With all due humility and modesty,[1] I’ll start with a contentious proposition: The moral intuition that most Western businesspeople have acquired by way of worldly experience has been much corrupted by a philosophical underpinning that is ill-suited to business. This is not at all the fault of the businesspeople. The blame lies with the prevailing contemporary moral philosophy.
I would describe this prevailing moral philosophy - in our Western business world, at least - as a Consequentialist stew in which one occasionally encounters lumps of what seem to be a sort of Kantian-flavored mystery meat.[2]
My concern is that that prevailing philosophy is flawed, both (i) inherently, and (ii) in the sense that there is another, better philosophy available.
It's the latter point, though – the availability of a better philosophy and the reasons why it’s better – that’s the primary focus of this essay.
My thesis is this: There are three main systems of moral philosophical thought in Western[3] philosophy. They can be subdivided into others, but there are essentially three. Of these, the most practical and useful one for the businessperson is Virtue Ethics.
Lots of people will disagree with this claim. Some will agree, but in a lukewarm, well-if-you-say-so kind of way, suggesting that it doesn’t matter much.
For the lukewarm people, I have a sub-thesis: It matters quite a lot – if not to you, then certainly to your co-workers, subordinates, bosses, and other stakeholders. If you were a Roman citizen, would you rather have Marcus Aurelius or Nero running the show?
Before I get to my arguments, though, I need to provide a little bit of background on the three main systems of moral thought. [4]
To wit:
System One: The Kantian / Deontological System
When I teach business ethics, I especially like it when students start bandying around the word “deontological.” If nothing else, I reckon I’ve at least managed to impart some feel for the jargon.[5] And although “deontological” sounds like a medical specialty, all that it really means is “duty-oriented.” Our good friend Immanuel Kant was big on duty.
Kantian ethics gives us lots of rules for behavior, and for Kant it’s in situations where we’d most like to bend or ignore the rules that we’re put to the test. For instance, Kant says we mustn’t lie - even, say, in circumstances where we might stand to save our own bacon by playing dumb:
Highway Patrol Officer: “Did you know that the speed limit here is 65?”
Kantian Tesla Driver: “Yes officer, alas, I knew full well.”
Officer: “How fast do you think you were going?”
Kantian Driver: “Oh, probably 90 or 95.”
Yet despite the picture this paints of a credulous, ivory-towerish ethos that would be characteristic of someone who never ventured more than a few miles from his hometown,[6] Kant was nothing if not an innovator. The prevailing intellectual motif of his time was that of rationalism, whereby thinkers and scientists were determined that natural phenomena were governed by immutable laws that could be expressed in formulaic terms. And thus Kant, in his guise as moral philosopher, identified his famous Categorical Imperatives – moral laws essentially expressed as maxims with equation-like precision.
For business ethics, we tend to focus on what is probably the best known of Kant’s imperatives: “Act only in accordance with that rule which you would at the same time want to be a universal rule.”
Unlike, say, the “golden rule” (do unto others . . .) this imperative is a rule about rules. As a moral actor, if you’re doing things right then everything you do becomes a rule – and not just any rule, but a perfect rule that you and everyone else should follow always and forever.
That imperative is also, however, about “ought.” It doesn’t describe the world as it is, but rather as it should be – morally, that is. In a moral utopia everyone would obey it all the time. I’ve tried to visualize such a utopia, but I find that very hard to do. It seems clear that although universal compliance with the imperative would not end all inter-personal strife, it might at least bring down some insurance premiums – although query even that, since I’ve found for instance that the person who likes to tool along at 90 mph on the freeway is generally okay with everyone else doing that as well. In that sense, the imperative seems not to conquer the problem of relativity.
Nonetheless, a lot of business students say, initially at any rate, that they like the Kantian approach. It’s clear and precise and you know where you stand. But in business ethics class we tend to find, after a few minutes of spirited dialogue, that it does indeed admit of relativism. The universal maxims favored by Culture A might not match those of Culture B or even Sub-Culture A-1 within Culture A. And since one of the genuine joys of business is that it throws us all together, the whole situation can start to get very messy in a hurry. What we thought were well-defined boundaries begin to blur.
Plus, there’s my big criticism of it as a moral operating system for the businessperson, which is that it looks at moral actions one at a time, as if each moral action one takes in the course of the business day is a standalone set piece. But say, just to give one example, that I’m running a small-ish business where revenue flows mean that some creditors will get paid today while some will have to wait another week. I know which ones I need to keep sweet, so this is a fairly easy, almost intuitive decision.
My decisions, in that example, certainly have a moral dimension to them, but for the Kantian they present a very troubling situation. Kantian prohibitions on deception and using people as a means to an end[7] seem to dictate that everyone must get paid at the same time. But on the other hand, it clearly would be an outrageous act of deception for me to write a check without being absolutely certain that there will be funds in the account to cover it. For each individual decision in this overall scheme the requirement is clear, but if I do the right thing (for Kant) in each case, then I’ve got a set of irreconcilable actions (paying all the creditors at the same time without the immediately available funds needed to do so). It seems, then, that for the Kantian the only option is for the business to declare bankruptcy immediately – otherwise a Kantian foot will be put wrong (some creditors will have to wait a few days) and that is simply intolerable.
The fact that I know I’ll soon have the necessary funds and that the creditors that I’m planning to hold out on for a few days don’t particularly mind waiting (say, even, that they’re all net-30 creditors and despite the delay they’ll each be getting paid within the 30 days) is beside the point for Kant. I’d be using those people as a means to an end, which absolutely falls afoul of the Categorical Imperatives. So then, bankruptcy it must be. Which, I would submit, is kind of nuts.
My point is that the Kantian system, with its focus on each discrete moral event, seems to have no way to take account of the bigger picture, as it were. Indeed, it seems that Kant would say that an appeal to the bigger picture is nothing more than a vain attempt to weasel out of one’s moral duty.
System Two: The Utilitarian / Consequentialist System
The Utilitarian / Consequentialist system would seem to offer an easy[8] way out of this Kantian thicket. But before getting to that I need to provide some important trivia about the man who is credited with the founding of this approach, Jeremy Bentham.
One can consider Bentham’s enduring appeal on a number of levels. As an undergraduate, I was shocked – but then actually sort of pleased, in a morbid sense – to find that the man’s corpse is on public display in a glass case at University College London. It still is. True story. You can look it up. The display case has, however, improved in recent years. The first time I saw Bentham, he was in what was essentially a glass-fronted Victorian wardrobe, with doors that presumably could be shut at night.[9]
Bentham’s big moral idea was that the moral value of an action lies in the extent to which it produces the greatest good, or greatest happiness, for the greatest number of people. On the face of it, this formulation is even more calculating than Kant’s Categorical Imperatives. It seems to bring a dispassionate and elegant simplicity to the resolution of ethical questions.
As thinkers such as philosophers and economists began to gnaw on this, though, its dispassionate elegance seemed to fade in favor of frustration. Sure, it sounds marvelous to say, “greatest good for the greatest number” and then withdraw from the scene with a smug expression of satisfied profundity on your face, but what is this “good” that we’re talking about? Isn’t that in fact where the real moral action is – in determining what the “good” is?
John Stuart Mill tried to refine Bentham’s formulation somewhat with the argument that in assessing the good or happiness that is to be maximized, we need to consider the quality of such good or happiness. An enduring, meaningful happiness, he seemed to hold, is of greater value than a more trivial, fleeting pleasure. To give an example (mine, not Mill’s), compare a government policy under which thirty percent of the population is given a genuine opportunity to own a house with one under which every man, woman, and child in the country gets a free candy bar every six months. The latter brings happiness to the greatest number, but if you were a legislator which would you be most inclined to advocate for?
Other moral philosophers have noodled around with this system, and by and large the thinking has evolved into something which the Oxford philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe (and others) refer to as Consequentialism. The idea, essentially, is that it’s the consequences of an action that determine its moral worth. An action itself has no intrinsic moral value, nor does the intent behind it. A person can do mean, nasty, horrible things for the greater good, and as long as good consequences do in fact ultimately flow, the horrid deeds that are carried out in furtherance of such good consequences become themselves part of a moral good.
As one might imagine, this doctrine is unsettling for many – including the aforementioned Elizabeth Anscombe, who pointed out that it served as the moral basis for celebration[10] of the decision of the US President to drop atomic bombs on cities filled with innocent civilians. Which whole discussion gets us into some very harsh and difficult terrain. Which in turn reveals the fact that the fundamentals of our moral philosophical outlook, as individuals, in groups, and as a society, can have deeply profound ramifications. Anscombe, whom I very much admire, did not shy away from such discomfort, believing that philosophers who are worth anything at all will face such difficult circumstances square-on. I agree with her.
Indeed, in business ethics we need look no further than the famous Deepwater Horizon[11] case study to see that ethical awareness can have a make-or-break effect, especially in times of crisis. The decision to use the Corexit dispersants might be characterized in a variety of ways, as class discussion always demonstrates, but one finds an especially strong whiff of Consequentialism in the idea that this was the best way to deal with a toxic situation.[12] (Though as always, I counsel against the prideful stance of the after-the-fact moralist. Given the limitations on available information in an unbearably tense and rapidly evolving situation, how would you like to have been in the hot seat?)
And once your Consequentialist antennae are up, you tend to find this kind of thinking everywhere in the corporate world. For instance, in a publicly traded company, how many sins are absolved each time earnings per share beat expectations in a quarterly report? How is it that a juicy dividend can cause the corporate jet to comport perfectly with even the most rigorous ESG criteria?
System Three: Virtue Ethics
At first blush, in comparison with the Deontological and Consequentialist systems, Virtue Ethics seems old, loosely knit, and imprecise – generally not features that business students find attractive. That may be fair enough as an initial impression, but as an advocate for Virtue Ethics I think I can dispel the notion that those apparent features are an impediment to the practicality of the system – and they may even work in its favor to some extent. In philosophy, old is not necessarily bad. An old system will at least be one that people have had a long time to think about.
It is Aristotle, of course, who is given much of the credit for the development of Virtue Ethics, although many thinkers have refined his approach over the centuries.
We start, says Aristotle, with the notion that everything – every person, object, plant, animal – has a telos, or purpose, for which it exists. The moral worth of a person (or object, etc.) lies in the extent to which it achieves that purpose. The purpose of a human life, according to Aristotle, is eudaimonia, which is probably best translated as “a state of flourishing.”
Our purpose, then, as human beings is to flourish. And even if you reject Aristotle’s teleological perspective, it seems reasonable enough to posit that from a moral perspective a person would want to flourish.[13]
The path to eudaimonia, says Aristotle, lies in the formation of character, and this path involves several steps. The first is the recognition of the virtues. Aristotle identified lots of virtues, but later thinkers refined and consolidated these considerably, resulting in what are widely regarded as the four cardinal virtues: wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance.[14]
Having identified the virtues, the aspiring moral sage learns to put them into practice. And by the famous Aristotelian formula, practice becomes habit and habit forms character. Some have referred to this kind of process as “moral perfectionism,”[15] where one pursues an ideal that is attainable in theory even though he or she knows that it is unlikely ever to be fully and comprehensively attained in practice.[16]
Practicing the virtues is, in the early stages, like learning to drive a car. Initially, every move you make is very studied and deliberate but over time things become more automatic. The notion of the sage, or moral exemplar, is also important here. One learns by studying and imitating those whom one recognizes as having a virtuous character.
Over time, one develops a virtuous character. One is – reflexively - wise, just, courageous, and temperate. Yet it’s not easy and it doesn’t happen overnight, and even on achieving some measure of success one must constantly re-assess and self-correct - if you’re sailing a boat and have it on the desired compass heading, you can’t at that point simply let go of the tiller and expect to stay on course.
Perhaps the most obvious way of distinguishing Virtue Ethics from Deontological or Consequentialist thinking is that where a Kant or a Mill has us asking, “is this particular action morally good,” the Virtue Ethicist asks, “is this particular action something that a person of virtuous character would do.” The focus is on the character of the moral actor rather than on the classification of the action itself. If I am of a wise, just, courageous, and temperate character, would I favor the use of the oil dispersants in the Gulf of Mexico or the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japanese cities? Would these actions be consistent with my character?
Why Virtue Ethics is the Best Working Model for the Businessperson
It’s probably true that most people, when they take a business ethics course, are primarily concerned with learning the material to the extent necessary to get a good grade and then getting their focus back to finance and accounting and all the other more satisfying topics that they specifically came to business school to learn. People don’t tend to enroll in business school with the idea that they’re going to learn systems of moral philosophy that they’ll be interested in internalizing and putting into everyday practice.
It seems, then, that I am swimming against the tide when I say that learning practical moral philosophy is not only something that business students ought to do, but also that it’s no less important to their careers than all the finance, accounting, and organizational management stuff that they’ll be learning. Aspiring businesspeople should, in my opinion, seek to develop a moral awareness that is fairly specific to business and to understand that their approach to everyday ethics can make or break success.[17]
Note, however, that I refer to a practical moral philosophy. The reason we read case studies such as Deepwater Horizon is not to “tut-tut” over others’ supposed ethical shortcomings, but rather to walk a mile in their shoes. Someone had to decide whether to use the petroleum dispersant after the Deepwater Horizon blowout. Someone had to decide whether to drop the atomic bombs on Japan. That someone could be you (business student), and if you do ultimately reach a position that is commensurate with your considerable talents and charisma – as is likely - then the time will come when you’ll find yourself face to face with ethics and morality in circumstances that are much more profound and gut-wrenching than you might like.
So yes, I am an advocate for the businessperson’s acquisition and internalization of a moral philosophy that will fit into his or her everyday toolkit.
And here, then, are the reasons why I think Virtue Ethics – rather than a Deontological or Consequentialist system - is best suited to that:
1. Business is an Ongoing Process and Not Merely a Series of Isolatable Events
From a moral perspective, an operating business is comprised not of a lot of discrete, disjointed decisions, but of relationships based on patterns of regular interactions. Meaningful business relationships – the kind that sustain a thriving operation and a successful career – are not merely one-off, purely transactional affairs.
The Deontological and Consequentialist approaches focus on individual actions. Neither seems to offer any systematic means whereby a particular moral actor builds a track record that itself can be deemed morally good. To be sure, one can tally up more good actions than bad ones, but the Deontological and Consequentialist approaches don’t seem to accord any particular significance to that, nor, on either of those systems, does such a positive track record become in any way predictive of future good decisions.
By contrast, Virtue Ethics contemplates the formation of a durable character – a virtuous character that, so long as you continue to maintain and refine it, will see you through until the end of your days. A basic premise for Virtue Ethics is that consistently good ethical choices will be, in effect, “in character” for the person who develops moral habits in such a way as aim at a life of human flourishing (eudaimonia). Business decisions, then, as well as other moral choices in life, form part of an overall process in which one ‘s overarching objective is to be at all times as wise, just, courageous, and temperate as he or she can manage.
What I’m trying to say here is that on the system of Virtue Ethics, business (and the rest of life) is part of a continuum – the decades-long story arc of life and career - rather than a staccato series of more or less independent, calculated decisions. No ethical choice that you make in a business career is a standalone one. Your choices have a cumulative effect, and over time you develop a reputation. Your reputation will, ultimately, reflect your character.[18]
The person who is dedicated to the practice of Virtue Ethics is likely (though not guaranteed) to develop a reputation as a wise, just, courageous, and temperate individual. His or her business decisions will be consistent with that reputation.[19] My claim is not only that that makes for good business, but also that it is a more practical one to implement and use over the moral continuum of a career than one that treats each business decision as a discrete and essentially independent moral event.
Virtue Ethics, I would submit, is designed for ethics in the wild rather than carefully controlled laboratory conditions. It tends to absorb and accommodate real-life factors such as the unintended consequences of a moral decision, whereas the other systems seem to take no account of such matters, treating any unintended consequence as a new, discrete, standalone moral problem to be resolved independently. As the Deepwater Horizon case study seems in my opinion to illustrate, the business that opts for the one-off, expedient, reactive, disjointed Consequentialist approach to a problem – attempting at each turn primarily to evade blame and mollify what it deems to be important observers - may discover that each short-term expediency acts like a little cluster bomb giving rise to a host of new problems.
2. Business Decisions Often Have to be Made Quickly with Imperfect Information
The vast majority of business decisions are not big, set-piece affairs with board meetings and PowerPoint slides and consultants’ reports and so forth. No, most are about small matters, with quick and efficient determinations being made on the fly. The effects, however, of these small decisions add up over time, and ultimately make the difference between a well-run shop and one that is perpetually beset by self-generated crises.
No one – even the brilliant businessperson who aced the ethics course in B-school – is going to stop and consider the views of Kant or Mill or Aristotle each time she faces a decision about the allocation of work on her team or the frequency with which restrooms should be cleaned or any other routine matter that might have an ethical dimension to it. You generally don’t see managers reaching for a well-worn copy of the Metaphysics of Morals when they encounter a gray area in the application of the company’s sick leave policy. The reality is that the moral compass tends to occupy a fairly obscure place in the subconscious, and everyday ethical reasoning is usually not an overt thing.
The learning-to-drive analogy is a good one here. The skilled and seasoned driver signals lane changes and checks mirrors with little or no conscious thought. Anyone who drives a regular commute will have had the experience of making the journey from work to home with virtually no recollection of it afterwards – the conscious mind is not occupied with “change lanes now for my exit” or “mustn’t tailgate” but instead is likely thinking about dinner (got that nice salmon in the fridge) or some difference of opinion at work (“one of these days I’m going to have to stand up to those pedantic clowns in the legal department”).[20]
And so it is with Virtue Ethics. Once the practitioner has reached the stage where the virtues are habitual, they become reflexive and automatic. Moral thoughts need not interfere much with the conscious dialogue that’s aimed at solving a business problem – they remain in the background, like the operating system that facilitates the function of various apps on your phone.
The person who has reached this stage – the habitual Virtue Ethicist – will have formed a character that tends reliably to make the right call, morally. In an unexpected ethical crisis – and let’s face it, few moral crises are planned – instinct takes over. The person of virtuous character will generally find that the correct moral path is easy to discern, even if he or she needs to summon a fair amount of courage in order to follow it.
This kind of virtuous habit is, I suggest, far more workable that a moral system that requires laborious (and often ethically pliant) calculation for each situation on a case-by-case basis. Time pressures and a lack of information make such calculations difficult – sometimes so difficult that they become muddled and meaningless, such that the idea of a “correct” path seems obscure and elusive. One becomes tempted to give in to the expedient, to conduct a quick and dirty Kantian analysis or Consequentialist calculation in the name of “efficiency” or “pragmatism,” and thus to become like Emerson’s materialist, merely deploying “the name of philosophy to gild his crimes.”
3. Even For Big Businesses, the Relevant Communities are Small Enough that Individual Reputations Matter
Some years ago I had a friend – let’s call him Plato – who worked in a certain specialized department of a large bank in a big city. My recollection of exactly which bank it was was very dim, but I wanted to get in touch with him. So I put my faith in my dim recollection, called the relevant department at Bank X, and asked to speak with him. “Oh no,” the person who answered the phone said, laughing gently as she did so, “Plato works for Bank Y.” She then offered to give me the number.
The point of this admittedly rather inane anecdote is that even within the brutish world of big banks in a big city, the relevant business community can be a very small one indeed. Plato was definitely a player within his specialty, and as such was well known to the others in that field. Once you begin to achieve some measure of success in your field, you do not remain anonymous. You, and your character, become known to your peers – and depending on your line of business, your “peers” might include not only competitors or fellow specialists, but also vendors and employees and other people who have to work with you.
It seems natural, then, that your character would reflect whatever ethical system you may have internalized. There is, of course, debate as to the extent to which personality factors are hereditary or acquired, but there seems to be consensus on the notion that the individual can, to at least some extent, control his or her own temperament. My suggestion, then, is that Virtue Ethics offers a better means for this internalization – and thus the development of a reputation as a wise, just, courageous, and temperate businessperson – than either of the other two systems, which seem premised on the notion that the best temperament for the ethical decisionmaker is that of the cool, detached, and almost indifferent clinician.[21]
My further suggestion is that reputation matters enormously in business, even for the person who imagines that he or she plays such a minor role as not to be noticed. People who are good at business do not remain unnoticed for long, and whether you want one or not you will acquire a reputation.[22] The question is whether, and to what extent, you want to mold that reputation – or at least the character behind it.
4. Corporate Entities are Themselves Moral Actors
Some academic philosophers have questioned whether business entities (corporations and suchlike) count as moral actors. In practice, however, there doesn’t seem to be much debate about that. Large corporations spend many millions of dollars on advertising that’s simply designed to portray them in a favorable light. Based on that alone, it seems clear that people view business entities as moral actors.
A corollary to this is that when something goes wrong, people will not hesitate to blame any corporation that had any hand whatsoever in the thing that went wrong. Moreover, the legal system imputes culpability to corporate entities – and thus to the extent that laws codify moral obligations, such legal culpability is also moral culpability.
Now for a somewhat subtle point: It is tempting to think that Virtue Ethics is a system that must be relevant only to the individual, since it involves character traits that only seem to make sense in relation to individual people – for instance, can we sensibly say that a corporation, as an entity is being courageous or temperate? Those virtues seem to require a sentience that the corporation, being an entity that exists only “on paper” as a creature of the law, lacks.
So the temptation might be to say that any “moral” stance of a corporation is that which is engineered by its leadership, and thus that a calculating rather than character-based system of moral philosophy must be what is involved in such engineering. For example, one can easily imagine a board of directors trying to do a Consequentialist calculus, weighing the relative benefits of various possible moral actions. In fact, that probably happens all the time. But what of the director who comes to a board meeting and starts asking fellow directors about which action would be most consistent with the corporation’s virtuous character? Is he met only with an awkward silence? Or possibly a hushed whisper among his colleagues about the perils of the three-martini lunch?
Yet it doesn’t seem that we can simply dismiss the question of corporate character out of hand. What about all that advertising and marketing activity that’s designed to promote a corporate “image,” and what about the manner in which corporations do seem to be held accountable – as corporate entities and not merely as an alter ego for individuals – in the courts of law and public opinion?
My suggestion is that it is in fact intelligible to speak of corporate character and of the possibility of a corporate entity having a virtuous character. And I think we can do this without anthropomorphism. Rather, it seems to me that there is such a thing as a corporate culture in an organization. In some enterprises this culture will be stronger than in others, but the notion of a culture is very real – you’ll certainly hear a lot of chatter about it, for example, among executives looking for ways to motivate rank and file employees (as well as among consultants touting for business).
My admittedly approximate means of describing the process whereby a corporate culture is created and maintained is that “influential people” in the organization “set the tone.” Now I have a whole separate thesis on these two concepts – “influential people” and “setting the tone” – which I won’t go into in detail here,[23] but for purposes of this discussion it’s enough, I think, simply to accord these terms their ordinary meanings.
In discussing case studies such as Deepwater Horizon (obviously one of my favorites), people say quite a lot about the corporate culture of the companies involved, and they ascribe to corporate culture the tendency to yield certain types of outcomes where ethical issues are involved. To me, this feels an awful lot like the discussion of an individual’s character.
I’m aware that I am skating over quite a lot of detail in my analysis here, but my fundamental point is that a corporation is, in itself, very much a moral actor, and that its culture is akin to character for purposes of the application of Virtue Ethics.
Plus, I would go one further and assert that an overt attempt to bring Virtue Ethics into the formation of corporate culture would be a good thing. If “influential people” in an organization “set the tone” by clearly identifying wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance as the core values of the organization, and were to shape the specifics of corporate policies around those concepts, we would likely find that all sorts of benefits – including commercial and financial ones – ensue. That sounds like pie-in-the-sky thinking, I know, but consider by contrast the frequency with which ethical corner-cutting and in-the-moment expedience are ultimately identified as the factors that lead a corporation to bad outcomes and even outright failure.
I would also add that within a corporate entity people come and go. The culture, however, if well-established, will endure. Virtue Ethics, which contemplates a continuum of moral action over a period of time (an individual lifetime, or in the case of a corporate entity the lifespan of the entity), is thus the more apt system than a Kantian or Consequentialist one that takes each moral decision as novel and independent of any track record or reputation.
5. A Businessperson of Virtuous Character Will Avoid Being a Naïve Moralist
In some quarters, part of the lore of the business world is that it’s a rough and tumble place, and the person who insists on “moralizing” stands to get chewed up and spat out by hardheaded “all business” types who have no time for such nonsense. In other words, some people think that any concern with business ethics is naïve and a waste of time.
This point makes for an interesting discussion in a business ethics class. How does the ethical businessperson contend with the amoral one – the person who will say or do anything to better his or her position? What I find fascinating about that discussion, though, is that – time and again - when we set up a role-play hypothetical, we find that the ethical businessperson ultimately gains the upper hand. How can that be?
Once again, this is where Virtue Ethics turns out to be the superior practical approach. The reason for this is that there is an overlay of wisdom in everything the Virtue Ethicist does. Whereas, for instance, the Kantian businessperson is bound by the obligation not to lie, the Virtue Ethicist is able to advance a small deception as part of, say, a negotiation process, as long as the deception is consistent with wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance.
Note here that the virtue of justice does not always preclude deception – there may be circumstances where it is not unjust to deceive, such as when it’s part of the game.[24] On the other hand, temperance and justice would both seem to require that any such deception be limited to that which is strictly necessary in the particular circumstances – limited to what is accepted as a legitimate part of the game, as it were.
One might argue, though, that this puts the Virtue Ethicist in the same position as the Consequentialist – telling a lie in the interest of furthering the greater good. And that may be correct – in the single isolated circumstance in question. Indeed, it would seem to be true that Virtue Ethics permits the businessperson to go slightly Consequentialist now and then, but unlike the pure Consequentialist the Virtue Ethicist must do this within the constraints of his or her virtues. For instance, the Virtue Ethicist could not use deception in the interest of ultimately achieving some good outcome where the deception itself would be unjust (i.e. not within the rules of the game), whereas it is open to the Consequentialist to do so because on his or her system the ultimate outcome is all that matters.
The pure Consequentialist, I would argue, runs the risk of getting a reputation as an unsavory operator – as one who will do quite awful things and tell outrageous lies in order to achieve his or her objective.
And so again, Virtue Ethics wins. Its overlay of wisdom keeps the businessperson from being an easy mark for the unscrupulous (as the Kantian might be) or from developing a reputation as one who can’t be trusted (the pure Consequentialist).[25]
To Sum Up, Then
Does it matter whether a businessperson has a practical notion of moral philosophy? Not necessarily. People can acquire a useful moral awareness by all sorts of means. Philosophy, though, has the potential to offer insights, to streamline ethical thinking, and in a very real sense to enhance the moral satisfaction that one derives from work.
And my thesis here is that of the main systems of moral philosophy in the Western intellectual tradition, Virtue Ethics stands out as the one that can be put into practice as a coherent and systematic approach to everyday ethics. By contrast, the Consequentialist / Kantian approach that seems to govern much of modern morality is wholly deficient in this respect.
That is not to say that Virtue Ethics is easy. Aristotle makes clear that it’s not. Nonetheless, it is within the grasp of anyone who in good faith persists in working toward the ideal. Virtue Ethics is a philosophy of process, wherein arete (excellence) is achieved not in arriving at some terminal destination but in the progress one makes in the direction of it. Eudaimonia is not nirvana or some similar state of perpetual tranquility, but is more akin to Aquinas’ notions of beatification and grace.
Virtue Ethics does not seem to be something that one hears about from the boastful and self-aggrandizing, but rather is more likely to be found among the ranks of the diligent and the sincere who care little for such ephemera as fame and celebrity. It is, in my opinion, as sublime as it is difficult, but it is readily available to any and all who don’t wish to spend their lives and careers steeped in the moral sludge of the Consequentialist stew.
Lawrence A. Leporte
December 2022
© 2022 Lawrence A. Leporte
[1] And quite a lot is due. Although I teach some philosophy, and a long time ago even obtained a degree in philosophy, I am by no means any sort of professional philosopher in the properly salaried and tenured sense.
[2] Don’t worry about the jargon at this point. We’ll get to that.
[3] The arguments in this essay relate to certain long-established conventions of moral thought in the Western canon, which is not to say that there aren’t compelling and fascinating systems of moral thought in the Eastern tradition and in other regions of the world. Since, however, this piece is concerned only with Western thought, all subsequent references to “philosophy” in this piece should be taken as referring to “Western philosophy.”
[4] This “background” is a summary, and like any summary it does leave out quite a lot of nuance and detail. Academic readers (if any) will perhaps forgive me.
[5] One student said that her husband was greatly impressed when she told him she thought he was preparing dinner for her for tactical and not deontological reasons.
[6] Kant’s hometown was the Baltic port of Konigsberg, a Prussian city at the time. It’s now Kaliningrad, and forms a sort of orphan-satellite province of the Russian Federation.
[7] The Kantian prohibitions on lying and on using other people for one’s own ends are, in effect, a corollary of the Categorical Imperatives. Analytically, that might be a somewhat sketchy way of putting it, but I think it’s a decent heuristic for purposes of doing business ethics.
[8] Far too easy, I would suggest. But my whole huge critique of Consequentialist thinking is a matter for another time.
[9] Not that any of this has anything to do with philosophy, but it does offer additional proof – as if any were needed – that the British are an absolutely brilliant people in their wonderfully insane and unconventional way. Bear in mind too, that Bentham died in 1832, so the taxidermy involved is impressive in its own right.
[10] Oxford University awarded Harry Truman an honorary degree, in a sense celebrating a decision that is thought by most people to have brought the war with Japan to an abrupt end. Anscombe, who was teaching at Oxford at the time, objected to the award of the degree. I make no comment here on the morality of Truman’s decision, but would only observe that I have a recurring nightmare about having to be the one to make it.
[11] This is a business-school case study of the fatal blowout and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. It is used in most business ethics textbooks. I believe that the definitive case study itself is subject to copyright – which must be respected - but there are public domain accounts of the disaster and its aftermath available online that will give you the gist of what happened if you’re not already familiar with it. There’s also a film about it, which in my opinion is pretty good.
[12] This is an expression of opinion as to the underlying moral philosophy, based on my reading of the case study. The fact is, the circumstances were not easy for anyone who had to decide what the hell to do, and far be it from me to second-guess.
[13] For the avoidance of any doubt, I would point out that I include the achievement of one’s religious objectives in the notion of eudaimonia. I am not arguing that a religious person ought to put these aside in favor of some purely secular idea of human flourishing. To the contrary, for the person who seeks to be near to God, that is an essential part of his or her flourishing.
[14] Notable among these later thinkers was Thomas Aquinas, who is credited with reviving Aristotelian thought around 1500 years after the great Greek’s death and incorporating it in an approach to moral philosophy that permeated Western culture for quite some time. One of the many splendid things about moral philosophy is the way that, like mathematics, its development plays out over thousands of years. Although some feel oppressed by the weight of many centuries of deep thought, I find a certain joy in it. Carl Jung spoke of a collective human unconscious, and to me it feels like that (not to get all mystical here, but that’s just the feeling I get).
[15] I think most people would attribute the term “moral perfectionism” to the American philosopher Stanley Cavell, who died only a few years ago. Cavell was mostly concerned with its presence in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Friedrich Nietzsche. I think one could argue that Emerson and Nietzsche derived it from others, including Aristotle, but that’s a gnarly debate that I won’t go into here.
[16] The Stoic philosophers have the notion of the sage, an archetype to which the practitioner aspires. Stoic thought dovetails with the practice of Virtue Ethics in many respects. For purposes of business ethics, we might look on Marcus Aurelius as a sort of Stoic sage. Marcus was CEO of the Roman Empire for many years and was effectively a philosopher-king, or at least a near approximation to one. I include some readings from Marcus’ Meditations in my business ethics course, which maybe is something I’ll discuss in more detail in a separate paper. I regard him as a possible moral exemplar for purposes of learning to practice the virtues.
[17] I need to point out, though, that the last thing I want to do is to be preachy about any moral specifics. My interest is in equipping people with good moral-awareness tools, and not in trying to tell them how to use them.
[18] There is of course the problem that someone who doesn’t know you might form an impression of you that is based on a single decision. And sometimes the right decision, ethically, is not the popular one. Sometimes the virtues (particularly temperance) will have one tamp down the kind of recklessness that business journalists love to celebrate (though only when it works). So people who don’t know your character might see you as naïve (for failing to make a more popular decision) or timid (for holding your fire). Since Virtue Ethics takes the long view, it requires one to accept the possibility of being misjudged in the short term. Yet in relation to this, it’s important also to remember that wisdom is part of the virtuous character, which requires (wisdom does) that if you’re going to stand on principle then you do need to make sure that there is genuinely a principle at issue. Imaginary principles are some of the most pernicious things out there.
[19] I’ve heard it suggested that the savviest course of action is simply to pose as a virtuous person whenever it seems useful to do so. That way you’re not bound by the virtues when making business decisions, and you can go with a more Consequentialist approach when you like, cutting ethical corners with impunity when you judge it to be necessary for some greater good. I will admit that it may be possible to get away with this. It’s also true, though, that there are lots of very public stories of people who have tried to get away with it and failed, often with unhappy outcomes when called to account for the corner-cutting.
[20] NB: For a long time I worked as a corporate lawyer.
[21] For a long time, I discounted the value of warmth as an aspect of one’s business personality. I saw it as a potential sign of weakness. Over the years, however, I have noticed that nearly all of the wisest and most successful businesspeople and professionals have a warmth and sincerity to them that, in a way, makes them stand out. I’ve come around to the view that warm and sincere people are actually much better at making and implementing difficult decisions (and as lawyers, arguing their corner) than cool and clinical people who don’t seem to care much about others – or even worse, cool and indifferent people who try to fake warmth. This maybe seems like a non-philosophical thought, but I think it forms some part of what’s behind my preference for Virtue Ethics.
[22] Some of the Stoic thinkers have been dismissive about the value of reputation. I think that for this purpose they mean reputation in the sense of social glory, which can be easily lost at the whim of a fickle public. Since the Stoics invite us not to worry about things that we can’t control, they maintain that we shouldn’t concern ourselves with the arbitrary loss of public reputation. To me, however, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be concerned about building a good character. It just means that circumstances outside one’s control can sometimes lead to the wider world not seeing your good character.
[23] I have actually developed this line of thinking somewhat and am working on an essay about it. I am putting the proposition forward here in a somewhat tentative way – in the interest of moving the main argument along without getting sidetracked. But I am in fact convinced that business entities are bona fide moral actors in every respect that is relevant to business ethics.
[24] By analogy: In poker, bluffing is not cheating. Whereas marking cards or dealing from the bottom of the deck is. Virtue Ethics recognizes this kind of distinction whereas the Deontological system doesn’t seem to. I don’t know whether Immanuel Kant ever played poker.
[25] I appreciate that this point involves some subtlety, and I haven’t really done full justice to it here. I think the best means of doing that – or of illustrating the point at any rate – would be with a series of examples or role-play hypotheticals. What they would show, I believe, is that in each case it’s the Virtue Ethicist who has the most comprehensive ethical toolkit available to her, and that the completely amoral operator usually ends up getting hoist with his own petard.
