Preface
Pat Werhane has never claimed to be an Aristotelian, but she has helped me, and surely others as well, understand Aristotle’s ethics and virtue ethics generally. I was for long uncomfortable with Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean and his views about how virtue guides ethical action. As I became acquainted with Pat’s notion of moral imagination, I had the strong sense that this was what Aristotle was getting at and that his approach was, as hers is, right on the whole.
She assisted me on in a more practical way as well. Some years ago she asked me to lead a short summer seminar on Aristotle’s ethics for students in the Darden’s Ph.D. program in business ethics. She was under the impression that I was an expert, and in the next few months I did what I could to make her belief self-fulfilling. Reading the Nicomachean Ethics with greater care and discussing it with those excellent students contributed greatly to my development as a virtue ethicist.
Introduction
Patricia Werhane has argued to great effect that ethics is about more than principles: moral imagination is a necessary and extraordinarily important component of ethics. Aristotle, Werhane’s predecessor, takes ethics to be about not only principles but also virtues; in fact he gives virtue priority over principles. Character, which includes all of one’s virtues and vices, is central to ethics. But Aristotle claims that character also includes the ability to see situations as they really are. He calls that ability perception; it is close to Werhane’s notion of moral imagination, or at any rate a significant part of it. A virtuous person has this faculty and puts it to good use, says Aristotle; not so a vicious person.
I shall offer a brief summary of Aristotle’s ethics and some observations on Aristotle’s notion of perception in ethics and his view of the role of particulars and principles. Though some resemblances to Werhane on moral imagination will be evident, Aristotle is an essentialist and the notion of conceptual schemes, so important to Werhane, is largely absent in Aristotle. Yet there is a striking similarity in the ways in which Aristotle and Werhane deal with resolving ethical disagreements: Werhane embraces something similar to Aristotle’s dialectic. I use the case of financialization to illustrate how that works.
Aristotle would largely agree with Werhane’s work on group moral imagination, since he takes the role of the community to be central to ethics. Their work raises issues about individualism, a problem for modernity, and about reconciliation across communities. Democratic capitalism may have a part to play in addressing these issues.
Aristotle’s Ethics
According to Aristotle, ethics is first of all about the good life for a human being, and good character creates a good life for a person. As it is our human nature to be rational and sociable, the good is a rational and sociable life. A good person makes good decisions and lives well with a good family and good friends in a good community.
Aristotle does not believe that the good life is about finding and following unexceptionable ethical principles, for ethics is not an exact science. It is in fact a sign of erudition not to demand more precision of a subject matter than it admits of, and ethics admits of much less precision than, say, mathematics. (See Nicomachean Ethics I 3 1094b23–27.) Making an ethical decision is not a matter of consulting a rulebook, for there are no rules that tell one with certainty what to do in every possible case. At a certain point one must bring the perception of particulars to bear.
Aristotle famously claims that virtue lies at a mean between vicious extremes. So, for example, courage is a mean between cowardice and foolhardiness. On first look this seems a trivial insight, not of much help in guiding action. It may be useful to realize that a courageous person does not take pointless risks and that too much of a good thing is not good, but that is not very profound. But Aristotle puts meat on these bones by saying that hitting the mean is a matter of getting the details of one’s emotions and actions right: you feel and act at the right time, about the right things, with respect to the right people, to the right purpose. (NE II 6 1106b16–22; see also III 7 1115b17–19.) So, for example, whether a cavalry charge is courageous or foolhardy depends on whether the defenders are experienced, where both sides are, how well they are equipped, whether the expected value of victory exceeds its probable cost, and a list of other important factors. There may be many principles involved, but there is no algorithm that lets us figure out which one is salient in determining the courageous course of action. In fact even an excellent person can fail to take proper account of all of the salient facts of a situation. In this respect ethical action is like strategy, and it is at least as difficult.1 One has to perceive the situation in all its detail correctly. Here Werhane would invoke moral imagination, and in doing so would be carrying on and refining the legacy of Aristotle.
Aristotle on Perceiving the Essence of a Situation
Aristotle’s ethical views are based on his metaphysics. His world is populated by substances, natural material objects that have form and matter, or essence and accident. A substance is identical with its form or essence; its size or color or location or age may change while it remains the same thing – the same tree, for example, whether a sapling or a mature tree, whether leafy or leafless. Artifacts are not substances, strictly speaking, but Aristotle uses them as examples. So we can speak of a house remaining the same house after it is repainted or the kitchen is remodeled.
We can think of events as having essences by extension.2 So this event is essentially an explosion; that one is essentially a headache. Human actions have essences too, Aristotle suggests in discussing the mean, and where there is an ethical issue the essential description is the correct ethical description. So if Jones says with intent to deceive that p when he knows that in fact not-p, his statement is a lie. That is a fairly easy case: most people know what counts as a lie. But suppose Jones, a colleague of Adams, goes to Adams’s boss and accuses Adams of breaking a corporate rule. Jones knows that this will greatly upset the boss and cause problems for Adams. What is Jones’s act, essentially? An act of law-abiding corporate citizenship? A vindictive act? A betrayal? A well-meaning overreaction? It is hard to say; in the absence of further information, it may be impossible to say. To characterize the act in an ethically correct way – to identify its essence – requires considering the crucial details. How serious was the breach? Does Adams deserve what the boss will likely do to her? What is Jones trying to achieve, and why? It is necessary to know details like these if one is to give a correct judgment on what the act is.
Aristotle believes that if you are a person of good character you know the right thing to do because you can see the essential facts of a case. He says at NE III 5 1114a32-b3) that the agent is responsible for how the end or purpose of an action appears to him. If you are responsible for your character (hexis), then you will be responsible for how something appears (phainetai) to you. The faculty that apprehends particular things or states Aristotle calls perception (aesthesis).3 Based on knowledge of the pertinent details, to a good person a certain act appears to be what it is: discretion rather than cowardice, or chauvinism rather than loyalty, or vindictiveness rather than justice.
Aristotle and Werhane: Some Similarities
Werhane states that moral imagination “entails perceiving norms, social roles, and relationships entwined in any situation.” (1999, 93.) Aristotle would agree that the agent must be aware of all these factors and know which ones matter most, which ones determine the essence of the contemplated action. Roles and relationships are sometimes essential to situations – even to substances. We might object that there may not be any single essence to some action, but Aristotle can plausibly say at least that there is finally one best description and one best decision and that a virtuous agent is good at making that decision. But he knows that even a person of good character cannot always be perfectly sure that he (women barely count) has perceived the situation aright and done the right thing.
Consider a bond salesperson, Johnson, working for an investment bank. One of the bank’s customers, Williams, tells Johnson that he wants to buy some bonds. Johnson suggests some bonds held by the bank; she does not tell Williams that she believes the bonds are overvalued and that the bank wants to get them out of its portfolio. Williams buys them. Williams is a willing buyer; Johnson is a willing seller; there has been no force or fraud; the bonds change hands at the prevailing market price. Has Johnson done anything wrong?
There is little doubt about what Aristotle would take to be the essence of this situation, and that he would say that Johnson has acted wrongly. The sale is a transaction between willing traders; that is true. But it is also an exploitation of someone’s ignorance or weakness. The latter description is the ethically salient one – it gets at the essence of the situation – but it is not always seen that way. An investment banker might well see it as doing an excellent job of serving the interests of the firm.4
We can invoke no ethical principles that readily and definitively determine whether Johnson did anything wrong. We can invoke principles associated with the free market to make a judgment, but those principles are contestable. Those involving property are among the most powerful, but they invite controversy. In doing so they will offer us a nice example.
The ability to perceive correctly, a mark of good character, is a faculty not easily acquired, Aristotle acknowledges. It takes many years of experience: one cultivates good habits and then, with the help of good people in one’s community, learns to reason about one’s habitual choices and improve them. Most people fall short of genuine practical reason (phronesis).
The Role of Principles
Aristotle makes it clear that principles are important in ethics, though they are not all there is to it. His model of reasoning, ethical or otherwise,5 is the practical syllogism: the agent starts with a general principle (a certain kind of food is nourishing) and a particular fact (this is that certain kind of food) and reaches a conclusion that involves an action: I should eat this food – and the agent does. For Aristotle the agent’s failure to act on a practical syllogism is a puzzle to be solved: how could I know perfectly well that this is the food I need now and yet not eat it?
Aristotle’s answer fits with his account of aesthesis, perception. What goes wrong in the case of akrasia, which we usually translate weakness of will,6 is that on account of a failure of perception the agent does not identify eating the food under the principle that indicates what it is – getting needed nourishment. So instead of seeing the broccoli as essentially nourishing, the agent sees it as essentially tasting bad and does not eat it. In eating a doughnut instead of the broccoli, the agent decides that one has reason to eat delicious food and that this doughnut is delicious.7 One possible reason for this decision is that the prospect of the broccoli or the doughnut arouses strong negative or positive emotions. From this Aristotle infers not that we should ignore our emotions but that we should cultivate emotions that support our best choices, practical or ethical. Character is, after all, a matter of what we enjoy doing (NE II 3 1104b5–13).
An ethical case is a bit more difficult. Johnson may in all sincerity see the selling of these weak securities as fulfilling her corporate obligation rather than as exploiting Williams, who is after all a grownup responsible for his own decisions. It takes many years of habituation and development of one’s rationality to achieve the reliable ability to discern what is salient in a situation in which there are multiple considerations and no algorithms for identifying the salient one. Correct perception in cases like this is a function of good character. (This is discussed in NE III 3–5.) There are bad people who embrace bad principles, but among fairly civilized people the main problem is in perception or, we might say, in moral imagination.
Where They Differ: Conceptual Schemes
Werhane departs from Aristotle in thinking of one’s conceptual scheme as a filter between the world and what one believes, even perceives. “Our conceptual scheme frames our perceptions. It focuses, schematizes, and guides the ways in which we recognize, react, and organize the world.” (1999, 51) Language reflects and even influences our conceptual schemes. You cannot have direct knowledge of reality independent of the concepts you have acquired. You always frame the passing show in some way. Your conceptual scheme leaves things out; influenced by emotion, it may emphasize some things unduly. Some frames are clearly inadequate; none captures the world fully and perfectly. Yet a point of view may achieve a form of objectivity in that anyone taking it will describe the facts of the matter similarly (1999, 86), though not necessarily entirely correctly.
Aristotle does not give much attention to epistemology as we understand it. To oversimplify slightly, his account of perception is physiological.8 He does not raise questions about its accuracy in general, as opposed to the occasional situations in which we get something wrong. He thinks that we see the world pretty much as it is, and that the ways in which we organize and talk about our perceptions and thoughts normally and naturally reflect the way in which the world itself is organized. The Greek language has subjects and predicates; the world has substances, which have features and perform actions.
Though the notion of a conceptual scheme is not in Aristotle, perhaps the seed of it is. We have noted his view that when we perceive an action, actual or possible, we perceive it as falling under a certain principle, such as “do not perform vindictive acts” or “do perform just acts.” The conclusion of one’s practical syllogism is perception-as: one sees this act as one of vindictiveness and thus not to be done; or one sees the act of as one of justice and thus to be done. A person of good character gets it right.
Aristotle also acknowledges that the community has a strong and lasting effect on the agent; he sees how one can have a first-order desire that is inconsistent with a second-order desire; he understands the effect (for better or worse) that emotion can have on rationality.
But he has little to say about what we could fairly call a doctrine of a divided self, or even a divided consciousness. Missing in Aristotle’s account, and crucial to Werhane’s, is the agent’s ability to step back from one’s first reaction and critically evaluate the act and one’s consideration of it. Aristotle cannot have been unaware of the importance of self-examination – Socrates influenced him, after all – but he does not much stress the complexity that one so often encounters in assessing ethically significant situations, or the self-reflection that it may occasion. He does not quite grasp Werhane’s point that moral imagination essentially involves dealing with a great variety of ways in which a situation can be framed – or why that is the case – and the consequent variety of possible actions (1999, 90). This is in large part because, unlike Werhane, he does not hold that we perceive the world through filters.
Rational consideration of one’s options is not as easy or as common as we may think. As Aristotle says, your emotions may interfere, and you may just do what you feel like doing. When that happens, according to Jonathan Haidt (2001, 2012), you tend to look around for a principle that is more respectable than the one actually exemplified in the action. So Jones’s real first premise is something like “I like to cause trouble for uppity women”; that is the real reason for his blowing the whistle on Adams. But he says, less than honestly, that his first premise is “I want to see justice done.” Johnson rationalizes her sale of the securities to Williams by describing her act as following the principle that one ought to contribute to the company’s profit, though in fact she is influenced primarily by her sales commission. When I choose the doughnut because it is sweet, I may say, or actually believe, that I am making that choice because I need the carbs. We are not necessarily authoritative about whether our perception gets it right. Haidt claims that this happens so frequently that we should be skeptical of the whole standard account of deliberation and action – including, presumably, the practical syllogism. In this respect he is close to Doris (2002), who does not accept the idea that good character involves perceiving one’s action correctly because there is no such thing as character.
I do not wish to portray Aristotle as a naive absolutist about right and wrong. In the second section of the first chapter of the Nicomachean Ethics he states that ethics, like other practical disciplines, cannot be precise. We get a sense of what he means from his stress on the importance of the details that make actions difficult to assess. Werhane too emphasizes the importance of details like this. But as she notes several times, she is no relativist. She discusses what went wrong with Thiokol, what went right with Merck, and how people misjudged Dow Corning.
A Similarity: Dialectic
On what basis, then, do we judge an action right or wrong, its description correct or incorrect? Aristotle and Werhane offer remarkably similar answers. Werhane (1999, 93) cites Martha Nussbaum with approval. The function of moral imagination is “to see more deeply into the relationship between fine-tuned perception of particulars and a rule-governed concern for general obligations…and how a dialogue between the two…can find a common ‘basis’ for moral judgment.” Werhane explicates further in discussing Adam Smith. “As a spectator one goes back and forth between a particular situation and its context, between one’s moral sentiments and those of others, and then applies general moral rules to evaluate that situation or character.” So we generate moral rules from particular contexts, but “sometimes, to fit a new kind of situation, this process calls for a reform of general moral rules that depends on what individuals agree should be approved.” (96).
This should remind us of dialectic, one of Aristotle’s standard ways of argument. Dialectic starts with common opinions about particulars, including judgments about individuals and narrowly defined classes of cases, and draws inferences from these to principles. We then check the principles to see that they do not justify clearly unacceptable particular judgments, and we check the particular judgments to see that they are compatible with principles that we find acceptable. It is much like Daniels’s (1979) “wide” version of Rawls’s (1971) reflective equilibrium. Principles like “One should respect private property” may require some modification if we contemplate whether a struggling seaman should tie up to your dock in rough water.
But dialectic does not help a great deal in solving framing problems. Even when the dialectical process has generated principles consistent with our widespread intuitions, we may still face a challenge in deciding whether this particular sailor was right in tying up at this particular dock when the lake became choppy. And as Werhane certainly and Aristotle probably would agree, one’s principles and individual judgments should always be open to further testing and possible modification as over time new circumstances require reconsideration.
The notion of property offers a good example of how easy it can be to fail to perceive in a morally imaginative way, and of how dialectic might help.
Property
Property is a source of rights and an engine of well-being. In Politics II 5 Aristotle himself offers a number of arguments in favor of doing so, and they sound familiar to us. One normally takes better care of a property if it is one’s own. Private property supports friendship, increases one’s love of oneself, and encourages generosity and moderation and other virtues.
Property and its associated rights are central to a free market. Milton Friedman (1970) famously argued largely on the basis of property rights that corporate managers have a moral responsibility to maximize returns to stockholders. If we were to examine this view dialectically, we might begin by looking at some broad principle about property rights, which are not usually defeated merely by the needs of people other than the property owners. Then we might look at a particular instance of the principle: no firm should contribute any corporate funds to charity or to any cause other than the wealth of the stockholders. This would mean that Roy Vagelos, the chairman of Merck, was wrong in making Mectizan available free to cure river blindness. That is clearly contestable. One problem with it is that, for all we know, the stockholders themselves might have been willing to divert a small percentage of corporate resources to save many thousands of people from agonizing death. So using dialectic we might say that a different – perhaps more detailed and conditional – principle is required to govern cases of this sort.
If we just invoke property rights to solve all questions of stockholders’ rights or intellectual property,9 we must say that no other stakeholders have any affirmative ethical claims. We must say that codetermination in Germany is wrong because German corporations belong to the stockholders. Surely stockholders ought to get a fair return, whatever that is – perhaps it is whatever return they get once they have freely bought the stock – but why should their return be maximized? Why are wages an expense to be minimized?
Whatever else may be true of Friedman’s claim, he was not restating any consensus, even among stockholders and corporate executives, though he may have been helping to create one.10 He was stating a contestable moral proposition. He would presumably find Johnson’s sale of questionable bonds to Williams praiseworthy, for Johnson has acted without force or fraud to maximize the bank’s profit for the benefit of its stockholders. But far from offering evidence for Friedman’s view, the case raises doubts about it.
Friedman was probably responding to changing economic circumstances.11 Large American corporations like GM had little or no competition in the ‘50s, and could therefore afford to be generous to employees and others. By the time Friedman made his declaration, foreign competition was forcing many of them to cut costs and moderate price increases; they could no longer get whatever profit they chose. Corporate philanthropy came at the expense of stockholders, including some who did not share the corporation’s charitable priorities. But the new circumstances do not by themselves justify today’s form of stockholder capitalism, in which executives’ compensation and stockholders’ returns have risen while wages have stagnated. To understand how things have changed is a necessary but not sufficient condition of making an ethical judgment about today’s economy.
Can we find some principles that establish the importance of property without ignoring such pertinent details as historical and economic context? It seems unlikely. In due course and in certain unforeseeable situations these principles will turn out to be problematic. Time is a great confounder of the pretensions of even the most plausible sounding principles, apart from those that are so vague that they are seldom of any practical use. Friedman himself could not have predicted the extent to which financialization would distort corporate priorities. To say, as Aristotle probably would, that we should avoid the extremes of giving stockholders absolute priority and giving them none is vague, but it is closer to the truth than any property-based principle, including Friedman’s, that we could find for our guidance. It also calls on us to look at the details of particular cases.
One case in particular shows the problems with going to extremes in giving stockholders priority.
Financialization
Many companies have given something close to absolute priority to stockholders rather than customers and employees, and management control to financial people rather than managers who know their people and products and markets. Most of today’s clever MBA students are not planning to manufacture anything. Their future is in finance. That is a problem, to say no more, on a number of grounds. Financialization leads to short-term thinking rather than generating long-term value for stockholders by adding value for customers. It shrivels innovation and hiring in favor of financial engineering activities like buying back stock to raise its price to benefit “activists.”12
Even if we think that Johnson is exploiting Williams or that financialization has been a disaster, we have no easy way of determining what counts as exploitation or destructive greed, or what as a matter of policy we should do about them. It might seem easier to give it up and default to a market notion of justice. In so doing we might claim the authority of Adam Smith. But he was writing about small firms competing in transparent markets. He did not contemplate today’s financial services industry. It does not reflect badly on Smith’s greatness to point out many who invoke him today oversimplify the author of A Theory of Moral Sentiments as well as The Wealth of Nations. 13 And while he has much to teach us, we need to understand how his lessons do or do not apply to our current circumstances. There are many cases – no doubt more than some people realize – in which we do well to trust the invisible hand of the market. But we need to be sufficiently aware of details and exceptions, some of which create significant differences between the economies of the eighteenth century and ours.14
Aristotle would reject the notion that financialization is essentially about serving the legitimate interests of the stockholders, much less other stakeholders, and Werhane would surely agree. That notion ignores the crucial details of the situation, which the person of good character perceives. It is a case of bad perception. It is a failure of the moral imagination of individuals but also of groups of people.
Group Moral Imagination
As Hargrave (2016) notes, Werhane has moved the discussion of moral imagination forward by focusing on its social aspects. Moral imagination operates at the level of the organization. (See especially Werhane 2002.) It is not simply an individual matter. This is an important insight, with far-reaching implications for managers, who need to understand the psychology of effective organizations.
I do not claim to find anything closely similar to Werhane’s analysis in Aristotle, but he would surely be hospitable to her approach. While Aristotle has little to say about organizations, he has much to say about communities. In his view there can be no ethics without community, and one’s community deeply influences the ethical status of its members. Ethics is about being a good family member, a good friend, and a good citizen. That is the fulfillment of our nature as sociable and rational creatures. We learn ethics mainly from fellow members of our community. To become a person of good character is difficult; in a bad community it is nearly impossible.
Arguments about individuals and communities have a long history. Aristotle and Werhane take a position that takes some account of the notion, now increasingly popular, that humans are inevitably tribal.15 Modernity has many facets, but few more prominent than the importance and the autonomy of the individual. This is no mere theoretical issue; it is a matter of personal importance for many people. We know we are tribal to some degree; we know that friendships and other relationships are of great value to us. At the same time we want to make our own decisions and design our own lives. So there is a tension. How tribal should we to strive to be, and with whom, and under what circumstances, and with what principles in mind? Aristotle would say that you have the capacity to create a good life for yourself, but it must be a communal life. Achieving the right degree of autonomy is a matter of finding the mean between the extremes of being isolated and being a willing Milgram volunteer. Getting that right probably begins with an individual community. It requires moral imagination that can discern, criticize, and in due course improve the local culture.
Enlightenment figures were individualists for the most part; some of their conservative opponents, such as Edmund Burke, found the cradle of morality in the “little platoon” of one’s community. The argument was an old one even in the eighteenth century. What is new is that, owing to advances in technology, especially in communications, our notion of community has changed. You, a reader of this volume, probably have more in common culturally and morally with educated Berliners and Parisians than with many blue-collar people in your own city. What happens in Aleppo arouses in you the sort of sympathy that Adam Smith correctly considers a significant aspect or morality. Yet you are a citizen of your own city, and you are associated with many other communities as well.
Aristotle famously stresses the importance of community as well as of the character of the individual, and the connection between the two, though he has little to say about the tension.16 Nor does he note, what is true of modern life and to a lesser extent of ancient life as well, that many of us are members of several communities.
Werhane is aware of the epistemological power of communities in a way Aristotle is not. People in a community, especially a linguistic community, tend to have the same or similar filters. Watching a meteor cross the sky was not the same experience for an Athenian of Aristotle’s time as it is for us. If we tried to use facts and logic to convince a man in Aristotle’s Athens that some women are intellectually superior to most men, he would filter out most of what we would say. Today we encounter no ancient Athenians, but some of our global neighbors believe in honor killings, and some of our near neighbors do not accept evolution.
As we are becoming aware of the importance of imaginative sympathy with people who once could be dismissed as being too far away to worry about, we are seeing that imaginative sympathy is sometimes hard to acquire. We are divided from some people by conceptual differences that make communication difficult. Perhaps dialectic is part of the answer, but it will be difficult to enter into a dialectical conversation with people whose intuitions about particular cases as well as their principles differ so greatly from ours.
It might be useful and a little encouraging to consider how the spread of democratic capitalism might move us closer together. Werhane holds that groups, including organizations, can be morally imaginative. It is possible that the common goals and common interests of people in organizations can change the views of participants in a positive direction. Men may come to see Jane as an excellent analyst rather than as that blonde girl that they hired instead of a qualified man. Americans may come to see Mahmoud as a contributing member of our team rather than as that Arab guy. And if Jane and Mahmoud sometimes bring a different point of view to bear, that can be an advantage. It is not good for widely shared mental models to remain unexamined. Milgram (1974) shows us what can happen; Werhane et al. (2011) elaborate.
It would be gratifying to be able to add that the democratic side of democratic capitalism encourages citizens to defend their views in something like dialectical conversation. Particularly in view of the nature of today’s political campaigns, that notion seems utopian. Differing conceptual schemes, stubbornly held and fiercely defended, have extraordinarily firm bases in disparate facts as well as disparate values. If I have understood Werhane correctly, reconciliation will require more than showing people what the facts are and insisting that they have coherent values. For better or worse – some of both, probably – conceptual schemes are not easily changed.
To believe that democratic capitalism is leading us towards a near-term solution to problems about the individual, the community, and intellectual and moral diversity would be naively utopian. Management is hard. Politics is hard. Werhane is no utopian. She writes (1999, 93) that in developing moral imagination we become able to think of new mental models, to frame situations anew, and to create new solutions. What she understands is a crucial fact beyond Aristotle’s ken: the world will be creating new situations of great ethical significance to challenge our moral imagination. The challenges will never end, and there is no reason to believe that they will ever get any easier.