Aristotle claims that the person of good character perceives a situation rightly – that is, notices and takes appropriate account of the salient features of a situation. As you perceive that a particular figure is a triangle, so you perceive that a particular act is (say) a betrayal of trust.22According to Aristotle, perception involves imagination (phantasia): the faculty of imagination enables you to understand what a perceived object is, or grasp the ethical quality of an act. You are morally responsible for understanding the act correctly – that is, for framing it right. To get it wrong – that is, to fail to apprehend the ethically salient features of the situation – is a sign of a bad character (NE III, 5, 1114a32–b3). A person of good character will perceive that a certain act is courageous rather than foolhardy, generous rather than vainglo- rious, right rather than wrong, and will act accordingly. An irascible or phlegmatic person will take offense, or not, inappropriately. Weakness of the will, Aristotle
94 E.M. Hartman suggests, is sometimes the result of wrong framing (NE VII, 3, 1147a32–b6). Moral imagination is the name we now give to the ability to frame ethically significant states and events (see Werhane, 1999, for example).
Tversky and Kahneman (1981 and elsewhere) show how important framing is.23 One of their experiments shows that people judge and respond differently to a certain state of affairs as accurately described in different ways: whether they are told that 20% will survive some action or that 80% will die as a result of it makes a great difference as to whether they would choose the action. This indicates a certain irra- tionality; in particular, it suggests that people may make judgments and take actions in large part on the basis of how they describe a complex situation to themselves.
You can frame eating a doughnut as a pleasurable experience or a fattening act, as it is both; but a person concerned with health should take the second way of fram- ing rather than the first as salient. A good accountant will frame the Enron-related tricks as misrepresenting the financial position of the firm rather than as good client service. Those who teach business ethics face the task of teaching students to do a better job of ethical framing.
A typical business course will not likely address this problem, for it does not usually put an ethical frame around the problems and issues that it covers. Insofar as a business ethics course merely helps students become more fluent in the language of right and wrong, it enriches their moral imagination and increases the probability that they will give salient descriptions of morally significant situations.24
Your environment will influence the way you frame a situation: you will likely do it as others do it, as is the custom in your profession, as the client wishes, etc.
Consider the Milgram (1974) experiment, in which experimental subjects willingly administered what they believed to be painful shocks to innocent people who had given wrong answers. One way to interpret the outcome is to say that most of the participants did not see themselves as causing pain to an innocent subject but instead as following directions and helping Dr. Milgram in his important work. Your ego will be influential as well: you are likely to describe your failure to confront the boss as a piece of thoughtful diplomacy, whereas others will see it as self-serving and cowardly. Your interests will influence the framing as well: you tend to argue for the moral rightness of actions that favor you, and to describe those actions accordingly.
This is a form of rationalization, in which one begins with a conclusion and then attends to the features of the situation that support one’s conclusion – the opposite of the way in which Aristotle claimed that ethical reasoning should go. No doubt this sort of thinking afflicted the Arthur Andersen accountants working for Enron.
One of the worst kinds of perceptual mistake is overvaluing good results because they are nearer to hand. Mischel (see Shoda et al., 1990, cited in Haidt, 2006, p. 17f.) discovered that small children who were able to postpone gratification by forgoing an immediate treat and getting two treats a little later were more likely to grow up to be successful adults in many respects. In a case like this, one wants to do action A but has an overriding, longer-range, more inclusive, more rational desire for action B, which is incompatible with A but more desirable. One might even want A but not want to want it, as in the case of an addiction: one wants to smoke but wishes one did not.
Socratic Questions and Aristotelian Answers 95 The ability to frame correctly, a significant component of good character ac- cording to Aristotle, is threatened from many sides. We have evidence that young children are able to frame and act accordingly, or not. We have evidence that people frame as those around them frame. And now the question is: how can we help our students improve their framing? At the very least we ought to be able to show them that there are alternative ways of framing situations. That is a start, but we want to avoid giving the impression that one way is as good as another.
It will be helpful to teach business students about social psychology. Those who teach business ethics talk about organizational culture, for example, out of the con- viction that as employees, the students will be able to respond to it by recognizing it and taking its possible effects into account. Former students who have learned about the Milgram experiment in a business ethics course testify that they do some- times think of it when they are in similar situations, and act accordingly. Beaman et al. (1978) show that people can be inoculated against crowd-induced culpable indifference by being taught to recognize the crowd’s influence and to act appropri- ately despite it (see Slater, 2004, p. 109f.).
Corporate culture in the usual sense is not the only threat to virtuous action that business students should know about. One of the most serious threats is the looming prospect of failure. There would have been no WorldCom scandal if that company had not found itself faced with growth objectives that were unattainable but had to be met or the stock price would tank. It was wrong and irrational for management to falsify its profits, but there would have been no particular temptation to do that if the company had not found itself heading towards the edge of a cliff. If senior managers had had the opportunity to plan for that situation, they might not have decided to pur- sue a course of action that was bound to end in catastrophe.25Contingency planning, especially in a high-risk environment, is part of good management. This suggests, what is not at all surprising, that a well-managed company, like a well-governed community, provides an environment more supportive of ethics, other things being equal.
It is best to think about problems of this sort well in advance. If managers are aware, as Aristotle was, of how easily stray desires and emotions and social pressure can divert us from our most rational intentions, they should try to avoid getting into those situations in which they are vulnerable. This is “self-management,” which Elster (1984, 1985) has acutely discussed. Finding ways of protecting the company from the kind of bad behavior that emergencies encourage is a corporate form of self-management. Graduate school is not too soon for thinking this way, and a business ethics class is a good place to consider how foreseeable but unforeseen emergencies may sway those whose character is vulnerable – that is, most people.26 These are issues about character. What Aristotle means by character encompasses not only principles and values but also the readiness to act on them and the ability to see how to do so in a particular situation, however complex or difficult it may be.
Some people sincerely espouse a certain value – say, the importance of courage – but do not act on it because they do not recognize that speaking one’s mind in this situation is what courage requires. They are sincere, but they are not courageous.
An organization can do that to those who live there. On the basis of a number of
96 E.M. Hartman studies of the impact of corporate culture, Chen et al. (1997) reach the important conclusion that ethical behavior depends on the employee’s ability to recognize eth- ical issues – to frame certain situations correctly from an ethical point of view – and that this ability appears to be a function of corporate culture more than of individual employees’ attributes.
How, then, does a person of good character make a decision in a complex situ- ation? It will not suffice to tell yourself to be brave or honest or just, but it is true that the kind of person you are will have as much to do with the decision as will your reasoning about it. Dialectic has a role here, but it is not primarily to facilitate specific decisions. It is to give you somewhat sharper, though still not perfectly sharp, principles and intuitions. Under the influence of dialectic your reasoning about specific issues will be better, because you are better at noticing and evaluating aspects of the situation that people of less character do not handle so well. You will justify your decisions by appeal to whether their consequences are favorable, whether the decision process is fair, and whether anyone’s rights are being violated.
Almost anyone can do that, but with dialectic you will do it better because you will be better at identifying the aspects of the situation that are most important.
One might object that being good at dialectic will not protect people from bad cultures or keep them from rationalizing. But Haidt’s (2001, pp. 819, 829, 834) argument, noted earlier, suggests otherwise. No doubt dialectic is best done before the crisis arises, if possible, but it appears that what one decides in a cool moment will influence what one does when the moment is warmer.
In part because one cannot accurately calculate with all the variables in mind, in part to avoid rationalization, a person of good character will often satisfice by sticking with certain nearly unexceptionable rules, such as, “We don’t lie to our employees. Period.” In some cases the decision will have to be an intuitive one.
You may say, “We’re just not that kind of company,” or “That’s something I’m just not prepared to do.” Whether anyone finds that sort of account (or non-account) convincing will depend in part on your credibility. We believe the Jim Burkes of the world when they say that they are doing something because they care about the welfare of their customers. We do not believe the Ken Lays.