ABSTRACT
Throughout this book, the emphasis has been on defining the ethical act. Our context has been the individual manager making a decision or taking an action that impacts others. If we shift the unit of analysis from an individual act to an individual person and ask what it is that lets us describe a person as ethical or unethical, can we simply say that the ethical person is the one who takes ethical actions, as defined in earlier chapters of this book? One immediate problem with this approach is that of frequency. Must the ethical person always make ethical decisions, or nearly always, or more often than not? Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, provided a well-reasoned answer to this question.1 He maintains that the ethical individual is the one who usually or normally performs ethical acts. He does not quantify “usually” or “normally” but the picture that he provides is of a principled individual who consistently follows his principles. Both psychology and common sense tell us that no one attains perfect consistency in a lifetime of actions and decisions. Aristotle’s view on this issue is often referred to as virtue ethics because he characterizes ethical acts as virtuous acts and he explains at considerable length his views on what constitutes virtue. For Aristotle, the virtuous person is the one who avoids extremes. He defines courage as the mean between cowardice (too little bravery) and foolhardiness (too much bravery). Similarly, generosity is the mean between stinginess and profligacy. One becomes virtuous by repeatedly making individual virtuous decisions; in other words, by practicing the virtues. He places strong emphasis on experience. One does not become virtuous by thinking about or studying virtues, or by wishing to be virtuous. It is only in the real world of everyday decisions and actions that one
achieves consistency in virtue by the accumulated experience of individual virtuous (ethical) acts. At the beginning of this book, we defined ethics as the study of social or interpersonal values and the rules of conduct that follow from these values. Aristotle might take this definition one step further and add that it includes actions consistent with these rules of conduct. As indicated earlier in the discussion of ethics in Chapter 3, virtue ethics as a system is difficult to use in defining the ethical act and, for this reason, we did not treat it as a basic approach to ethics throughout the book. However, it does offer useful guidance in thinking about what it means to say that an individual is ethical. We have talked briefly in various places throughout the book about ethical actions and ethical patterns. In this chapter, we formally address this issue at some length.
