A lack of confidence in one's ability to know the truth has serious consequences both for our economic life and for the wider culture. Without objective truth, people are simply adrift. Given human weakness and the strength of human passions, this understandably ushers in crisis and tragedy. The recent global financial crisis has been due in no small part to reason basically abandoning the pursuit of ultimate and objective truth. The result has been a pervasive skepticism and relativism, which, if not stemmed, will lead not to the advancement of humanity but, instead, to yet more of the despair and irrationality that has attended the catastrophic erosion of economic value.
I believe that the widespread misunderstanding of the relationship between economics (ultimately anchored in truth), ethics (ultimately anchored in goodness), and culture (ultimately anchored in beauty), particularly among those primarily responsible for teaching business, weakens the ability of both business schools and business organizations to cultivate and transmit authentic human values. The “ethics” that corporations and business schools attempt to transmit, when they badly misunderstand the relationship, is “business ethics” only in a weak and defective sense. For example, it may be an agenda for political correctness (motivated from either end of the political spectrum), or it may amount to an effort at “window dressing” to serve the narrow interests of the organization.
I wish to stress the role of philosophy in the theory and practice of business and the need for businesspeople and business academics to be trained rigorously in philosophy. But I do not mean philosophy in the narrow sense that many departments of philosophy take it to be, detached from a broader understanding of human culture. It is not conceptual puzzles and brain-teasers, but rather wellsprings of wisdom that need to be integrated into business education. A syncretic understanding of philosophical thought can help one in constructing a holistic worldview. We ought to be alarmed that indispensable philosophical work is widely neglected—both in business research and in the formation of business leaders—in favor of mathematical and financial modeling approaches to economics; such technocratic approaches are often reductionist and incompatible with the humanistic enterprise of business in whose service they are putatively placed. This is not to say that nonhumanistic fields lack legitimacy, autonomy, and importance as intellectual disciplines in their own right, but rather that there is a threat of possible corruptions of these fields that render them incompatible with the proper end of the economy, which is to serve humanity and not the other way around.
The first of these potential dangers is that the legitimate autonomy of the science of economics can be misinterpreted as liberating it from the overarching requirements of morality—the higher, invisible law that philosophy seeks to reveal (no matter how controversial our interpretations of it may be). What may be termed a scientistic (as opposed to scientific) mind-set can lead people to falsely reckon that if some innovation in business is technically possible, then it is therefore morally permissible.
The second possible danger concerns scientism—a philosophical notion that refuses to accept the validity of any form of knowledge besides positive science. Scientism deems values to be mere by-products of emotions and relegates the question of the meaning of life to the land of the irrational or illusory. The growing presence of scientism in economic thought reveals both the possibility of philosophical error and the fact that economic philosophy can turn, as it were, antiphilosophical. The positivism at the core of scientism was embraced by philosophers as part of their philosophical mission to instrumentalize reason, to place reason in servitude to the passions. In this manner, positivism attempted to reinvent philosophy, not as the pursuit of wisdom, what we may term the quest for sapiential knowledge, but as a purely analytic kind of venture.
As rationalism took root within Western philosophy, a decoupling of reason and faith ensued, culminating in various forms of nihilism that are prominent within contemporary thought and culture. Nihilism is characterized by an abandonment of meaning and rejection of the objectivity of truth. Life is taken to lack any objective purpose, meaning, or intrinsic value. According to moral nihilism, morality does not exist, and any established moral values are abstract contrivances. In place of objective morality the utilitarian goals of pleasure and power are glorified. Subsequently there are no moral values with which to uphold a rule or logically prefer one action over another. Accordingly, people are viewed as objects that may be manipulated instead of as persons possessing inherent dignity to be honored. Nihilism is seen throughout contemporary culture: in art, entertainment, music, and literature. To transcend nihilism, however, philosophy must return to its initial status as both an analytic and sapiential endeavor.
What does all of this have to do with business ethics? In order to assist in moving economics and business back to playing a more constructive part in the human enterprise, not only must philosophy be restored to its Socratic roots, but also it must help to revivify business ethics in partnership with the panoply of worldly concerns that have attended the economic crisis: restoration of faith in the market, respect for human rights, environmental sustainability, and so on. Ultimately, the global economy has a stake in the renewal of philosophy in both its analytical and sapiential aspirations.
More than one philosophical system can be valuable in the pursuit of both the truth and the understanding of virtuosity within invisible law. While it is true that many scholars of the natural law tradition would grant pride of place to the thought of Thomas Aquinas and other prominent thinkers within that tradition, it is not necessary to confer standing upon any one thinker or group of thinkers as embodying the one true philosophy of natural law. That is so because no historical form of philosophy can legitimately claim to embrace the totality of truth, or can claim to be the complete explanation of the human being, of the world, and of the human being's relationship to the eternal. It is for this reason that I present the broader notion of “invisible law” as a way of avoiding disputes about the “correct” understanding of “natural law.” Competing accounts of natural law theory have arisen in part from political and religious agendas seeking to claim legitimacy from it. It is not the aim of this book to advance any such agendas.
Although diverse philosophical systems may legitimately be embraced by an orientation toward invisible law, and while various systems can contribute to understanding virtuosity, my view of philosophy is not a relativistic one. Neither is it inclined toward ethnocentrism, moral absolutism, and other views that would deny the need for moral conversation, reflection, and analysis. There are false and destructive philosophies, false and dangerous philosophical claims. I would count among them not only scientism and nihilism but also views that ignore the logical requirement of internal coherence and the principle of noncontradiction; ideological intolerance, which brushes aside without reasoned debate all moral standpoints other than one's own; and “vulgar utilitarianism” that sacrifices moral principle to perceived interests and expediency.
Philosophical errors are possible in part because of the weakening of reason itself, by its neglect of virtuosity—that is, the neglect of maintaining the proper balance between truth, beauty, and goodness. In the absence of virtuosity, even those aspects of the moral life that can, in principle, be grasped and understood by reason—for instance, those aspects stressed by a legalistic mind-set—remain hidden from view to some extent. Reason needs virtue to illuminate even those truths to which it has access. But virtue also needs reason.
Many conventional approaches to business ethics tend to make the reading and exegesis of purported norms of business ethics the sole criterion of economic morality. Such approaches offer ever more lists of rules of ethics for guiding business conduct. In consequence, ethics in business is identified with conventional moral rules alone, thus eliminating the role of virtuosity and the need for reflection on the moral life as something that transcends mere collections of rules. The “supreme rule of virtuosity” derives instead from a unity among truth, goodness, and beauty in a reciprocity, which means that none of the three can survive without the others.
Philosophy and other forms of rational