Keynote Address
Listening to Annoying Voices Robert Bottoms, President of Seabury-Western Seminary, President Emeritus of DePauw University
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ob Steele invited me to speak tonight about how we make decisions, a discussion that will be revisited throughout the weekend. When Bob first asked me to talk about decision-making, I thought for a long time about the best way to approach the topic. After much reflection, I have decided that the best way to introduce the subject is through sharing several stories that we can talk about this weekend. The first story comes from a front-page article in The New York Times on March 24th. The article told the story of how in 2009 some of the top aids to Colonel Gaddafi called together 15 executives from global companies doing business in Libya. These executives were not asked, but told, that between them they would shell out the 1.5 billion dollars that Gaddafi’s country had to come up with for their role in the Pan Am 103 Lockerbie Scotland terrorist attack and for their role in other terrorist attacks. Thus, to frame our discussion, I would like to ask you what you would have done had you been one of the 15 executives? Immediately most of us would say, “Well, I wouldn’t have anything to do with Gaddafi.” This is an emotional kind of reaction. However, some of our colleagues might say, “Well, if we do not pay, then we do not get to do business here. Is that fair to our stockholders?” Other people might respond by saying, “Well, it is not just our stockholders, it is those workers back in the Midwest who might lose their jobs if the company’s profits are reduced.” A second story. Recently, I have been taken with the courage of the 50 or so people
who were the first to go into the damaged nuclear plant in Japan. They literally risked their lives in order to save the lives of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people whom they had never seen before. If we had had that opportunity, would we have wanted to be one of those 50 or 52 people? Is there anything that we care so much about that we would be willing to risk our lives to make life better for people whose faces we may never see? What do you do when such voices highlight the different sides of an argument? In conversations with the students earlier, many responded, “We figure things out. We use our minds. We reason together and try to make the right decision.” Growing up in Alabama, we would say, “Well, we try to figure it out.” Yet some of the voices we hear during our decision-making processes become “annoying voices,” for they expose us to the tensions we subject ourselves to when we have important decisions to make. My goal for tonight is to establish how we ought to understand these “annoying voices.” Michael Sandel was on our campus early in my presidency. Sandel’s book Justice tells the following story about a petty officer named Luttrell. In 2005, Luttrell was leading three navy seals deep in Afghanistan. They believed they had an opportunity to capture one of Osama Bin Laden’s right-hand men. The seals were very careful. However, just before they reached the village of the person who they hoped to capture, they met two farmers and a fourteen-year-old boy who were tending their 6