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A Role for Virtue Ethics in the Analysis of Business Practice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

Daryl Koehn
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Abstract:

This article explores differences in the ways in which utilitarian, deontological and virtue/aretic ethics treat of act, outcome, and agent. I argue that virtue ethics offers important and distinctive insights into business practice, insights overlooked by utilitarian and deontological ethics.

Type
Articles
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 5 , Issue 3 , July 1995 , pp. 533 - 539
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 1995

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References

Notes

1 For example, Robert C. Solomon, “Corporate Roles, Personal Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach to Business Ethics,” in Business Ethics Quarterly July 1992, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 317–340.

2 In the ensuing discussion, I refer only to Aristotelian ethics. While there is some dispute as to what qualifies as a virtue ethics, Aristotle’s system surely does if any do.

3 This contrast may be a bit overstated but it does seem to me that utilitarians take a much more narrow view of outcomes of an act than do Aristotelians precisely because the latter see actions as forming a continuous fabric of life. Thus, while Mill worries that indulging in a bestial pleasure (sexual intercourse) in preference to a higher pleasure (listening to opera) over time may destroy the capacity to enjoy “nobler feelings,” he does not claim that this indulgence will destroy the capacity to do a good act (e.g., to respect another’s liberty by allowing this person to eat or not eat pork). Aristotle, by contrast, sees the pursuit of pleasure as such (be the pleasure “higher” or “lower”) as corrupting the capacity to perform any and all virtuous actions (e.g., just, temperate, courageous, truthful, magnanimous, etc.) because the life of pleasure and life of virtue are two very different, mutually exclusive types of lives. Compare John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism in The Utilitarians (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1973), pp.408–11 with Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1095b15–1096a10.

4 NE 1095b30–1096a1.

5 NE 1138a5–18.

6 “Justice and equity are therefore the same thing, and both are good, though equity is the better.” N£ 1137M0–13.

7 NE 1152a8–15. For an excellent discussion of the senses in which the vicious person does and does not choose, see Nancy Sherman, The Fabric of Character: Aristotle’s Theory of Virtue (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 107–17.

8 For Aristotle, the notion of fulfillment or entelechy is crucial. Choice is an activity of the soul; and soul is for Aristotle the first entelechy of a natural body which has organs. Aristotle, De Anima 412b4. Insofar as mind or nous is part of soul, it is part of a fulfillment.

9 “… Aristotle says, ‘We deliberate not about ends, but about what contributes to ends (ta pros ta tele).’ This will include deliberation about the constituents and specifications of an end and about the means towards an antecedently fixed end.” Sherman, p. 71.

10 For Aristotle, truth-telling is a virtue. It is striking that the truth Aristotle emphasizes as most important is truthfulness about one’s own merits, a truthfulness which would seem to require knowledge of one’s own motives. Such knowledge would be necessary to correct for, say, one’s propensity to boast or to rule out certain considerations because one finds them unpleasant or an impediment to one’s getting one’s own way. The truthful person corrects such propensities; vicious persons do not. NE 1127b10–30.

11 “The function (ergon) of the practical [intelligence] is truth having correspondence to right desire.” NE 1139a30–32.

12 Leon Kass, Toward a More Natural Science (New York: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 164–77.

13 “In actual fact it is absolutely impossible for experience to establish with complete certainty a single case in which the maxim of an action, in other respects right, has rested solely on moral grounds and on the thought of one’s duty.” Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals trans, with notes by H.J. Paton (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 74.

14 Lewis discusses the general atmosphere at Salomon Brothers in Michael Lewis, Liar’s Poker (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1989).

15 For support for and explication of this claim, see Daryl Koehn, “Toward an Ethic of Exchange,” Business Ethics Quarterly July 1992, vol.2, no.3, pp. 341–56.

16 It should be noted that deontologists have invoked duties as well as rights when describing justice. But even here they have tended to emphasize what a rational agent ought not do rather than what such an agent is ethically bound to do. Hence the literature is dominated by discussions of Kant’s duty not to commit suicide; the duty not to make a lying promise; the duty not to tell a lie; etc.

17 “If winning is not the over-riding aim in [games and sports], if they are played for their own sake, the activity is consistently universalizable. But to play competitively with the fundamental intention of winning is to adopt an intention that makes of one’s own case a necessary exception.” O’Nora O’Neill, Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 102–3.

18 NE 1094a25–1094blO.