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Corporate Roles, Personal Virtues: An Aristotelean Approach to Business Ethics*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

Robert C. Solomon
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Abstract

Each of us is ultimately lonely, In the end, it's up to each of us and each of us alone to figure out who we are and who we are not, and to act more or less consistently on those conclusions.

      –Tom Peters, “The Ethical Debate” Ethics Digest Dec 1989, p. 2.

We are gratefully past that embarrassing period when the very title of a lecture on “business ethics” invited—no, required—those malapert responses, “sounds like an oxymoron” or “must be a very short lecture.” Today, business ethics is well-established not only in the standard curriculum in philosophy in most departments but, more impressively, it is recommended or required in most of the leading business schools in North America, and it is even catching on in Europe (one of the too rare instances of intellectual commerce in that direction). Studies in business ethics have now reached what Tom Donaldson has called “the third wave,” beyond the hurried-together and overly-philosophical introductory textbooks and collections of too-obvious concrete case studies, too serious engagement in the business world. Conferences filled half-and-half with business executives and academics are common, and in-depth studies based on immersion in the corporate world, e.g. Robert Jackall’s powerful Moral Mazes, have replaced more simple-minded and detached glosses on “capitalism” and “social responsibility.” Business ethics has moved beyond vulgar “business as poker” arguments to an arena where serious ethical theory is no longer out-of-place but seriously sought out and much in demand.

Type
Articles
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 2 , Issue 3 , July 1992 , pp. 317 - 339
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 1992

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References

Notes

1 Business and Society Review (1984). Solomon and Hanson, Its Good Business (New York: Atheneum, 1985).Google Scholar

2 Indeed, the most serious single problem that we find in the teaching of business ethics is the insistence on a false antagonism between profits and social responsibility, perhaps (on the part of philosophers) in order to keep the debate going. A far more productive route would be the search for profit-making solutions, but this would require a major step down from the abstractions of theory into the messy world of details, technology, marketing and politics. It is the same old problem of egoism in ethics (as in Hobbes and Butler three centuries ago) revised on the corporate level. It presupposes an artificial opposition between the self-interest and shared interest and then finds it impossible to locate the motivation for mutually interested action.

3 Anthony, Flew, “The Profit Motive,” in Ethics, vol 86 (July 1976), pp. 312–22.Google Scholar

4 Manuel Velasquez, comment on Joanne Ciulla, Ruffin lectures, 1989.

5 Alfred, Carr, “Is Business Bluffing Ethical?” Harvard Business Review (Jan-Feb. 1968).Google Scholar

6 Milton, Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits” The New Yofk Times Magazine (1971).Google Scholar

7 This has been the topic of considerable debate. See, notably, Anscombe, G. E. M., Intentionality, and John, Cooper, Reason and Human Good in Aristotle (Cambridge, 1975).Google Scholar

8 Elizabeth, Wolgast, A Grammar of Justice (Cornell, 1989).Google Scholar

9 William, Frankena, Ethics, 10th ed. (Prentice-Hall, 1987).Google Scholar

10 Alasdair, Maclntyre, After Virtue, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, 1981).Google Scholar

11 Cheshire, Calhoun, “Justice, Care and Gender Bias,” Journal of Philosophy (1988).Google Scholar

12 Peter, Drucker, Management (Harper and Row, 1973), p. 366f.Google Scholar

13 Norman, Bowie, Business Ethics (NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1982), p. 1–16.Google Scholar

14 Peter Townsend, Up the Organization.

15 Lynne, McFall, “Integrity,” in Ethics (October 1987).Google Scholar

16 Robert, C. Solomon, A Passion for Justice (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1989), Chapter 2.Google Scholar

17 A complex taxonomy of the virtues is in Edmund, Pincoffs, Quandries and Virtues (Kansas, 1986), p. 84.Google Scholar

18 See Frithjof, Bergmann, “The Experience of Values,” in Hauerwas and Maclntyre, eds., Revisions (Notre Dame 1983), pp. 127–59.Google Scholar

19 Aristotle does give us an elaborate discussion of the “quasi-virtue” of shame. The point is not that it is desirable t o be ashamed, of course, but rather that the capacity to be shamed is essential to having a virtuous character in the first place. As the Ethiopian proverb goes, “where there is no shame, there is no honor.” The difference between shame and disgrace, however, is significant here. Disgrace suggests dishonor before God. Shame is secular and suggests rather a “letting down” of your colleagues and others who trusted or depended on you.

20 See, for example, Stuart, Hampshire, ed., Public and Private Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978)Google Scholar and his own Innocence and Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).Google Scholar See also Bernard, Williams, “Politics and Moral Character” in his moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)Google Scholar and Thomas Nagel, “Ruthlessness in Public Life” inte the Hampshire collection.

21 The need to do wrong in order to do good was one of the enduring obsessions of the great German sociologist Max Weber. See his “Politics as a Vocation,” in Gerth, H. and Mills, C., eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946).Google Scholar The term “dirty hands” was popularized by Jean-Paul Sartre in his play of that name. It can be found in the volume No Exit and Three Other Plays (New York: Vintage, 1946).Google Scholar See also Michael, Stocker on “The Problem of Dirty Hands,” in his Plural and Conflicting Values (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).Google Scholar