to their nature, people are drawn to demonstrate virtues such as courage, generosity, self-control, prudence, and wisdom, whether inside or outside the sphere of business. Yet virtues are not exercised to reach monetary triumph. Indeed, financial achievement is taken to mean that which is needed to underwrite the life of virtue.
For Aristotle, leaders of associations are among those exemplifying virtuous life.
An Aristotelian approach to business—a virtuosity mind-set—shows that business will rise to the highest moral level by having virtuous leaders, not only at the top, although that is necessary, but at all levels of the enterprise. In turn, such leaders will, by exercising virtue, foster ethical economic cultures.
It is good to keep two points in mind. The first is that the relative degree of prosperity generated by today's market economies accords a substantial amount of time for leisure, offering contemplative opportunities to a larger segment of the populace than existed in Aristotle's time. The second point is that today's business organizations all around the world offer a more extensive assortment of opportunities for leadership as compared to ancient times, when an elevated governmental position would have provided the only real chance to direct a sizeable outfit.
Adopting an Aristotelian outlook on leadership means enabling people to know themselves. It means helping people understand that a vast gulf separates merely living from living well. Virtue comes into the picture the moment we deliberately choose to seek excellence. You display virtue insofar as you opt to cultivate your distinctive talents and abilities, especially your higher-level capabilities of thought and feeling. Should you have the good fortune to hold a position as head of an organization, you display virtuosity to the degree that you are able to assist others to attain happiness and to realize their own human excellence.
When you think about it, we are all, in a real way, already leaders, or could develop into leaders. We just don't realize it. If we consider that parents are “leaders” of their children, and that those who occupy even foundation-level positions in organizations of any size face countless opportunities on the frontier of day-to-day interactions with others (customers, colleagues, supervisors) to set a nobler example, to point to a higher path through excellence and virtuous conduct, then everyone is, from a broadened perspective, truly a leader.
Virtue and the Good Life
Aristotle launched his study of the nature of morality in Nicomachean Ethics with the observation that all paths ultimately lead to the good: “Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.”4 He seeks to establish that the good at which all of our actions are aimed is happiness. This strikes us modern readers as odd. Normally we speak about happiness and morality in starkly different terms. We praise someone for acting on moral principle even if they suffer personal hardship as a result. To Aristotle, however, happiness is not the same thing as enjoying a pleasant frame of mind. Otherwise, we would have to reach the conclusion that someone stays happy even while fast asleep. As he puts it:
With those who identify happiness with virtue or some one virtue our account is in harmony; for to virtue belongs virtuous activity. But it makes perhaps no small difference whether we place the chief good in possession or in use, in state of mind or in activity. For the state of mind may exist without producing any good result, as in a man who is asleep or in some other way quite inactive, but the activity cannot; for one who has the activity will of necessity be acting, and acting well. And as in the Olympic Games it is not the most beautiful and the strongest that are crowned but those who compete (for it is some of these that are victorious), so those who act win, and rightly win, the noble and good things in life.5
For Aristotle, the idea of eudaimonia, normally translated into English as “happiness” or “flourishing,” refers to activity that puts our capacities to correct use. Being in a state of happiness is tied to a way of living, that is, acting pursuant to our proper end as human beings. According to Aristotle, it is implicit in the logic of choice that whatever we are choosing to do, we are doing so to bring about an end.
Ordinarily, the nearest objective we are considering turns out to be, when we think about it, advancing some other objective. And that further end itself turns out to be sought for the sake of yet some other thing. By continuing to scrutinize all of our objectives like this, eventually we reach an end that is not leading us beyond itself to anything else. That is going to be what we pursue for its own sake, which is to say, the good life. As Aristotle explains:
If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this) and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else (for at that rate the process would go on to infinity, so that our desire would be empty and vain), clearly this must be the good and the chief good. Will not the knowledge of it, then, have a great influence on life?6
Because all human choice inevitably points this way, getting clear about what happiness entails constitutes the essence of ethical reflection. Indeed this focus on happiness is foundational for the structure of decent human associations.
Happiness Is Social
For Aristotle, happiness is not an exclusively individual affair; I can be happy only by living in a web of relationships with other people. In the eyes of Aristotle, humans are social and political creatures. People are inclined to live and to work collectively, and they do so not just from basic instinct, or because they need to, or because it's easier that way. Rather, nature disposes us to be social with an eye to our telos (end), which is coextensive with our perfection as human beings. Our flourishing entails living agreeably in a sociable community. There is reciprocity. You benefit your friends, family, and neighbors while they bring you benefits in return. Living in society completes us.
The proof that the state is a creation of nature and prior to the individual is that the individual, when isolated, is not self-sufficing; and therefore he is like a part in relation to the whole. But he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god: he is no part of a state. A social instinct is implanted in all men by nature, and yet he who first founded the state was the greatest of benefactors. For man, when perfected, is the best of animals…. 7
Thus, Aristotle maintains that it is not sufficient just to have the ability to reason. Nor is it sufficient to cultivate our reason. To be truly virtuous we also need to apply our reasoning ability toward the service of human communities. To grasp the significance of this for our look at virtue in business life, it is necessary to consider what Aristotle means by activities such as “philosophy” and “politics.”
To Aristotle's mind, those activities that are most distinctly human are politics and philosophy. Because these endeavors involve maximum use of abstract thinking, they are of the highest order. But the realm of “philosophy” is quite broad, encompassing what we today consider to be the arts and sciences, together with all learned professions. Alongside this wide sense of philosophy, virtuous people are also active in the practical realm of politics. By “politics” Aristotle means not just elected officials, but something much more expansive that would certainly include people occupying positions of leadership in business enterprises.
From an Aristotelian perspective, what is most significant is not some particular job description or career path. What matters instead is how you go about putting upper-level mental potentialities to use. Accordingly, the rank-and-file employee that is enlisted to solve company problems may be using the same high-order capacities as one of the firm's executive. Nevertheless, Aristotle endorses a hierarchy. At the apex are people with the highest inborn ability as well as those who cultivate their own abilities most completely. To be sure, this way of thinking seems totally out of
