The portrait I render in Virtuosity in Business blends conceptual colors extracted from the virtue tradition with intellectual hues drawn from the natural law tradition. The resultant chromatic mixture is intended to afford a nuanced picture of business ethics to be painted, one that is equally attuned to questions of virtue, disposition, authenticity, and character, on the one hand, and matters of moral law, justice, human rights, and sage corporate governance, on the other. Since these seemingly disparate facets of virtue and law are in fact deeply interwoven, a broadened sapiential approach such as the one offered here holds promise to illuminate the kind of discussions of business ethics needed to meet the challenges the postcrisis, globalized economy poses for business today.
Virtuosity in Business seeks to explore ways that our thinking about business and economics can be illuminated with the help of a quartet of bold images:
1 The market participant as virtuoso artist. So conceived, the businessperson's or business firm's competitive performance, like that of a musician, is dictated by creativity, authenticity, self-knowledge, inner discipline, and a relentless pursuit of excellence. Such characteristics cannot be prescribed by rules or regulations, nor can they be effectively instilled simply by threats of sanctions for noncompliance, but instead require an engagement with higher and more noble ideals that spring from our nature as humans in search of fulfillment.
2 Business as an existential human endeavor respective of freedom and authenticity. We cannot hope to understand business unless we understand the human condition, since that is the wellspring from which all relationships of commerce and trade ultimately flow. Whether one is a disciple of, say, J. Paul Sartre, one the one hand, or J. Paul II,1 on the other, one must confront fundamental questions of free choice, reason, and authenticity of character. In today's globalized world, where the corporation often arrogantly asserts its metaphysical stature as a distinctive “person,” seeking to earn (if not downright command) our trust, even while frequently violating it, we ought to have some notion of just what such an extension of trust might mean, what the stakes are, and whether we are prepared to abdicate our own human moral responsibility while ceding authority to corporations in the pursuit of ever greater technological and material conquests, as individuals and as a society.
3 The juxtaposition of metaphorical types of capital alongside the familiar notion of financial capital: cultural capital and reputational capital. Such metaphors help us to see connections between economic value and moral value. The metaphors express the economic significance attached to intangible assets such as character, honor, and virtue, which are preconditions of business success, yet at the same time they have intrinsic worth that, somewhat paradoxically, must be honored in order to trigger that success. The way that our culture fosters (or fails to promote) such intangible assets profoundly influences whether business within our culture flourishes or decays. Conversely, the way business fosters (or fails to promote) these intangible assets will profoundly influence whether our culture will flourish or decay.
4 Adopting a sapiential outlook on business ethics that embraces both virtue and the moral law. As virtue theory is asserting itself in business ethics as a moral tradition as worthy as legalistic approaches, it is important to guard against polarization. So I seek to give voice to the possible harmonization of these traditions.
Virtuosity in Business does not aim to supplant but rather to honor ancient wisdom about the primacy of virtue, seeking at the same time to rekindle our passion for pursuing it and for engaging it in our approach to contemporary economic ethics. While the book acknowledges that significant differences exist between cultures of virtue that arise from different societies separated through historical time and geographical space, it recognizes the moral authority of key transcultural truths, for example, the idea that human beings everywhere are deserving of dignity and basic human rights, and that by their nature all humans seek happiness.
The concept of invisible law that I expound throughout the text follows in the footsteps of Aristotelian philosophers who, like Thomas Aquinas, assert that an objective moral order exists. Although the moral order is not directly visible with our eyes, it can be seen with our mind's eye, by human reason. Moreover, we possess, according to our human nature, the free will either to follow it or to abandon it. Proceeding from the ancient Greek notion of the well-ordered soul, I would argue that, guided by reason, virtue is master over emotivism and noncognitivism (to modify Plato's charioteer allegory) as a reliable guide for ethics.2 Skeptics hailing from various camps—nihilism, postmodernism, and ethical relativism, to name a few—will of course demur. In a departure from Aristotle's moral realism, such theorists maintain that although the world may supply us with objective facts to discover, the world does not furnish us with any objective values. Rather, values are the product of our own creation. Consequently, for these skeptics we are not able to extract an “ought” from an “is”; we cannot formulate moral prescriptions concerning what ought to be just by observing states of affairs as they actually are. What that means is that no ready-made, objective basis can be given for why you ought to pursue some given aim over any other—choosing the aspirations of being a solitary drunk in preference to the ambitions of a leader of nations, to use Sartre's example. For such a worldview, reason remains simply an instrument placed in the service of any passion or desire that happens to float your boat. As Hume famously put it, “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”3
However, if we cannot point to any rational ground for choosing some purposes instead of other purposes, what becomes of the possibility for the human exercise of authentic freedom of choice? We are instead left with an amoral fatalism that explains human behavior, on putatively empirical grounds, in terms of multifarious causal influences like oxytocin deficiencies, DNA, an excess of Twinkies, or anything else that might preordain you to opt for a vocation of, say, entering bars (as a self-absorbed drunkard) on the one hand, or passing bars (as a civic-minded attorney) on the other. Thus, I argue in this book that one can look to either rationally based and freedom-respecting theories (such as the virtuosity model, albeit Kantian and other deontological approaches would fill the bill as well) to drive our understanding of and participation in business ethics, or we can abandon the field to irrationally based subjectivist, relativist, and deterministic approaches. In this sense, as well as many others, philosophical currents that originate within the broader intellectual culture feed directly into our understanding of business and economics, even though traditional economic theory and even some current schools of management claim that their disciplines have an exceedingly narrow scope that effectively quarantines them from moral life.
Some approaches to business ethics—utilitarian, econometric, contractuarian, and compliance-driven legalistic theories tend to deliver a relentlessly narrow and negative message about business and economic life. Owing in part to their origins in the tradition of analytical philosophy, there is seldom any effort to provide a synthetic view of what the world means for us, what characterizes our human nature, and how human beings figure into the commercial realm.
Such theories of business ethics fail to render any satisfactory account of what Aristotle referred to as eudaimonia, which designates an especially deep form of happiness, and the principal exemplar of the common good. Eudaimonia is a state that we will attain only through association with others. Accordingly, there is a need to put culture in the picture, to establish connections between business and the broader culture.
As cultural understandings change, so too do the challenges for business. The expected standards of excellence for business performance today derive from a different set of concerns than have ever existed before. These stepped-up expectations are apt to trigger reputational sanctions and rewards that often attach directly to the moral probity of market participants. Today, reputational penalties and benefits are as important, if not more significant, than legal penalties that were predominant in previous decades. In the aftermath of the recent financial crisis and the rash of corporate scandals leading up to that crisis, broad shifts of moral viewpoints toward business have occurred. In wide-ranging shifts across continents, social investment funds, employees, customers, corporate executives, elements of global civil society such as activists and NGOs, as well as members of the general public have dramatically recalibrated