Michael E. Berumen
From Philosopedia.org
Michael E. Berumen (1952 - )
A philosopher and Southern California businessman, Berumen is author of Do No Evil: Ethics with Applications to Economic Theory and Business.
Formerly a senior vice president of one of the nation's largest financial institutions, Pacific Life Insurance Company, Berumen is currently the principal stockholder and chief executive officer of Four Star Private Patrol, Inc, which specializes in private security. He is also the owner and president of cogito enterprises, an agricultural management company.
After a peripatetic childhood, one year of high school, early admission to college, and a brief bout with juvenile delinquency, Berumen joined the U.S. Army in 1969, shortly after his 17th birthday. While in the Army, he was eventually trained in cryptography and later served in Germany, doing highly classified work. Upon being honorably discharged in 1972, he did his undergraduate work in philosophy and logic. He was graduated magna cum laude from California State University, Hayward (1975). He later attended the Stanford Executive Program at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business.
Berumen testified in 1993 before the U.S. Congress as an expert on health insurance. He is the author of many published articles on various subjects; he has appeared on television broadcasts; and he has lectured widely before community, academic, and business audiences.
Among other civic and academic organizations, he belongs to the American Society for Industrial Security, International Churchill Centre, the Bertrand Russell Society, the Society for Business Ethics, and the Los Angeles Breakfast Panel. He is also a director of CALSAGA, a trade association representing the security industry in California.
Berumen's philosophical interests extend over a wide range of subjects, including mathematics, logic, science, epistemology, and ethics. In recent years, Berumen has focused primarily on developing and justifying a normative system of ethics and considering its implications on economic theory and business practices.
Berumen has at various times called his philosophy rational objectivism, which roughly holds that our most useful knowledge is grounded in experience tempered by logic (reason), and, at best, that it is an approximation of truth. He maintains that logic, alone, is not especially useful, and that only empirical content gives it power. He is a traditional realist in terms of his epistemology and metaphysics, and he eschews both subjectivism (idealism) and the pragmatic or instrumentalist view of truth.
Today, Berumen is especially interested in reconciling aspects of quantum physics with general relativity, and is presently working on a book on this subject.
Berumen lives in Laguna Niguel, California, with his wife, Carol, and their daughter, Anastasia.
