laid down through rules, my response is to agree wholeheartedly; I would say in reply that the vapidity of such music (which typically caters to and sanctifies the spontaneous whims of a performer yet fails to enrich or inspire listeners) is a good example of what is missing in business ethics when we strip moral virtue away from its primordial grounding in norms and the guidance they provide.
Virtuous conduct, in business and elsewhere, does not take place in a vacuum. Particularly in the world of business, which operates in the shadow of law and its many institutions, norms provide an intricate web within which moral actions make their moves. It would be a grave error to suppose that, working as an investment banker, one can simply be admonished to “be courageous” while remaining oblivious to the finely textured normative matrix that rules and principles establish. At the same time, deliberation and judgment with those norms require virtue, along with some grasp of the broader meaning of the moral life beyond technical legal compliance. One does not know whether a compass functions well and points true apart from the pull of the invisible magnetic field. One cannot say whether a person is virtuous apart from the promptings of the invisible moral order.
Accordingly, I term the approach that combines the quest for moral and performative excellence in business culture together with these deeper and broader kinds of philosophical considerations grounded in human nature virtuosity: the invisible law guiding the invisible hand.
The portrait I render in Virtuosity in Business blends conceptual colors extracted from the virtue tradition with intellectual hues drawn from the natural law tradition. The resultant chromatic mixture is intended to afford a nuanced picture of business ethics to be painted, one that is equally attuned to questions of virtue, disposition, authenticity, and character, on the one hand, and matters of moral law, justice, human rights, and sage corporate governance, on the other. Since these seemingly disparate facets of virtue and law are in fact deeply interwoven, a broadened sapiential approach such as the one offered here holds promise to illuminate the kind of discussions of business ethics needed to meet the challenges the postcrisis, globalized economy poses for business today.
Virtuosity in Business seeks to explore ways that our thinking about business and economics can be illuminated with the help of a quartet of bold images:
1 The market participant as virtuoso artist. So conceived, the businessperson's or business firm's competitive performance, like that of a musician, is dictated by creativity, authenticity, self-knowledge, inner discipline, and a relentless pursuit of excellence. Such characteristics cannot be prescribed by rules or regulations, nor can they be effectively instilled simply by threats of sanctions for noncompliance, but instead require an engagement with higher and more noble ideals that spring from our nature as humans in search of fulfillment.
2 Business as an existential human endeavor respective of freedom and authenticity. We cannot hope to understand business unless we understand the human condition, since that is the wellspring from which all relationships of commerce and trade ultimately flow. Whether one is a disciple of, say, J. Paul Sartre, one the one hand, or J. Paul II,1 on the other, one must confront fundamental questions of free choice, reason, and authenticity of character. In today's globalized world, where the corporation often arrogantly asserts its metaphysical stature as a distinctive “person,” seeking to earn (if not downright command) our trust, even while frequently violating it, we ought to have some notion of just what such an extension of trust might mean, what the stakes are, and whether we are prepared to abdicate our own human moral responsibility while ceding authority to corporations in the pursuit of ever greater technological and material conquests, as individuals and as a society.
3 The juxtaposition of metaphorical types of capital alongside the familiar notion of financial capital: cultural capital and reputational capital. Such metaphors help us to see connections between economic value and moral value. The metaphors express the economic significance attached to intangible assets such as character, honor, and virtue, which are preconditions of business success, yet at the same time they have intrinsic worth that, somewhat paradoxically, must be honored in order to trigger that success. The way that our culture fosters (or fails to promote) such intangible assets profoundly influences whether business within our culture flourishes or decays. Conversely, the way business fosters (or fails to promote) these intangible assets will profoundly influence whether our culture will flourish or decay.
4 Adopting a sapiential outlook on business ethics that embraces both virtue and the moral law. As virtue theory is asserting itself in business ethics as a moral tradition as worthy as legalistic approaches, it is important to guard against polarization. So I seek to give voice to the possible harmonization of these traditions.
Virtuosity in Business does not aim to supplant but rather to honor ancient wisdom about the primacy of virtue, seeking at the same time to rekindle our passion for pursuing it and for engaging it in our approach to contemporary economic ethics. While the book acknowledges that significant differences exist between cultures of virtue that arise from different societies separated through historical time and geographical space, it recognizes the moral authority of key transcultural truths, for example, the idea that human beings everywhere are deserving of dignity and basic human rights, and that by their nature all humans seek happiness.
The concept of invisible law that I expound throughout the text follows in the footsteps of Aristotelian philosophers who, like Thomas Aquinas, assert that an objective moral order exists. Although the moral order is not directly visible with our eyes, it can be seen with our mind's eye, by human reason. Moreover, we possess, according to our human nature, the free will either to follow it or to abandon it. Proceeding from the ancient Greek notion of the well-ordered soul, I would argue that, guided by reason, virtue is master over emotivism and noncognitivism (to modify Plato's charioteer allegory) as a reliable guide for ethics.2 Skeptics hailing from various camps—nihilism, postmodernism, and ethical relativism, to name a few—will of course demur. In a departure from Aristotle's moral realism, such theorists maintain that although the world may supply us with objective facts to discover, the world does not furnish us with any objective values. Rather, values are the product of our own creation. Consequently, for these skeptics we are not able to extract an “ought” from an “is”; we cannot formulate moral prescriptions concerning what ought to be just by observing states of affairs as they actually are. What that means is that no ready-made, objective basis can be given for why you ought to pursue some given aim over any other—choosing the aspirations of being a solitary drunk in preference to the ambitions of a leader of nations, to use Sartre's example. For such a worldview, reason remains simply an instrument placed in the service of any passion or desire that happens to float your boat. As Hume famously put it, “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”3
However, if we cannot point to any rational ground for choosing some purposes instead of other purposes, what becomes of the possibility for the human exercise of authentic freedom of choice? We are instead left with an amoral fatalism that explains human behavior, on putatively empirical grounds, in terms of multifarious causal influences like oxytocin deficiencies, DNA, an excess of Twinkies, or anything else that might preordain you to opt for a vocation of, say, entering bars (as a self-absorbed drunkard) on the one hand, or passing bars (as a civic-minded attorney) on the other. Thus, I argue in this book that one can look to either rationally based and freedom-respecting theories (such as the virtuosity model, albeit Kantian and other deontological approaches would fill the bill as well) to drive our understanding of and participation in business ethics, or we can abandon the field to irrationally based subjectivist, relativist, and deterministic approaches. In this sense, as well as many others, philosophical currents that originate within the broader intellectual culture feed directly into our understanding of business and economics, even though traditional economic theory and even some current schools of management claim that their disciplines have an exceedingly narrow scope that effectively quarantines them from moral life.
Some approaches to business ethics—utilitarian, econometric,
