way of response, it is crucial to understand just what Aristotle and Plato are saying. They are not contending that music will, in any facile and direct manner, impel us to behave in some particular fashion. Instead, their view amounts to the twofold contention that (1) music influences human passions, and (2) such an influence will either make it harder or easier for reason to grasp and the will to select the right things in life.
These ideas acquire further illumination from the stress that ancient thought places on human flourishing as an attainment surpassing bare public stability. If you were to go around today asking what it means for human flourishing to take place, you would doubtless receive all sorts of answers, ranging from “spending more time with the kids” to “having enough money to play golf” to “getting in touch with my spiritual side.” According to the ancient Greek mind, though, the utmost happiness arises out of the engagement of our intellect in leisure. Aristotle instructs that leisure is the objective of human life. Many people consider their work as simply a means to acquiring goods that they will be able to enjoy once they are away from work. By comparison, leisure is a state during which we are able to relish whatever we have chosen for its own intrinsic value. Leisure is what most of us prize and where we look to gain fulfillment.
A key issue for Aristotle and Plato, though is this: Is what we are enjoying in leisure genuinely the kind of thing deserving of a rational being, and is it fostering the kind of well-being that is fitting for that sort of being?
Another response, of a more general nature, is that we ought not to demand too much from music, as if it can supply something of a sinecure that even a modern legal order and religion are not equipped to do. What is more important to grasp from the enlightened ancient reflections is the idea that music imparts, even in the midst of our obvious moral crises and social failings, a glimpse of something in humanity that is higher, immutable, and most worthy. The ancient philosophers' insights into virtuosity help us to gain a greater awareness of our potential for fostering human excellence, whether in music, in the arts, or in business.
Assuming the vantage point of ancient philosophy, the importance that today's culture attaches to material wealth and hedonism, together with its acceptance of moral relativism and a general apathy regarding the pursuit of human excellence is utterly unsatisfactory. Early thinkers maintained that this sort of society attends to the lowest features of humanity. Consequently, the soul comes around to pine for sustenance that is absent in the culture at large. According to the classical account, the type of “society of pigs” rejected by Glaucon fosters irrational and disorderly passions that disfigure the soul while imperiling the foundations upon which society rests—an imperilment that is in fact mirrored in much of the turmoil and disorder transpiring within the global economic crisis.
My contention is that it is vital that people incline themselves toward the uppermost human ends singled out by ancient philosophers. Only out of the pursuit of human excellence—virtuosity—can a respectable social order and an ecology of the market materialize as a consequence. The early philosophers instruct as to why music stands indispensable to cultivating an adoration of the highest things, and thus to safeguarding civilization.
Raising Awareness
According to Aristotle, a person in possession of good character sees circumstances in the right way, discerning their relevant moral dimensions. Among other things, this explains, for instance, why we “punish those who are ignorant of anything in the laws that they ought to know and that is not difficult, and so too in the case of anything else that they are thought to be ignorant of through carelessness; we assume that it is in their power not to be ignorant, since they have the power of taking care.”103 It is by means of our imagination (phantasia), that we can comprehend the ethical features of our conduct, and our inability to grasp the morally significant aspects of a state of affairs is a mark of poor character. If we are a person of good character, we will see a given action, say, the racist comment of a client, as requiring us to exemplify courage in standing up to challenge the remark. In fact, being morally spineless, lacking the will to stand up for what is right, can be a symptom of incorrect moral awareness. “For [although] both the man who has knowledge but is not using it and he who is using it are said to know, it will make a difference whether, when a man does what he should not, he has the knowledge but is not exercising it, or is exercising it; for the latter seems strange, but not the former.”104
Businesspeople enter judgment and chose how to behave based on the way they model complex phenomena—like the financial crisis. In Chapter 7 we shall consider how contemporary thinking about business has developed around different mental models. In particular we will discuss how various mental models have portrayed the global financial crisis differently, and we will suggest how those models need to be expanded.
Thus, for economists, issues surrounding the financial crisis are framed as technical problems, not moral issues. Typically the language used is descriptive, centering around raw sets of values fed into systems instead of normative analysis of obligations, rights, and fairness. Such an econometric language-game can be commanding and alluring, creating an illusion that considerations of morality, of the human side of things are somehow off-message for business culture. To the extent that a moral-cultural mental model can be brought to bear on business and economics, it will assist us in gaining fluency in the language of virtue, character, human dignity, and the common good. Such a way of thinking enhances our moral imagination and raises the likelihood that we will be able to provide a more comprehensive account of morally important states of affairs.
It is precisely to this end that I am endeavoring to weave into our tour of ethics in contemporary business a fair measure of allusions to artistic excellence. Here is why. Excellence in any human endeavor, be it in music, art, literature, science, or athletics, in the end points to our higher nature. Paradoxically, we may only be able to come to an adequate understanding of what is at stake in the world of business and economics today by looking beyond them. By casting our gaze away from the ever-present realities of commercial life, we may come to see new possibilities that have eluded our attention, to gain a vision of the transcendental, sacred side of our moral nature, to refresh our sense of one another as beings in pursuit of what is best in ourselves: our virtuosity. This is especially apt to be true during our collective experience of cynicism, anxiety, and moral disorientation occasioned by the financial crisis as well as the extended sequence of scandals that preceded it.
Returning to Aristotle, we are reminded that the way we portray a moral problem is a matter of our character. For Aristotle, the notion of character casts a wide net, extending beyond our values and principles to include as well our willingness to act on them. Our inclination to act is, in turn, often connected to the relative degree of intensity that an ethical issue has for us. The intensity of a moral matter flows from the significance we attach to it.105 A significant number of managers at Enron attuned to the corporation's deployment of off-balance-sheet partnerships—which were eventually cited as a substantial reason for the company's implosion—perceived the complex scheme of partnerships as being legal and therefore ethically acceptable. Being disposed to accept legality as a sufficient standard of conduct, the Enron managers were not inclined to interpret them as raising any moral issues, so they did not take any action to oppose or question them. A similar situation appears to have existed at Lehman Brothers in advance of its collapse, through its use of “Repo 105” transactions to dress up the firm's financial results and hide debt.106
Our character also embraces our capability to discern how principles and values ought to be applied in concrete cases, no matter how complicated or knotty that might turn out to be. A middle manager may genuinely proclaim the value of courage, yet fail to put it into effect from a failure to appreciate that voicing an objection to an upper manager's order to overcharge a client is what courage demands now. Here, the middle manager may be earnest, yet lack courage.
Aristotle instructs that being
