Not so long ago, companies were basically expected to focus on producing goods and services at reasonable prices. In contrast, today we find corporations being held responsible for a host of moral issues encompassing environmental rectitude, human rights, alleviation of poverty through entrepreneurship, and quality of life. In companies throughout the world, sustainability issues, gender issues, diversity issues, and questions of the clash between work and family are all included in the agenda of corporate social responsibility.
Among the challenges that I take on in Virtuosity in Business is crafting a narrative that reaffirms the ancient notion of virtue as something built into human nature together with the confirmation of objective moral precepts that demand respect for human dignity, being just and fair, and advancing the common good. Yet I acknowledge the reality that cultivating virtue in the competitive world of business and wisely applying open-textured precepts is an ongoing process, requiring commitment by reasonable people of good will who are sincerely motivated to seek excellence in themselves and others. I believe that the task of undertaking such commitments is assisted when people are able to live in a culture that keeps faith with time-honored values, fundamental truths, and settled wisdom even while confronting complex situations that severely test fidelity to those philosophical constants and would have perhaps been incomprehensible to ancient philosophers. Virtuosity in Business provides such a portrait.
The concepts that inform Virtuosity in Business are at once simple and complex. The simple idea is that both moral virtue and moral law constitute the basic operating system of business ethics. Without knowing core moral rules and principles (norms) it is not possible to distinguish what matters and what doesn't ethically in a specific business context. However, just knowing what the rules are is insufficient. Just as genuine virtuoso artists are driven by their desire for self-imposed excellence and their inclinations for musicality, authentic virtuoso businesspeople will pursue fineness and possess a disposition to be ethical, to want to do the right thing for its own sake. Our determinations about whether we trust businesspeople and the companies within which they work enough to want to do business with them, and on what terms, are in large part based on our judgments about their character and sincerity, their display of honesty, and many other virtues upon which we depend. These very simple ideas, however, require elaboration and justification. Hence, Virtuosity in Business is framed within a more complex rationale and set of concepts. The book's architectonic is constructed as follows.
Chapter 1 (“Virtue and Character”) begins with a conception of the human person as a rational being, and this discussion forms a point of departure for examining how such a being attains virtue and character Anchoring the analysis in ancient thought, including ideas from Confucius, Lao Tse, Plato, and Aristotle, the chapter extends insights about moral virtue and the character it produces to contemporary concerns raised by the recent economic crisis, such as executive compensation and the choice of a meaningful career path.
Chapter 2 (“Authenticity and Freedom”) expands and deepens this discussion with a conception of persons as rational beings endowed with existential freedom. This chapter shows how notions of authenticity and freedom derived from Sartrean existentialism can provide an illuminating and useful point of view on the nature of the moral character of businesspeople in the contemporary world. In spite of all that may undermine or seduce us, in spite of inevitable ambiguity, we are required to take responsibility for our character and actions and to make decisions in view of our own projects and that of others, and other broad concerns. However, in doing this, we often find traditional sources of moral guidance unhelpful or incomplete. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to suppose that there are never any good reasons for making a big existential choice. For instance, sometimes deciding to be this rather than that sort of a person is morally wrong. The chapter shows how a Sartrean perspective offers some important insights about the way our roles, and this includes the roles we occupy in business organizations, can be implicated in bad faith.
Chapter 3 (“The Art of Business”) augments the analysis with a conception of rational and free persons as creative artisans. However, rather than painting an idealistic, Quixote-like portrait, this chapter seeks to come to terms with the practical implications of taking virtue seriously in the hard-nosed world of competitive business, an environment that often threatens to “crowd out” the virtues. Just how far can the metaphor of artistic excellence take us in a field where the relentless pursuit of profits seems to be the order of the day? Some commentators, particularly Kantians, are perplexed by the assertion that a businessperson or firm can choose something both for its own sake and for the sake of something else. Can a businessperson or company authentically choose to conduct an honest transaction for its own sake—because it's the right thing to do—and also for the sake of boosting its reputation with clients, thus enhancing its profitability both in the near-and long term? I argue that choosing a virtuous action for its own sake and for the sake of other ends makes sense at face value, given that the pursuit of those further ends does not undermine the choice of the virtuous act undertaken in the first place. The plausibility of this account is maintained once we place profitability in proper perspective. That is, we must recognize that for the virtuous businessperson or firm, profitability, albeit an important goal, is not the narrow sine qua non of all business activity that some extremists tout it to be. Instead, profitability is a reasonably predictable result flowing from the pursuit of virtuosity—excellence in providing a valuable good or service for the common good.
Chapter 4 (“Trust, Personhood, and the Soul of an Enterprise”) augments the conception of moral personhood with that of the business enterprise as a moral actor. This chapter shows how, due to legal and regulatory issues of corporate responsibility, and as an outgrowth of motivational and marketing tools, our traditional analysis of conduct and character has been shifting from the individual level to the corporate one. The chapter explores questions raised by that trend: If a corporation is capable of assuming a real personality, assembled by artful PR specialists, then is the signal being sent that the people working in the firm do not have to act like real or ethical people? What happens if people begin to act in the image of the invented corporate person to diffuse and limit responsibility?
These discussions set the stage for Chapter 5 (“Discerning a Higher Law”), which examines the challenges of interpreting ethical pronouncements for business enterprises and the people in them as conceptually derivative from an objective moral law. Arguments from a moral realist frame of reference are put forward for the idea of a higher moral law from which obligations to honor human rights and other moral precepts specified in corporate and international instruments can be drawn. Replies are given to the views of moral skeptics, relativists, and nihilists who oppose the robust brand of moral realism that I offer.
Chapter 6 (“Polycentered Phron
