To be effective, business cannot do without philosophy. Philosophical reflection on economic data is often necessary. The human capacity to reason and think abstractly is an extraordinary endowment. Human beings are capable of obtaining true knowledge concerning themselves and the world in which they live. Humans have an innate desire to know the truth about themselves. It is vital that they seek truth. It is only by making a choice to live according to true values that mankind can remain true to its nature and discover genuine happiness. The need to come to terms with the ultimate questions in life is unavoidable. Following in the spirit of ancient philosophy, we can define the human being as that being which seeks truth. Since business is first and foremost a human endeavor, we ought to recognize that homo economicus is not sufficient unto himself, and to set our sights higher, to homo verus.
Although a great deal has been written about the necessity of trust for attaining success in business and other practical affairs of life, there is a much more fundamental way in which we require trust: it is essential that we place trust in other people in our shared quest for such ultimate truths about our existence. We rely on others for knowledge of every kind. It is impossible for anyone to personally examine and verify the truth of everything we depend on to get by in life. From the heritage of innumerable historical facts and scientific experiments to day-to-day practical details communicated from person to person, we must place our trust in others and learn to believe what others tell and teach us, even though not all that we are told and taught is true. In the course of our interactions with others we develop the ability to entrust ourselves to them. For me to be able to believe anything I must be able to place my trust in you. I trust that what you are telling me is the truth. In this way, our beliefs and our knowledge are ultimately grounded in interpersonal relationships of trust.
In his meditations concerning the virtue of faith, Aquinas depicts faith as an intellectual virtue. What he means is that we have a habit of mind according to which we tend to accept some things as true from a variety of grounds: sometimes our acceptance is on the basis of authority, other times we accede because we don't have time to check for ourselves, or because we aren't equipped with the necessary scientific wherewithal from which to obtain the knowledge firsthand.
It is a characteristic of our human nature that we are in pursuit of truth. More than that, we have an inherent need for others. And we depend on a culture to help us on our voyage toward these realities. This goes to show why so much of the financial crisis—which involved such a widespread crippling of confidence in others who were relied upon to provide the truth, for instance about the value of assets—necessarily merges into a wider intellectual and moral crises.
When deeply rooted in experience, cultures show forth the human being's openness to the universal and transcendent. They offer different paths to the truth, which assuredly serve men and women well in revealing values that can make their life ever more human. Insofar as cultures appeal to the values of older traditions, they point—implicitly but authentically—to a vision of things that are enduring in the human spirit. Just as faith cannot do without philosophy, it cannot do without cultures—which are particular and limited. People understand, appropriate, and live the truths of faith in light of particular cultures. Faith is mediated by and through cultural structures even as it necessarily transcends every culture. Truth is both universal and universally longed for. Since the finite reality that we inhabit is incapable of giving us an adequate response to our quest for the meaning of life, we are prompted toward the ideas of beauty, truth, and goodness. Art, music, literature, and philosophy all have a role to play in penetrating the world of appearances to reveal timeless truths. In every human heart there is a desire to know truth, as Socrates said to “know thyself,” to arrive at a fullness of truth about ourselves and others.
Introduction
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.
—Plato
THE FINANCIAL CALAMITIES of recent years offer strong evidence that there is such a thing as immorality in the market economy and that it is very destructive. In this book I aim to present a new approach to business ethics, based on objective morality, which exposes and revivifies the implicit and broad cultural understandings of the meaning of moral excellence. The conception of virtuosity that I present is, in a sense, quite idealistic. However, business needs to be, and needs to be seen as, a noble activity. Business ethics can play an important role in providing a broader, deeper, and more systematic account of business than many current discussions allow. It is in light of the imperative of nobility in business that the notion of virtuosity provides, or ought to provide, both a source of vision and a standard of excellence for market participants, whether they are individuals or organizations operating locally or globally.
By market participants I mean to include more than just for-profit enterprises and the people running them. Many not-for-profit enterprises, whether they are houses of worship, public arts organizations, housing cooperatives, or charitable foundations, are truly “businesses” in the wider sense. They must operate according to the same standards of diligence and discipline as for-profit businesses in order to attain their objectives. Conversely, many for-profit enterprises often benefit financially by operating as if they were nonprofit concerns, that is, by acting not purely for the pursuit of profit but rather with the expectation of profit coming about as an off shoot of attaining excellence and contributing to social betterment.
Cultivating cultures of virtuosity within our economic communities, and honoring the often unspoken timeless cultural understandings about the nature and importance of goodness, truth, and even beauty, provides the moral glue for such communities; this is how, I believe, many of the problems facing business ethics can be fruitfully addressed. Further, I think that confronting such challenges requires the engagement of a deeper and universal “invisible law” superseding not only written legal codes and the visible legal orders that enforce them, but also superseding parochial ethical standards established by organizations that are normally assumed to specify the obligations of business.
Consider how odd it would be to speak of the accomplishments of a virtuoso musician apart from any regard for her mastery of any particular music, that is, in isolation from any structure or form imposed by the “rules” of composition. Such rules, of course, are behind any great composition and even provide a necessary background for meaningful improvisation. If one were to counter that so-called free-form music arises from a conscious disregard for any compositional format laid down through rules, my response is to agree wholeheartedly; I would say in reply that the vapidity of such music (which typically caters to and sanctifies the spontaneous whims of a performer yet fails to enrich or inspire listeners) is a good example of what is missing in business ethics when we strip moral virtue away from its primordial grounding in norms and the guidance they provide.
Virtuous conduct, in business and elsewhere, does not take place in a vacuum. Particularly in the world of business, which operates in the shadow of law and its many institutions, norms provide an intricate web within which moral actions make their moves. It would be a grave error to suppose that, working as an investment banker, one can simply be admonished to “be courageous” while remaining oblivious to the finely textured normative matrix that rules and principles establish. At the same time, deliberation and judgment with those norms require virtue, along with some grasp of the broader meaning of the moral life beyond technical legal compliance. One does not know whether a compass functions well and points true apart from the pull of the invisible magnetic field. One cannot say whether a person is virtuous apart from the promptings of the invisible moral order.
Accordingly, I term the approach that combines the quest for moral and performative excellence in business culture together with these deeper and broader kinds of philosophical