Aristotle’s approach to ethics solves, or at least alleviates, these problems. In par- ticular, it does not raise the bar too high, it does not rely unduly on principles, and it does not reject common opinions about ethics. Aristotle accomplishes all this in large part because he takes ethics to be primarily about character, which, follow- ing Kupperman (1991, p. 17), we may define as one’s standard pattern of thought and action with respect to one’s own and others’ well-being and other important concerns and commitments. Character includes virtues and vices and entails certain values, and it involves certain emotions as well as actions. One’s character defines the sort of person one is, and it includes some personality traits that are not of im- mediate ethical significance, such as sensitivity and humor. According to Aristotle, maintaining your character is tantamount to continuing your life (see NE IX, 4, 1066a13–29, b7–14).
Emphasizing the importance of character and virtue in this way need not, and in Aristotle’s case does not, undermine principles. As generosity is a virtue, for example, one ought to act on the principle that one should happily lend money to needy friends even if they may not be able to pay it back. But principles are secondary, in the sense that we act on principles of generosity because we are gen- erous, and not the other way around. If you are a generous person, your immedi- ate thought in lending the money to a friend is not that one ought to be generous but that Jones needs help. A friend’s need is a reason for action, from your point of view.
Virtue ethicists do not believe that we can find principles that will tell us how needy the friend should be, or how much money we ought to lend. Nor can we find any algorithms that show us how to prioritize competing principles. This is hardly surprising, readers of Wittgenstein would say.9If we did have meta-principles governing the application of principles, then we would need meta-meta-principles governing the application of meta-principles, and so on to infinity. In dealing with ethical issues we must satisfice much as in management; and as in the case of man- agement, we cannot find the optimal way to satisfice.10
Contrary to what Socrates suggests, having a virtue is not primarily a matter of knowing something in the discursive sense of being able to produce a principle or the definition of a virtue, which typically implies a principle. To have a virtue is to have certain enduring desires that can serve as reasons to act because they have to do with our well-being and other important concerns and commitments. So a person of generous character acts generously, wants to do so, and thinks it good
Socratic Questions and Aristotelian Answers 87 to do so. If you are generous, you are and want to be the sort of person who is normally motivated by thoughts like this: “Jones needs help, so I’ll help him.” The next-best thing, though short of a truly generous character, is mere acceptance of one’s obligation: “Jones needs help, so I suppose I ought to help him, so all right, here I go.” To be a person of truly generous character entails having and wanting to have a settled disposition to help a friend in need and emotions to match. So having a virtue involves having what Frankfurt (1981) calls second-order desires. Some of our enduring desires, especially those concerning the sort of person we want to be, we call values. To have a character of significant strength is to have values that consistently guide one’s actions.
Parents tell children not to lie, but many parents raise their children to be honest – that is, to be inclined not to lie, to feel some repugnance when lying even in circum- stances that might justify it. Virtues involve attitudes. Consider gratitude: when you give me a generous gift, I should not only thank you but also be grateful. Aristotle claims that, while you cannot make yourself feel grateful on a particular occasion, you can in time become the sort of person who is grateful on appropriate occasions (see NE, I, 3, 1095a2–13).
The usual process of moral education is a gradual one, part of growing up in a good community.11In fact the needs of a good community help determine what counts as virtuous. Experience in that sort of community is the best teacher, and it requires the opinions of good people. One comes to apprehend courage by first being told as a child that this or that act is courageous, or not courageous but cowardly.
Over a period of time one gets into the habit of acting courageously and comes to have a pretty good sense of what courage looks like. Then, through a process that Aristotle calls dialectic, which we shall discuss, one acquires a fuller understanding of courage and its contraries, cowardice and foolhardiness, and can reliably identify instances of them.
A virtue is more than a dispositional state.12A courageous person, for example, is indeed disposed to do what is appropriate given the risks involved. But rational- ity is involved as well, since the courageous person can distinguish courage from machismo, and knows why courage is a good thing and recklessness and cowardice are not. Acting courageously just by imitating courageous people will not suffice.
To be truly courageous requires one to have a clear idea of what one’s values are and to be concerned about the kind of person one is. All this demands a high level of rationality, though a courageous person is not required to give an unassailable definition of courage or to prove beyond any possible doubt that a certain act is courageous.
Virtue ethics therefore does not raise the bar as high as Socrates does, or as proponents of principles sometimes do. Aristotle claims, surely correctly, that ethics is not like geometry (NE, I, 7, 1098a29–34). It is more like navigation (NE, III, 3, 1112a5–7) or medicine or comedy (NE, IV, 8, 1028a23–34). There are rules, but they are not as well defined as those of geometry, and they are more difficult to apply to the real world. One has to develop a feeling for it. But that navigation and medicine are unlike geometry does not imply that they are unimportant or that there are no right or wrong answers to questions about navigation or medicine. Indeed,
88 E.M. Hartman there are few areas of knowledge in which wrong answers are more spectacularly exposed than in navigation and medicine.
Philosophers do often argue to no consensus over the details of ethical theory, but their disagreements do not undermine ethical behavior any more than those among organization theorists undermine management. No serious scholar would deny that there are right answers in organization theory. Many would say that the principles of management admit of exceptions and that they are not always easy to apply.
Consider Donaldson’s (2007) discussion of a familiar principle of management:
a large, diversified company will do better with a divisional structure than with a functional one. But exactly how large and how diversified must a company be to justify the expense of reorganization into divisions? And what if a company has too few talented managers for a divisional structure? There are useful principles here, but there are also individual cases in which even the best scholars and the most successful managers will be unable to reach an agreement.
Experienced managers make these decisions well. Aristotle believes that wise and experienced people can make ethically good decisions even if they cannot give airtight reasons for what they do. Aristotle respects the opinions of experienced people.13 Whereas Socrates and some other moral philosophers seem to demand a kind of philosophical expertise that not only does not depend on received wis- dom but also undermines it, Aristotle holds that we should respectfully consider the opinions of people widely regarded as wise. In terms more familiar today, we should think of opinions about ethics as data that successful theories explain.14
There is something solidly realistic about Aristotle’s approach. In general, he takes people as they are in a way in which Socrates does not and Kant, the greatest theorist of principle-based ethics, does not. He offers an account that explains human behavior. That Jones is courageous makes him praiseworthy, but it also explains why he rescued the child from the pit bull. Aristotle acknowledges that on his theory not many people are sterling characters, but he does believe that our nature supports and even shapes ethics more than it opposes it, that most of us have a pretty good idea what we ought to do, that ethics is not at all about radical selflessness, and that what is politically possible helps determine what is ethical.15
In the next three sections I want to look at three issues raised so far. The first is whether I have good reason to be ethical. Is ethics justified only if it is good business to be ethical? Or, as an agency theorist might say, only if ethics serves my personal interests? The second is how ethics takes account of our common opinions about right and wrong. My position on this issue, which owes much to Aristotle and Rawls, is that it is rational to accept a particular theory, whether a moral or a scientific one, in part on the basis of its scope and coherence. There is both moral and scientific knowledge available, and neither kind needs an unassailable foundation. The third issue is whether virtue ethics deals adequately with morally complex situations. I want to defend virtue ethics against the criticism that it tells us no more than “be courageous.” Taught properly, virtue ethics heightens students’ un- derstanding of these situations and in that way improves their decisions. But it is not geometry.
Socratic Questions and Aristotelian Answers 89
First Issue: Character and Interests
16Utilitarian and other principles tell us what we ought to do, but they do not nec- essarily tell us why an agent is better off for being ethical. One good reason for being a contributor to society, as utilitarianism would have us be rather than a free rider, is that society in the aggregate fares better if all are contributors rather than free riders. But the best off are those who can arrange to be among a small number of free riders; so a selfish person might ignore utilitarian rules and ride free – not vote or cheat on taxes, for example – without destroying the benefits of others’ good citizenship. There appears to be no self-interested reason for good citizenship. What is needed, therefore, is some way of ensuring compliance with utilitarian rules. But perhaps there is a deeper problem here: utilitarian theories do not typically specify what counts as self-interest, and do not offer us a good characterization of the good life that utilitarianism is supposed to promote. Aristotle does.
Aristotle holds that your character is a matter of what you enjoy doing (NE, II, 3, 1104b5ff.): good things if you are a good person, bad things if you are a bad one. Good character is a matter not only of doing the right thing but also of having the right desires and emotions (NE, X, 8, 1178a9–24, and elsewhere). If you do the right thing reluctantly, you are not really a person of good character, and virtuous action may not be in your best interests. You should be grateful for kindnesses, angry if and only if you are seriously wronged, sympathetic towards the wretched, glad to help your fellow citizens. The person of good character has an enjoyable life doing good things, unless misfortune intervenes. So emotions of the right sort support good character, as Frank (1988), Elster (1998), and many others have also argued.
Aristotle claims that for a good person virtuous behavior is self-interested be- havior. He views ethics as being about the good life for the agent, which is a mat- ter of living according to nature – humankind’s communal nature – and so being happy and fulfilled. Since human beings are social creatures, the good life, hence good character, involves living satisfactorily in a congenial community. So your virtues cause you to benefit your family and friends and people in your community.
There may be costs associated with virtue, but a virtuous person is better off on the whole for being inclined to do the honest or courageous thing. But can Aristotle give a convincing argument against those who claim to enjoy being successfully rapacious?
A reflective business student might ask why is it in my interest to be a person of good character rather than a rapacious person. Why can I expect to enjoy it more? On Aristotle’s view, those are wrongheaded questions. We should instead ask this one:
given that you want to serve your own interests, what do you want your interests to be? Do you want to be the sort of person who can enjoy only overwhelming financial success? Or the sort of person who enjoys a life in which work plays an important but not dominant role and in which that work offers challenge, variety, growth, as- sociation with interesting people, and compensation that lets you live comfortably?
90 E.M. Hartman The question is not which one business students prefer. It is a higher-order question about which one they would choose to prefer if they could choose their preferences.
That question cannot be readily answered by reference to self-interest, since it is hard to see what would count as a straightforwardly self-interested answer to the question, “What do you want your interests to be?”
There is, however, a good answer to that question if, as is probable according to Belk (1985) and Kasser and Ryan (1996), cited in Haidt (2006), most students who give the second answer are happier in the end than those who give the first. Great wealth is hard to come by, and many who achieve it enjoy it less than they expected to. Many who have retired from a financially successful career say that if they had to do it over again they would spend more time with their families. They failed to do so, probably, because they were committed to a conception of the good life based on peer pressure rather than reflection.
What should students’ reflection tell them about choosing a conception of the good life if it cannot be done just on the basis of self-interest? Surely a good life must be achievable and sustainable. Aristotle believes it should also have a certain wholeness, rather than being a series of unconnected experiences; this he suggests in saying that the continuation of character is the continuation of one’s life. Happiness requires desires that are rational in the sense of being consistent with one another and with one’s values, and actions that are consistent with one’s desires (see NE, IX, 4, 1066b7–11). He is echoed by psychologists like Festinger (1957), Chaiken et al. (1996, p. 557), and Haidt (2006, p. 225f.).
Aristotle clearly does not regard rationality as just a matter of the efficiency with which a means leads to the satisfaction of some desire, as Hume and many mainstream economists hold. But surely there is something irrational about valuing (say) health while eating and drinking to excess, smoking, and avoiding exercise;
and there must be something irrational about not valuing health at all. It is also irrational to have inconsistent values and desires, or to be unclear about what one’s values are.17
Consistency of desires is not sufficient for good character or for happiness, but it goes some distance in the right direction. There are difficulties in prizing both idleness and personal achievement, or heavy drinking and fitness, or feeling free to offend and having many friends. But cannot you do well if you hide your hostil- ity or rapacity? Aristotle says no: if you do it for strategic reasons, as when peo- ple are watching, you will be doing something that you do not enjoy (NE, IX, 4, 1066b7–14). In any case, like it or not, you are a communal being, and your hap- piness depends in part on your being a productive and congenial member of the community. Haidt (2006, pp. 92–4, 105, 113, 131) refers often to a flood of litera- ture that suggests that personal and particular connections are essential to happiness.
Desires that are at odds with this fact about us can create serious problems. So you do have good reason to be virtuous, and not merely to act sometimes as though you were. It is in your nature.
Most of us would recognize a greater variety of satisfying lives than does Aristotle. In fact, most of us think that the ability to choose what sort of life to lead is itself a good thing. At the same time, we respect the limits on that variety
Socratic Questions and Aristotelian Answers 91 that are implied by the requirements of our rational and social nature. As business students plan their lives, those who teach business ethics should encourage them to consider their strengths and limitations, their opportunities, and what they can and cannot learn to enjoy. Some of them will indeed turn out to enjoy a life of intense competition and high risk, but it is not appropriate to encourage them to assume ahead of time either that whatever they happen to want is possible or that they will enjoy it if they get it.
The essential matter, for both Socrates and Aristotle, is the state of one’s own soul. The chief end of man18 is to achieve psychic health, which is self-evidently a good thing. Or, if it is not self-evidently good, it is attractive to almost anyone, surely including most business students. From Aristotle’s point of view, to say that there are no right or wrong answers is to say that there is no difference between happiness and unhappiness, or between a fulfilling life and a miserable one. That is truly absurd,19an affront to common sense. That is a major problem for Aristotle, who takes common sense very seriously.