The Role of Community

Virtue ethics theory also has implications for the role of the firm or professional organization. For the virtues to flourish requires a conducive infrastructure; "one cannot think for oneself if one thinks entirely by oneself, .. it is only by participation in a rational practice-based community that one becomes rational .." (MacIntyre, 1988, p. 396). MacIntyre defines a practice as …

".. any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended". [1984, p. 187]

Thus rationality in virtue ethics is a shared rationality with a shared conception of what is ultimately desirable in all human endeavor. This shared conception must be supported by, and indeed be the raison d'être of, the organizations and institutions that control and direct human activity. This infrastructure is an aspect of what was known in the city-states of ancient Greece as the polis.

"The polis is the form of social order whose shared mode of life already expresses the collective answer or answers of its citizens to the question 'What is the best mode of life for human beings?'" (MacIntyre, p.133).

Such an infrastructure is essential for virtue ethics:

"Aristotle is articulating at the level of theoretical enquiry a thought inherited from the poets when he argues in Book I of the Politics (1252b28-1253a39) that a human being separated from the polis is thereby deprived of some of the essential attributes of a human being. .. A human being stands to the polis as a part to its whole. .. For the polis is human community perfected and completed by achieving its telos". [Ibid., p.96-97]

The virtue-ethics approach thus casts the firm or professional organization in a role that is far more active and intrusive than merely what Jensen and Meckling call a "contractual nexus" (1976) or what Miller describes as a "wealth creating machine" (1986). The firm becomes a nurturing community, a polis. "Corporations are real communities, ..and therefore the perfect place to start understanding the nature of the virtues" (Solomon, 1992, p.325). Solomon emphasizes the link between virtue-ethics and this expanded role of the firm as a nurturing community: "It [virtue-ethics] is an Aristotelian ethics precisely because it is membership in a community, a community with collective goals and a stated mission – to produce quality goods and/or services and to make a profit for the stockholders" (Solomon, 1992, p.321). Within the rubric of virtue-ethics theory, therefore, the goals and aspirations of the individual are nurtured and directed by the business organizations and institutions of which that individual forms a part.