Incorporating Virtues: A Speech Act Approach to Understanding how Virtues Can Work in Business

One of the key debates about applying virtue ethics to business is whether or not the aims and values of a business actually prevent the exercise of virtues. Some of the more interesting disagreement in this debate has arisen amongst proponents of virtue ethics. This article analyzes the central issues of this debate in order to advance an alternative way of thinking about how a business can be a form of virtuous practice. Instead of relying on the paired concepts of internal and external goods that define what counts as virtuous, I offer a version of speech act theory taken from Paul Ricoeur to show how a business can satisfy several aims without compromising the exercise of the virtues. I refer to this as a polyvalent approach where a single task within a business can have instrumental, conventional, and imaginative effects. These effects correspond to the locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary dimensions of meaning. I argue that perlocution provides a way in which the moral imagination can discover the moral significance of others that might have not been noticed before, and furthermore, that for such effects to be practiced, they require appropriate virtues. I look at two cases taken from consultation work to thresh out the theoretical and practical detail.

External Goods and the Complete Exercise of Virtue in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics

In Nicomachean Ethics 1.8, Aristotle seems to argue that certain external goods are needed for happiness because, in the first place, they are needed for virtuous activity. This has puzzled scholars. After all, it seems possible for a virtuous agent to exercise her virtuous character even under conditions of extreme hardship or deprivation. Indeed, it is natural to think these are precisely the conditions under which one’s virtue shines through most clearly. I argue that there is good sense to be made of Aristotle’s stance on external goods. Drawing on passages in Politics 7.13 and Nicomachean Ethics 3.1, I develop and defend a distinction between the “mere” exercise of virtue, and the full or complete exercise of virtue. I explain how, on his view, a range of external goods is required for the full exercise of virtue, and I show that it is only this full exercise that is constitutive of eudaimonia. I argue that, for Aristotle, the distinguishing feature of this distinction is the value of the virtuous action’s ends. An action that fully expresses virtue aims at an end that is unqualifiedly good, while an action that merely exercises virtue does not. The external goods Aristotle mentions in NE 1.8 are necessary for performing actions with unqualifiedly good ends, and so necessary for the complete exercise of virtue.

Perennial Problems

Three perennial problems are discussed: external goods, internal conflicts, and evaluative contingencies. These problems are recurrent and ineliminable conditions of human life. External goods are the physical, physiological, and social resources we need for living however we think we should. The problem is that the availability of these resources is often beyond our control. Internal conflicts are between our personal and social evaluative commitments. We are often forced to choose between them, and the problem is that whichever we choose, we lose something important for living as we think we should. Evaluative contingencies affect both what commitments we make and the conditions that may frustrate even our most reasonable efforts to honor them. We need human wisdom for coping with these problems again and again, because they unavoidably recur.

Can Finance Be a Virtuous Practice? A MacIntyrean Account

ABSTRACTFinance may suffer from institutional deformations that subordinate its distinctive goods to the pursuit of external goods, but this should encourage attempts to reform the institutionalization of finance rather than to reject its potential for virtuous business activity. This article argues that finance should be regarded as a domain-relative practice (Beabout 2012; MacIntyre 2007). Alongside management, its moral status thereby varies with the purposes it serves. Hence, when practitioners working in finance facilitate projects that create common goods, it allows them to develop virtues. This argument applies MacIntyre’s widely acknowledged account of the relationship between practices and the development of virtues while questioning some of his claims about finance. It also takes issue with extant accounts of particular financial functions that have failed to identify the distinctive goods of financial practice.

Aristotle on Self-Sufficiency, External Goods, and Contemplation

Aristotle tells us that contemplation is the most self-sufficient form of virtuous activity: we can contemplate alone, and with minimal resources, while moral virtues like courage require other individuals to be courageous towards, or courageous with. This is hard to square with the rest of his discussion of self-sufficiency in the Ethics: Aristotle doesn‘t generally seek to minimize the number of resources necessary for a flourishing human life, and seems happy to grant that such a life will be self-sufficient despite requiring a lot of external goods. In this paper I develop an interpretation of self-sufficiency as a form of independence from external contributors to our activity, and argue that this interpretation accounts both for Aristotle‘s views on contemplation and for the role self-sufficiency plays in his broader account of human happiness.

Virtue and the “Good Life” in the Book of Job

In this article, I argue that Job 29 provides an eudaimonic depiction of human happiness whereby virtue, combined with a number of “external goods” is held up as the best possible life for human beings. I compare Job’s vision of the “good life” with an Aristotelian conception of εὐδαιμονία and conclude that there are numerous parallels between Job and Aristotle with respect to their understanding of the “good life.” While the intimate presence of God distinguishes Job’s expectation of happiness with that of Aristotle, Job is unique among other eudaimonic texts in the Hebrew Bible in that expectations of living well are expressed in terms of virtue, rather than Torah piety. In the second portion of the article, I assess Job’s conception of human flourishing from the perspective of the divine speeches, which enlarge Job’s vision of the “good life” by bringing Job face-to-face with the “wild inhabitants” of the cosmos.

Internal Goods in the Sociology of Education: Skills, Habits, Virtues, and the Problem of Power

Sociologists of education tend to emphasize external goods over internal goods, that is, the goods that result from a certain practice rather than the goods intrinsic to the practice itself. A distinction between kinds of goods allows sociologists to distinguish education for skills from education for virtues and education for habits. Skills produce external goods while habits and virtues produce internal goods, though in distinct ways, with virtues more related to a specific vision of the good and habits more open to different forms of growth. A distinction between these three forms of practice—skills, habitus, and virtues—can help sociologists recognize and study different forms of goods in schools, better empowering them to examine alienation and the relationship between power and morality. Distinguishing kinds of goods can be helpful in a wide range of sociological subfields, especially education, helping sociologists move beyond a predominant focus on stratified socio-economic outcomes.

Eudaimonia

The literal sense of the Greek word eudaimonia is ‘having a good guardian spirit’: that is, the state of having an objectively desirable life, universally agreed by ancient philosophical theory and popular thought to be the supreme human good. This objective character distinguishes it from the modern concept of happiness: a subjectively satisfactory life. Much ancient theory concerns the question of what constitutes the good life: for example, whether virtue is sufficient for it, as Socrates and the Stoics held, or whether external goods are also necessary, as Aristotle maintained. Immoralists such as Thrasymachus (in Plato’s Republic) sought to discredit morality by arguing that it prevents the achievement of eudaimonia, while its defenders (including Plato) argued that it is necessary and/or sufficient for eudaimonia. The primacy of eudaimonia does not, however, imply either egoism (since altruism may itself be a constituent of the good life), or consequentialism (since the good life need not be specifiable independently of the moral life). The gulf between ‘eudaimonistic’ and ‘Kantian’ theories is therefore narrower than is generally thought.