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5/4/22, 1:23 AM Launchpad: Aristotle and Virtue Ethics: UCOR 2910 02 22SQ Ethical Reasoning in Business

https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/pages/launchpad-aristotle-and-virtue-ethics 1/9

Launchpad: Aristotle and Virtue Ethics

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5/4/22, 1:23 AM Launchpad: Aristotle and Virtue Ethics: UCOR 2910 02 22SQ Ethical Reasoning in Business

https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/pages/launchpad-aristotle-and-virtue-ethics 2/9

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“this is a day which demands new thinking and the reevaluation of old concepts”

– Martin Luther King

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This week we begin by diving into Aristotle’s virtue ethics as a comprehensive framework that aims simultaneously at individual and collective flourishing (see the more thorough lecture notes (https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/files/68034395?wrap=1) (https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/files/68034395/download? download_frd=1) here). Often in our modern times this holistic nature of Aristotle’s ethics is forgotten. What we find instead, even within many contemporary ethics textbooks, is an emphasis only on a narrow individualistic sense of virtue ethics, tailored more to the individualism of modern society rather than to the inherent sociality of human nature. For some of these modern thinkers, virtue means simply its commonplace sense of individual conduct or polite behavior that conforms to the given norms of the status quo. But Aristotle’s virtue ethics combined a deeper understanding of the role of politics and economics for human well-being in a way that harbors a more progressive kernel for radically challenging our current status quo. This is why Aristotle says at the beginning of his Nicomachean Ethics that while ethics studies the Good, the highest science of the Good is politics – ethics is a field of politics, and politics (unlike its sense in our modern Western society) is an inherently ethical endeavor about how to collectively realize our common Good by fulfilling our uniquely human capacities for higher social relations.

Within our modern capitalist society, however, it is easy to forget this holistic ethical orientation because of our compartmentalizing and individualistic ethos – but I believe this modern separation of economics and politics from ethics is precisely what a study

5/4/22, 1:23 AM Launchpad: Aristotle and Virtue Ethics: UCOR 2910 02 22SQ Ethical Reasoning in Business

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of virtue ethics should begin calling into question. Why should politics, and especially the economy, be deemed inherently neutral, indifferent, or amoral, as if separate from shared ethical values around a sense of the common good? What is the function of economic activity if it is not the ethical task of providing goods and services that meet real social and environmental needs for flourishing together? And if the goal of life together is not just mere survival but living well—flourishing, which always requires socially working together—then shouldn't our politics and economy serve this common good rather than private profit? These are the questions pressed upon us by a holistic account of virtue ethics.

Of course, ancient Greece was bound up in those ancient problems of patriarchy and slavery, but in the context of the fledgling Athenian democracy some of these structures were beginning to be questioned, and it is from this initial questioning that virtue ethics was born. While Aristotle was a product of this context and often perpetuated some of its unfortunate biases (like almost all philosophers throughout history as we will see), his virtue framework nevertheless set forth a progressive notion of human nature and social practice that rightly calls into question and transcends his own time and place. As McCarthy’s reading from last week highlighted, Aristotle vacillated at times between, on the one hand his own aristocratic class perspective that inconsistently endorsed elitist aspects of the status quo, and on the other hand more inclusive forms of democracy truer to his own virtue ethics framework. The reason why democracy is truer to the progressive kernel of virtue ethics is because the whole point of Aristotle's virtue ethics was about building a community of equal citizens empowering each other for the good life—a communal life for its own sake beyond mere survival, consumerism, or any form of commercial and military exploitation. Such a conception of the common good can only be pursued (contrary to Aristotle's reservations) when everyone is given the equal opportunity to become active participants in political rule together, and thus where everyone practices the virtues of solidarity and compassion, learning how to treat one another as equals. As Aristotle says in his Politics: “It is evident that the best politeia (political community) is that arrangement according to which anyone whatsoever might do best and live a flourishing life”.

The task for this week is then to dig in, reevaluate virtue ethics, and carry forward its progressive kernel while of course leaving behind some of Aristotle’s own inconsistencies and biases. One of the progressive kernels of his thought that is

5/4/22, 1:23 AM Launchpad: Aristotle and Virtue Ethics: UCOR 2910 02 22SQ Ethical Reasoning in Business

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especially relevant to our own context, as we will explore, is that virtue ethics was developed in order to counter the arbitrary rule of moneyed elites who exploited society for private gain. The virtues, as habits or practices, are about empowering individuals according to their higher socially creative qualities. Therefore the virtues are ways of exercising our social nature in each individual for democratic community building rather than self-seeking money making (think of them like practicing skills for a team sport, but here it is the activity of democracy).

As Aristotle's account implies, politics and economics are not simply indifferent mechanisms for maintaining the status quo and facilitating private self-interests; rather they are inherently social activities and therefore ethical projects for realizing higher forms of social life together so that a true democracy might become possible. As a social activity, the economy should democratically serve social life, rather than social life bent to serve the private economic interests of a few—thus, well before the phrase became a current slogan, virtue ethics can be seen as one of the first explicit attempts to affirm “people over profit”. This more holistic sense of virtue ethics therefore provides a way of challenging market relativism, interrogating its social structures and institutions by demanding that they serve true human empowerment according to what it means to be social and rational. For virtue ethics, justice is then always already social, a demand that society’s political and economic structures meet the real needs not only for basic subsistence, but the truly human need for developing our higher socially creative capabilities for the good life.

This is why some of our more radically progressive modern thinkers have been influenced by the rational kernel of virtue ethics, seeking to take forward a more consistent form of it beyond Aristotle. Most notably Martin Luther King carries forward an Aristotelian sense of the common good of mutual flourishing, or what he says is an objectively shared need by all humans for "fulfillment". Thus he echoes others in challenging our market relativism with virtue ethic's progressive notion of justice as “to each according to need, from each according to ability”. And in his last book “Where do We go from Here?”, MLK argued explicitly for what he called an “Aristotelian sense” of justice against abstract notions of justice that lead to a homogenizing kind of equality. As he explained, the progressive kernel in the Aristotelian sense of justice meant concretely and holistically meeting the higher needs for real social, economic, and political empowerment of African Americans (along with everyone else) so that they might join in community building as fully capable equals. This ethical framework is also

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seen in his emphasis on the higher social virtues of cooperation, compassion, and solidarity against both racism and class exploitation, and his well-known vision of a society in which everyone is judged “not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character.”

Moving into more contemporary voices, this week we will read the feminist philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who argues that this progressive Aristotelian framework challenges the inequalities of our status quo with a more robust and empowering sense of “social democracy”. And in the video for this week’s case study we will also see this progressive Aristotelian kernel at work behind Michael Sandel’s democratic challenge to our society’s obsession with organizing everything around the market and money.

Some key ideas and critical patterns in Virtue Ethics:

These are some points of entry for engaging the readings—the lecture notes flesh out Aristotle’s virtue ethics in more detail from his texts:

For virtue ethics, asking “what should I/we do?” is determined by our understanding of what is it good to be—what qualities and activities make us distinctively human? Remember the normative form of human nature: For Aristotle we are inherently social and rational beings. Like other social animals such as bees, ants, or wolves we have evolved only because of our social nature. But for Aristotle we are not simply social animals in the exact same way as bees for example. Rather what makes humans unique is that we are social and rational animals in a distinctive way as “political animals”.

What he means by “political animals” is that we are defined as a species not only according to our social capacity for meeting basic biological needs, which is what we share with all other social animals, but more importantly according to the unique capacity we have for “politics” which is the social and rational capacity to consciously plan our material and social life in new and better ways toward higher ends of mutual flourishing. Politically organizing together is then what sets apart our social nature as distinctively human rather than just another herd animal. We are those animals who have the higher capacity to plan and build community in a conscious way for its own sake. This means the capacity to plan beyond mere survival and toward

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the higher aims of art, love, play, science, political organizing, and friendship—all those uniquely human activities worth doing for their own sake rather than for lower needs. "Political animal" therefore means politics should be a community project with a consciously planned goal for building associations of flourishing beyond mere survival, commercial transactions, or military alliances. But Aristotle was well aware that we don’t always live up to our higher ethical/political nature—the point is nevertheless that this capacity is a latent potential within our nature, that if it is not actualized it remains dormant, but when it is actualized humanity is able to progress. Bees are social but not political in this sense, in that they automatically carry out their biologically given and hierarchically structured social function without consciously choosing and planning more equal ways of sharing the labors and fruits of social life—if one is born a worker bee, one dies a worker bee (and worse still for drones). Whereas humans have figured out ways to consciously plan their labors around the idea of equal shares in a higher communal form of mutuality—therefore as animals with higher social and political capacities, humans have no excuse for continuing exploitative class divisions even though we unfortunately still perpetuate such.

Also notice that Aristotle's notion of political community implies forging higher, more inclusive communities beyond exclusive groups or tribalism. Aristotle's framework implies that the diversity of the city brings out what is best and highest in our human nature, sparking us to transcend biological determinism and immediate kinship ties in order to forge higher social relations on the basis of those higher qualities of creating, communicating, and reasoning together about new forms of life together.

The “Good” common to all refers to our highest fulfillment or flourishing as the distinctive beings we are. It then refers to fulfilling a thing’s highest purpose (telos). This is what Aristotle’s term “eudaemonia” refers to which is often translated as happiness--to be happy is to fulfill our highest potentials: which for Aristotle means building a community that realizes our social and rational capabilities in their most excellent form.

5/4/22, 1:23 AM Launchpad: Aristotle and Virtue Ethics: UCOR 2910 02 22SQ Ethical Reasoning in Business

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How does Aristotle distinguish "happiness" from other more common senses of that word, especially those represented above by Calvin in the comic strip? What does it mean to be truly happy for Aristotle and how does this pursuit connect all of his thought? These are the key questions to ask this week and they are addressed more in depth in the lecture notes. These are important questions to ask in realizing that what we happen to want in any given moment, thinking that it might bring us immediate happiness, might not always be “good” for us in a more holistic sense of happiness. Why is this sometimes the case? Is it because some objects of desire might not be good in terms of purposefully fulfilling our distinctive potentials? Do we then need to train our desires to desire higher, more fulfilling goods in order to be happy in a deeper sense?

The word “Virtue” refers to this critical training since it refers to the appropriate means or practices for reaching the good life: those qualities and practices necessary for actualizing our potentials as excellent political animals – active citizens who know how to rule together, work together, cooperate, share together, reason together, play together, dance together, imagine together, trust one another, etc. Virtue ethics is then about developing and internalizing those practices that enable us to realize our distinctive human qualities and capacities for mutual flourishing The norms of virtue ethics have to do with internally developing those distinctive potentials latent within human nature, so that virtuous living is about striving to realize the highest potentials of our nature rather than about obeying ideals or

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rules imposed externally upon human nature, as if from an external command or law.

These distinctive potentials latent within human nature are what Martha Nussbaum refers to as our distinctive "capabilities"

For virtue ethics moral education and transformative practice are then a necessary part of ethics in enabling humanity to become more fully human beyond brute nature by forging higher forms of diverse associations that realize our social and rational capabilities. But notice that in order to ethically and politically forge higher forms of community Aristotle recognizes that we must also rightly order our economic activity that makes any such community possible in the first place.

In the readings and lecture notes focus on how Aristotle understands two different kinds of economies, or “arts of acquisition” as he calls it, in relation to becoming more fully human. We will need to dive deeper into how and why he distinguishes one form of economic activity as more natural than another form. The two different arts of acquisition aim at two different kinds of wealth: one form of economic activity is aimed at true wealth and the other at false wealth. Aristotle makes this distinction because, unlike any of the other ethical theorists we will read, he asks some key questions about economic activity: why do we produce goods in the first place? what are they for? shouldn't the economy serve the political/ethical project of building a higher form of community that is more distinctively human?

For Aristotle the whole point of producing goods is in order to meet real needs for becoming more fully human as political animals, rather than to pile up private profit in the form of monetary values. This means the ultimate end of production is to morally contribute to the common good of creating community rather than to accumulate private wealth alone. This more natural aim Aristotle distinguishes from what he considers the unnatural aim of an economy that produces goods only for exchange and private accumulation of money, since it detracts from and exploits the political project of community building. This is an important distinction that we will carry with us the rest of the quarter. He also importantly distinguishes these two forms of economic activity and wealth according to two value systems: an economy organized around

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“social use values” and an economy organized around market “exchange values”. This is a very important distinction:

Every economy is organized on the basis of a value system and Aristotle realized that ethical and economic values are intimately related (but not every society equally recognizes this):

Communities that produce goods together for social use-values hold their economy morally accountable to the communal value of building higher human associations. Societies organized around producing commodities for exchange- value on the market separate economic activity from moral accountability: social life and the economy are instead submitted to the indifferent law of monetary value and private profit, while ethical values are no longer objective or public but exclusively private, like consumer preferences.

These two competing value systems will have a massive effect on how we view ethical values as we will see next week in the transition to our modern times.