Virtue at Work: Ethics for Individuals, Managers, and Organizations

by Geoff Moore

So she may learn to love the game and to play it well, and she may play it just for the love of the game and the social and personal benefits which she obtains from it (the internal goods). But it is possible that she might be good enough to play seriously, and develop a reputation, first at school, then later within the community, and perhaps eventually even as a grandmaster both nationally and internationally. As such, the external goods which she obtains from chess may extend beyond candy, fame, and reputation and may also include financial rewards; playing chess might result in an income, perhaps even the income on which she depends.

First, while internal goods can be achieved only by participating in the relevant practice, external goods can be achieved in any number of ways: one can become famous, obtain money, and generally be regarded as successful by engaging in any number of a very wide range of activities.

Second, external goods always belong to someone in a way which excludes others from them. Someone’s fame or reputation is at the expense of another who is not quite as talented.

There is, in other words, competition for external goods in which some will win out over others. With internal goods, however, while there is competition in a sense, this is always competition to excel, and the pursuit of excellence is always a good for the practice as a whole.

The chess-playing child, if she were to become an internationally recognized grandmaster, might develop new strategies which take the game of chess to another level; following her, all serious chess players would need to aspire to a new standard of excellence. Competition would have led to a yet greater level of sophistication in the practice of chess from which all chess players could benefit.

It is probably already apparent from the discussion so far that there is an implicit prioritization between the two kinds of goods as MacIntyre defines them. Internal goods are goods which we should pursue for their own sake. That is to say, internal goods are those which are a constituent part of the good for any individual; they are part and parcel o...

External goods, on the other hand, are those which we should pursue for the s...

But, if we pursue fame, reputation, wealth, success, and so on for their own sake, then we have missed the point about them, and about the projects and purposes in our lives, our true end, and in the process probably misunderstood what internal goods are all about.

These, as well as being an architect, are actually the priorities in her life from which she derives the internal goods which enable her to pursue her own telos in life. The external good of her salary does not have any point in and of itself; it serves only to facilitate these other activities. And if Elaine really is concerned about the level of her salary by way of a status symbol, we might well think less of her.

The point, therefore, is that there is an ordering involved here, in that internal goods are ultimately more important than external goods because it is only internal goods which enable us to achieve our telos in life. But we could also say that we need to get the balance right in pursuing these two different kinds of goods.

We need external goods—we quite literally could not live without them—so we will need to spend time and energy pursuing them. But we need to remember that we are pursuing these external goods only, and only in so far as, we can then realize internal goods. Spending all our time and energy on the purs...

But there are a few new ideas in this definition as well. First, and most notably, practices are ‘coherent and complex forms of socially established cooperative human activity’. Up to now, we have considered virtue ethics from the individual perspective and linked this to the community level and its pursuit of the common good. But now we have an intermediate level between the individual and the community. Practices are, under MacIntyre’s definition, social activities, so they are things which we do together in groups or teams; sometimes, practices are referred to as social practices in order to remind us of this. Practices, therefore, involve collaboration with others, and this collaboration is in the common pursuit of the internal goods which are the key outcome of practices. But in addition to this, practices are not just any old activity which we might collaborate in together. They have to be sufficiently ‘coherent and complex’ if they are to justify being designated as practices.

So while the idea of a practice applies to a very wide range of human activities, it has to be sufficiently ‘coherent and complex’ to warrant the description, which is why limited activities, such as throwing a football or planting turnips, are not in themselves a practice.

MacIntyre’s point, to return to the example of physics, is that Fred as a physics school teacher is himself engaged in the practice of physics which is, in a sense, a lot ‘bigger’ than simply what goes on in the school classroom. Physics also, of course, takes place in university departments where not only is existing knowledge transmitted to students, but experimental and theoretical work takes place to extend the boundaries of that knowledge. In addition, the application of physics takes place in commercial, military, and other settings. Taken all together, this is the practice of physics. And what Fred does is to engage in that practice by ‘communicating craft and knowledge to apprentices’, in other words to those who are just setting out in understanding what physics is all about. Fred’s role is to encourage them to explore and understand at least parts of this particular practice and, perhaps for some, to inspire them to make it one of the significant practices in their own lives—to go on and make a career out of it, for example. This also, of course, implies that Fred should remain connected to the wider practice, maintaining contact with others engaged in the practice, reading to keep his own knowledge up to date, and so on. He is, in other words, first and foremost a physician (in its original rather than medical sense), and is only secondarily a teacher of physics.

First, while all practices clearly involve technical skills and knowledge, these serve the purpose only of enabling the practice in its pursuit of its own goals and the internal goods associated with them ‘with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended’.

And this points to the second further aspect of practices, which is that practices have histories.14 In other words, when we begin to engage with any particular practice, we are always joining an existing ‘coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity’, and as a result we should regard ourselves as beginners (apprentices) in that activity and learn from those who are already engaged in it, and from those ‘giants’ of its past who have defined its present standards of excellence.

Before moving on, there is one final point to be made in relation to practices at this stage, and this is to consider the place of the virtues within them.

Recall that for Elaine such things as patience, attentiveness, diligence, courage, and courteousness, over and above the technical skills and knowledge she possesses, were some of the virtues which she required to be a good architect. We can now see that all of these—technical skills, knowledge, and virtues—are part and parcel of what are needed to engage in practices well, and so to realize the internal goods of practices. And vice-versa—as MacIntyre warns, not having the virtues effectively prevents us from realizing the internal goods of practices.

We might have thought, from the earlier discussion of practices, that they simply exist by themselves. But what MacIntyre is arguing is that this cannot be the case, at least not for ‘any length of time’. So institutions become the ‘bearers’ of practices or, to put it the other way round, practices have to be ‘institutionalized’ if they are to survive.

In other words, there is an institutional structure associated with chess, and without it chess could not survive as anything other than a game played by enthusiasts similar to other board and card games (though not bridge which, like chess, has similar practice and institutional features). MacIntyre reinforces this point when he says that, ‘Chess, physics and medicine are practices; chess clubs, laboratories, universities and hospitals are institutions’.

There should be intense satisfaction in the club as young players learn to become good players, and some kind of celebration when, eventually, one of them beats one of the club’s leading players.

But MacIntyre’s definition of an institution and its relationship with the practice of which it is the ‘bearer’ also points, as we saw above, to the potential for tension between the two. Indeed, on MacIntyre’s analysis, such tension is inherent; it is built into the relationship between them. Institutions must pursue external goods for their own survival, and because institutions and external goods support practices and the attainment of internal goods which is what, ultimately, it should be all about.

This understanding of practices and institutions, and the way in which they interrelate, suggests that we might begin to think of organizations in a rather different way. In other words, we might conceive of them as practice-institution combinations.

First, this is a way of thinking about most if not all organizations.

Second, although Figure 4.1 represents a single practice ‘housed’ within a single institution, this may be an oversimplification.

And, as we noted above in the discussion of teaching, each of those practices is not coterminous with the institution in which they are ‘housed’, but extends beyond the bounds of the institution—architecture is an obvious example, with its practical application in architectural firms and professional bodies outside of a university.

Nonetheless (and third), like any model, the simplification which the practice-institution combination represents draws our attention to something rather important. If an organization can be genuinely identified as having a practice or practices at its core, with the implications this has for the possession and exercise of the virtues and the pursuit of internal goods (good products or services and the ‘perfection’ of the practitioners in the process), then organizations are by definition ‘essentially moral spaces’.

Finally, this way of representing organizations also allows us to

locate management and begin to give some idea of its role.

In other words, the point which MacIntyre is making is that the making and sustaining of institutions is itself a practice. By definition, this is directed precisely at those individuals who occupy managerial roles, and hence we are able to locate management and managers within this framework, and to give an outline definition of the role of management—which is to make and sustain the institution, and therefore to be concerned with the pursuit and

distribution of external goods.

First, the making and sustaining of institutions is a secondary practice; the primary or core practice is whatever the organization is really all about—architecture in the case of DesignCo.

This does not mean that the secondary practice is not important, but just as with the idea that there is an order implicit in internal and external goods, with internal goods taking precedence, so there is an order implicit in the core or primary practice at the heart of the organization and the secondary practice of making and sustaining its institutional form; management’s primary role is to serve the core practice.

Second, however, the making and sustaining of th...

still a practice and, as MacIntyre says, one which ‘stands in a peculiarly close relationship to...

Nonetheless, it does intuitively make sense that management could be described as a practice (although in Chapter 6 we will qualify this and clarify that this really means a domain-relative practice), particularly if its role is conceived primarily as maintaining the institution such that it nurtures the primary practice at the core of the organization, and that the pursuit of external goods (one of the key roles of the institution and therefore of management) is always subservient to this task.

But if this is the case, then managers have an opportunity, just as do the practitioners in the core practice, to possess and exercise the virtues in pursuit of the internal goods of the secondary practice of making and sustaining the institution.

At various points above, we have spoken of internal goods and the way in which, both in the production or offering of the products or services which the organization provides, and in the ‘perfection’ of individual practitioners in the process, there is the potential for these internal goods of the practice to contribute to the common good of the community.

This point about the development of practitioners is worth developing somewhat. Instinctively, we might think that the contribution an organization makes to the common good is related entirely to the goods and services it provides.26 But MacIntyre’s idea of a practice, and the ‘perfection’ of practitioners in the process, demands that this contribution to the common good is extended beyond this. And if we think about it, this makes perfect sense. A fundamental part of the common good is having virtuous individuals making good decisions, and carrying out good actions on behalf of themselves, their families, and the various organizations which make up a community, including the political organizations of government.

This is key for employability.

Assuming, then, that we could arrive at some kind of judgement about how good the purpose of an organization is both in relation to its products or services and the development of its people, we might think of this as representing one dimension of the organization. Another dimension would then be the extent to which the organization pursued external goods, and most generically success, versus the extent to which it pursued internal goods, and most generically excellence; in other words, the extent to which it prioritized external over internal goods, the institution over the practice, or vice-versa. It would be possible to conceive of an organization that, as perhaps with DesignCo, overall had a good purpose (the design of buildings for office use and the appropriate development of its people in the process), but nonetheless did so in such a way which prioritized external goods such as profit over internal goods, success over excellence, to an inordinate degree.

compare perez lopez

Ethics at the individual level can be thought of as, in general, asking and seeking to answer the question, ‘How, then, should I (or we) live?’ The ‘then’ in this question implies that we have already gone some way towards answering the question, in the sense that we have some idea of the principles or values by which we might choose to live.

But in order to pursue our telos and the ultimate aim of eudaimonia, we find ourselves engaged in a narrative quest. That is, we are both involved in the story of our own lives and in the quest to discover ‘what more and what else’3 the good life for us consists of.

Now, of course, it is just about possible, in the individualistic age in which we live, to deny certainly most, and perhaps all, of these prior connections and commitments; someone could emigrate and cut off all ties to family, friends, and former organizations such as school, university, workplaces (and possibly even the tax authorities!). Even then, unless the person were to live as a hermit, she would begin to accumulate such connections and commitments afresh wherever she then chose to live; she would simply construct another, even if entirely different, set of relationships.

This is a key point. Cite in rights paper.

In other words, as we grow up we move on from the ‘given’ of our moral starting point to engage in our own narrative quest, while not denying the ties to our past.

The more general point from this is that our narrative quest towards our own telos, and the projects which we might pursue in support of this, are not simply ones which we can choose entirely for ourselves. We could look on these other connections and commitments as constraints on our otherwise free choice to pursue our own lives and projects, but a more constructive way of thinking about them is to see them as part and parcel of our narrative quest towards our own telos.

What MacIntyre’s approach to virtue ethics suggests is that the most important of the various activities in which we engage can be described as practices under his definition.

Family life, as we have seen, is one of these, but so are chess, architecture, physics, medicine, and so on. MacIntyre encourages us to see our lives, or at least the key parts of them, as lived inside practices. And, as we saw, it is by exercising the virtues and pursuing excellence in each practice that we can, together with other practitioners, attain the internal goods of that practice. And these internal goods, together with those from the other practices in which we engage, lead to the good for ourselves and hence to us fulfilling our own purposes in life—though recognizing that it is in the nature of a narrative quest that we are always likely to be considering ‘what more and what else’ there is to discover about ourselves and our purposes.

But since we are engaged in a narrative quest towards our true telos, one key virtue which we need to add to these is constancy.

Characteristically, the plain person responds…not so much through explicit arguments, although these may always play a part, as by shaping his or her life in one way rather than another. When from time to time, the plain person retrospectively examines what her or his life amounts to as a whole, often enough with a view to choice between alternative futures, characteristically what he or she is in effect asking is “To what conception of my overall good have I so far committed myself? And do I now have reason to put it in question?”

There is, of course, a link here back to the idea of ‘reasons for action’ which we saw in Chapter 3 (that we should be able to explain why we carried out such and such an action by providing a link from it to what we understand to be our true good), and to the question discussed there about what might lead to the substantial good for all.