Business Ethics HW Please see first attachment for requirement

Business Ethics – Thomas A. Package

Lecture 4

I. RUN Inc. Case

II. "Corporate Roles, Personal Virtues" Solomon

A) Solomon on relevance of Aristotle - persons should think of themselves as members of a larger community and strive to excel, to bring out the best in themselves and the community. An Aristotelean approach to business ethics begins with the virtue of the individual in a corporate setting and the virtues of the corporation will follow.

Package on relevance of Aristotle. Aristotle thought the interesting questions were about the tensions between an individual and her group. He dealt with the polis or city-state. Contemporaries triangulate between many groups, the most important are often state and corporations.

B) Solomon contrasts Aristotelean approach with Kantian and Utilitarian:

Kantian - too much emphasis on rational principles. Contra Kant, all that is morally significant is not a matter of rationalized principles. Cultivation of Character counts, not rationalizing our behavior. I assume he means rationalize as in to make rational, not excuse making. Most importantly, duties are formed in terms of community and how the greater whole is effected by actions, not monistic principles of rationality. Besides, it's dry and we just don't "DO" ethics that way. It ain't inspirational. Shifts emphasis from greatness of a person in a roll to roll-transcendant principle which may be "empty-handed" for solving corporate dilemmas and giving corporate direction.

Utilitarian - also too obsessed with doting over principles, namely maximizing good consequences. Like Kantian ethics, Utilitarianism compulsively focuses on decision procedures instead of the idea of personal responsibility. Shifts focus of ethics from being personally responsible and instead appeals to the almighty decision procedure.

C) Rights v. Responsibilities.

Solomon does not wish to deny the relevance of rights to ethics or the centrality of civil rights. But rights talk is not meant to replace talk of responsibilities. We should move from talking about having rights to recognizing the rights of others. Solomon thinks the latter can be best accomplished by talking about what the virtuous person would or wouldn't do, but he acknowledged that virtue theory can be provincial or ethno-centric.

Solomon's Six Dimensions of Virtue Ethics

1) Community - What is good for the community is co-extensive with what is good for the individual. Our self-interest is for the most part identical to the larger interests of the group. In this case, the good of the company and the good of the individual stand or fall together

2) Excellence - Just that. Means not just avoiding mistakes, but excelling and doing a good job, whatever that job may be.

3) Role Identity - The particularity of being an employee, of taking on that role and accepting the attendant obligations and performing conscientiously. Knowing which hat you just put on.

4) Integrity - As in the ability to integrate the roles you inhabit - a fluidity of deference to the proper virtue.

5) Judgment - particularly good moral judgment. This is the ability to make the right decisions, to correctly choose from among competing moral considerations.

6) Holism - a state of harmony. Where there is less emphasis on a job being just a job, and more on your job being a facet, not a component, of your life.

E) Business and the virtues - Business ethics is too often conceived as restrictions or regulations placed upon business instead of a driving force behind business. A virtue theory approach removes the emphasis from prohibitions, and it places the emphasis on what a good person would do. A short list of virtues - honesty, loyalty, sincerity, courage, reliability, trustworthiness, benevolence, sensitivity, civility, decency, cheerfulness, liveliness...etc. Not to mention strength, skill, charm and others.

Toughness - a difficult virtue. Making the tough choices, doing what might be described, in other circumstances, as the wrong thing. In other words, the virtuous person makes the tough choice to fire otherwise good employees when the situation demands cost-cutting. Doing something that may appear wrong in order to do something right, making painful sacrifices for a greater good. This is sometimes called strength of will.

The Aristotelean Bottom Line.

Business ethics is better conceived as what good people do, not what ought to be done while at work. We would be better served to see how our lives could be enriched by a better, even excellent, corporate world than to continue to foster a useless, damaging, and false dichotomy between our jobs and our lives. In other words, business ethics should show us how to fit our work lives into the broader scheme of a life well lived.

III. "Virtue in Ancient Philosophy" - Holmes Chapter 3

A) Be a Good Person - the directive of virtue theory. Virtue theory is the oldest of the moral theories we will study. For the most part, the strongest version is that given by Aristotle. The Ancient Greeks were concerned with how one should live a good life, eudiamonia was the term they used. The good life is not limited to good food and good wine, the pleasures of the world, but means a life well lived, as evidenced by what a good person would do. When faced with a moral problem, the question of what should I do is answered simply by "Do what a good person would do" or even simpler "Be a good person." In this sense, think of the theory as a top down approach. You begin with the directive of being a good person, then you try to figure out what it is to be a good person. Well, a good person has certain qualities of goodness, or the virtues.

B) Kinds of Virtue

1) Natural Qualities - strength, speed, intelligence

2) Acquired Qualities - musical abilities, foreign languages

3) Qualities of Temperament - good or amicable disposition, patience

4) Religious Qualities - faith, piety

5) Qualities of character - benevolence, kindness, perseverance, courage

If these qualities are to be action guiding, we need to figure out which are moral virtues and which are not.

C) The Function Argument. Some things have specific functions. Body parts have functions like eyes see and ears hear. Artifacts also have functions: hammers drive nails and drills make holes. This also applies to living things. Horses can either run races or do various kinds of labor. The virtue or excellence of something is a quality possessed by the thing which allows or enables it to function well. Dull knives function poorly and sharp knives function well. Weak horses function poorly and strong or fast horses function well.

This gets tricky when we ask what is the function of people and how do they perform well. It involves, for Plato, a conception of the person as a unification of body and soul, unified under the capacity of reason. The soul, for Plato, is comprised of 1) reason, 2) the appetites or appetitive part, and 3) the spirit. The spirit contains the emotions, like anger and fear, as well as feelings like honor and ambition. The appetitive part contains the bodily drives or appetites for food, drink, or sex. Reason sits in the drivers seat directs the soul. The soul functions well when reason is not subordinated to the other parts, when reason allows the soul to be directed by wisdom. Just as justice is the first virtue of a well ordered society ruled by wise people, so to justice is a state of the soul when all parts are in harmony under reason.

D) Virtue, Goodness, and Right Conduct

How is virtue or a properly aligned soul achieved? The answer is through virtuous conduct or actions. We must act justly or virtuously to achieve the state of being a virtuous person. There are two options here: 1) either the actions are just or good because they make the person virtuous or 2) the acts are virtuous as judged by some other standard independent of the effects on one's soul. In 1, acts are good because the causally effect or align one's soul. You need to know what effect an act had on a persons soul, and possibly on others and the state as a whole, in order to determine whether the act was just or unjust. In the latter, you can judge the actions as just or unjust without having to figure out what effect the act had on the person's soul. You just need to check the act against the independent standard. The former is more plausibly Plato, and though the latter may be more plausible. In the latter, virtue is then produced or sustained or promoted by just or good conduct. We then require an antecedent or prior knowledge about good or just conduct.

If we put this question in more contemporary and formal terms we would ask "Where is the goodness that determines rightness located? Is it in the good and thus right character, or is it in the actions themselves?" Here are the two options:

1) Right actions are those actions done by good or virtuous people. – Plato

2) Good or virtuous people are those that perform right actions. – Aristotle

In the latter, virtue is then produced or sustained or promoted by just or good conduct. We then require an antecedent or prior knowledge about good or just conduct. This seems like the much better answer, if for no other reason than Plato's position seems to give saints and paragons of virtue a pass to do anything, while saying that all actions taken by bad or vicious people are necessarily bad. It should be possible for even Mother Theresa to perform a wrong act, and it should also be possible for Hitler to perform a right act.

E) Aristotle and the Habits of Virtue

Aristotle also viewed the world in terms of purposes, ends, or functions. The distinguishing function of humans is to reason and from this capacity Aristotle also produces a theory of virtue. Aristotle broke from Plato over the nature of the soul and denied the immaterial or ethereal quality of the soul. As an early proponent of natural science, he found no evidence or argument to support an immaterial part of the soul and since the functioning of humans can be explained without it, he ejected it. The soul, if you want, has just rational and appetitive parts.

Anyway, Reason has theoretical and practical functions. Theoretic reason gathers and gains knowledge and practical reason directs conduct. When you are good at both, you have theoretical and practical wisdom, two intellectual virtues. You need not have both and having one does not entail having the other. Physicists may be very good at physics and very bad at moral conduct. Moral virtues are then habits, traits or dispositions of character and directed by practical reason. In this sense, the moral virtues are under the regulation or control of the intellectual virtues. They are appetitive and non-rational, one might say habitual acts. This makes the moral virtues acquired through practice, namely the practice of virtuous acts. If you consciously employee practical reason to regulate your behavior to the point where you habitually act generously at the appropriate time or courageously at the appropriate time, then you will eventually attain a generous and courageous character.

F) The Golden Mean

When is the appropriate time for generosity…or courage? Sometimes courage or bravery is just silly, not virtuous. Is the man who charges overwhelming odds and forces brave or just foolish since his death not effect the outcome of the battle? Aristotle's answer to this question of appropriateness is the golden mean. On one extreme, the man who never gives a penny to strangers, friends, or loved ones, is stingy. On the other extreme, the man who gives nearly all of his time and money to others is too generous. The mean is somewhere in the middle...just where in the middle is left up to those with good judgment to determine. The people who see it will be able to see the mean, and those who can't are left to try or fail. Aristotle was big on the idea that there were just some people who don't get it when it comes to matters of practical (moral) wisdom.

IV Does the Ethics of Virtue Presuppose and Ethics of Conduct?

The Priority of Conduct to Character

A) Aristotle runs head long into the same problem we found in Plato. What are the determining criteria for right actions? Aristotle answers, somewhat unsatisfactorily, the golden mean, or acting in some particular way like generously or courageously, when appropriate. That seems to be deference to right actions, not good actions. The good act, the act which approaches the mean, is defined in terms of appropriateness or rightness. In this sense, it would seem the good is defined in terms of the right, or right is prior to good. In other words, Aristotle NEEDS a theory of conduct to make his theory of character work. He provides us a theory of conduct in the form of the theory of the golden mean, but this should strike you as particularly unsatisfactory.

Let's try this from another angle. How can Aristotle's theory ever be said to be action guiding? Perhaps, as something like the function arguments would indicate, his theory is based on the directive "Be a good or virtuous person" or "One ought to be a virtuous person." OK, then suppose we have a prior commitment to this directive so we can make the theory action guiding and suppose we ask what it means to be a virtuous person, then Aristotle can't answer "following the directive" because that would be fairly obviously circular and vacuous. So if he wants to remain coherent, then a virtue theorist would need an independent theory of right and wrong actions which is not determined by the same grounds of his theory of value, else circularity.

Here's another problem for Aristotle: what if I don't care about virtue or being a virtuous person. Is that morally wrong? Suppose I am a really lack-luster person. I may be an uneducated, beer drinking, comic-book reading, layabout, BUM who lives in his parents’ basement, but I don't ever hurt or harm a single person. Is that so obviously MORALLY wrong? Not without the prior commitment or moral directive to be a good person. True, I could be a much better person if I got a job, stopped drinking so much beer, and started reading books with hard covers, but you could only say I was morally terrible if you thought I had some prior obligation or commitment to be a good person.

B) What is character? Aristotle seems to define it in terms of the propensity to commit certain acts, maybe even certain acts at the right time. But if that is all there is to character, then why not talk about acts or conduct instead of character. What we are owed is a very specific account of character and it cannot be entirely defeasible in terms of actions or else we have an ethics of conduct. But what else could character be? Could it be a state of mind, or having certain feelings about actions, or persons or whatever? All attempts to explicate character seem to be reducible to actions. If that is the case then why not just talk about an ethics of conduct right from the beginning? At the very least, we think a theory of right conduct or action is needed to ground the theory of character so we should perhaps attend to first things first and decide how we are going to determine right and wrong actions.

Questions to Answer:

1. Solomon's *Corporate Roles, Personal Virtues.* Why does Solomon favor a virtue theoretic approach to morality? What does he not like about the other approaches he mentions? Does this preference seem reasonable?

2. What does Solomon mean when he says it's possible for a virtue ethic to be ethno-centric or provincial? What do these terms mean? Isn't this a nice way of saying something else? Is this a deeper problem than he lets on? 3. What is the golden mean? What role does it play in Aristotle's theory of virtue ethics? How does Holmes argue for the priority of a theory of right conduct to a theory of right character? Can you consider a theory of virtue to be also an ethics of virtue without a theory of right conduct?