance. Sometimes we fail morally because we just don’t know what the right thing to do is, either because we don’t have all the information, or because we don’t know the relevant moral principles. We see this kind of moral failure in “Christmas Party,” when Pam chooses to take a video iPod from Michael instead of Jim’s heartfelt gift (a teapot full of personal affects, intended only for Pam). Pam isn’t malicious. She has no desire to hurt Jim. Likewise, she’s not just giving in to her desire for a video iPod, despite Jim’s feelings. Rather, she doesn’t know how much Jim has put into his gift for her, and so she initially opts not to take it. The key evidence that Pam’s failure is ignorance, of course, is that she trades Dwight her iPod for the teapot as soon as she realizes what’s going on. In any instance where new knowledge will change one’s behavior substantially, it’s likely that the cause of one’s moral failure is ignorance.

But the really interesting examples of moral failure—from my philosophical vantage point, at any rate—are not when we are evil, or when we give in to our desires, or even when we are ignorant of all the facts, or of the relevant moral rules. The really fascinating moral failures are failures to see that there is even a moral issue at stake.² It is this kind of failure, I contend, that we see in Michael Scott.

Knowing But Not Seeing

Does Michael understand what it means to be offensive? In one respect, the answer must be “no.” Everyone who has even casually watched The Office will be quick to recognize that Michael is a master of the art of unintentional offense. But why is this so? Is it simply that no one has taught Michael what’s offensive, or is it something deeper? I’ll call this one like I see it: no number of rules will ever help Michael. The problem isn’t failing to know the rules. The problem is a failure to see when the rules are relevant.³

Deciding what Michael’s problem is turns out to be a thorny task. In many cases, he really seems just plain ignorant: he doesn’t seem to know what’s going on, or what he’s saying, or how it relates to other things in the world. When Michael decides to run his own diversity day, for example, he immediately kicks Toby out of the meeting for making a joke. “This is an environment of welcoming, so you should just get the hell out of here!” (“Diversity Day”). It’s as though there is a short-circuit between the words Michael utters and his ability to comprehend those words—after all, one doesn’t need a PhD in philosophy to recognize that kicking someone out of a welcoming environment is contradictory! A welcoming environment is one where you welcome people!

In other contexts, Michael attempts to justify his actions by analogy —by relating what a decent person would do in other contexts. Once again, he seems oblivious to what a decent person would do. In these situations, it looks like Michael is ignorant of the rules of the moral life. In trying to justify his email forwards to his employees, Michael claims that he doesn’t come up with these jokes. He just delivers them, and “you wouldn’t arrest a guy who was just delivering drugs from one guy to another” (“Sexual Harassment”). When Toby tells him he shouldn’t send out inappropriate jokes, regardless of their source, Michael replies that “there’s no such thing as an appropriate joke. That’s why it’s a joke.” When Jan tells Michael that there will be downsizing, Michael doesn’t see the point of letting the gang know about the possibility of losing their jobs. “As a doctor, you would not tell a patient if they had cancer” (“Pilot”). Things only get worse when Michael has people wear tags with particular races on them to encourage awareness of diversity (“Diversity Day”). Michael wears a tag that says “Martin Luther King, Jr.,” apparently not recognizing the difference between a person and a race. Michael explains why he has not included some groups among those named: it would be “explosive” to include Arabs in a diversity exercise, “no pun intended … [pauses] … Maybe next year. The ball’s in their court.” In attempting to encourage awareness of diversity, Michael brazenly invokes the very stereotypes he supposedly wants to overcome.

Episodes like this make Michael seem downright idiotic. He just doesn’t seem to know what doctors should do, or what the law says, or what races are, or even that jokes can be offensive. But, I’ll confess, I don’t think simply listing some rules would help Michael navigate the murky waters of the moral life. Michael knows p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Introductory Memo: A Note to Our Suppliers in the US and the UK: Support Philosophy, It Uses Lots of Paper!
• A Note to Bitter Brits and Confused Americans …
• The Dundies: Some Awards for Making this Book Possible
• Memo 1 Paper Thin Morality
• 1 Screws and Nails: Paper Tigers and Moral Monsters in The Office (US)
• 2 Flirting in The Office: What Can Jim and Pam’s Romantic Antics Teach Us About Moral Philosophy? (US)
• 3 Can Michael Ever Learn? Empathy and the Self-Other Gap (US)
• 4 Leaving the Dice Alone: Pointlessness and Helplessness at Wernham-Hogg (UK)
• 5 The Virtues of Humor: What The Office Can Teach Us About Aristotle’s Ethics (UK)
• 6 Pam and Jim on the Make: The Epistemology of Self-Deception (US)
• 7 What Dwight Doesn’t Know Can’t Hurt Him—Or Can It? Deception and Self-Deception in The Office (US)
• 8 Authenticity or Happiness? Michael Scott and the Ethics of Self-Deception (US)
• 9 Humiliation in The Office (and at Home) (US)
• Memo 3 Funny and Not-So-Funny Business
• 10 Laughter Between Distraction and Awakening: Marxist Themes in The Office (US)
• 11 Being-in-The Office: Sartre, the Look, and the Viewer (US)
• 12 A Boy Who Swims Faster than a Shark: Jean Baudrillard Visits The Office (UK)
• Memo 4 Mind Your Business!
• 13 Stakeholders vs. Stockholders in The Office (US)
• 14 Attacking with the North: Affirmative Action and The Office (US)
• 15 Darkies, Dwarves, and Benders: Political (In)Correctness in The Office (UK)
• 16 The Hostile Office: Michael as a Sexual Harasser (US)
• 17 The Obscene Watermark: Corporate Responsibility at Dunder-Mifflin (US)
• Memo 5 Philosophy at the Water Cooler …
• 18 For L’Amour: Love and Friendship in The Office (US)
• 19 Look at the Ears! The Problem of Natural Kinds (UK)
• 20 Gareth Keenan Investigates Paraconsistent Logic: The Case of the Missing Tim and the Redundancy Paradox (UK)
• 21 Being Your Self in The Office (US)
• 22 Michael Scott is Going to Die (US)
• Appendix A: From Our Office to Yours: The University of Scranton and The Office
• Appendix B: Question: What Do You Need to Know About Dwight K. Schrute?
• Employees of The Office and Philosophy
• Corporate Filing System