REVIEW ARTICLE ARISTOTLE AND THE GOOD BUSINESS LIFE Terry L. Price Creating the Good Life: Applying Aristotle's Wisdom to Find Meaning and Happiness James O'Toole New York: Rodale Books, 2005; hardcover, 304 pp.; ISBN 1594861250 Corporate Integrity: Rethinking Organizational Ethics and Leadership Marvin T. Brown Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005; paperback, 284 pp. ; ISBN 0521606578 At the beginning of last year. Fortune Magazine announced its "100 Best Companies to Work For 2006." Many of these companies were excepdonal in terms of the extras they made available to employees: healthcare, on-site childcare, work- life balance, telecommudng, sabbadcals, and other unusual perks. But "[w]ork diat really matters . . . [is] what makes Genentech die Best Company to Work For in 2006" (Morris 2006). Genentech, a biotech company based in San Francisco, uses "In Business for Life" as its motto. Two recent books—^James O'Toole's Creating the Good Life: Applying Aristotle's Wisdom to Find Meaning and Happiness and Marvin Brown's Corporate Integrity: Rethinking Organizational Ethics and Leadership—take up quesdons about the reladonship between our business or organizadonal hves and our development as moral agents and citizens. To make sense of this reladonship, both books draw on the ancient Greek view of the good life and the good community. The authors' choice for intellectual guidance is particularly well suited to the task at hand. Philosophers such as Aristotle understand ethics in a way that does not allow us to separate what we owe ourselves from the communal good. We cannot make sense of individual idendty apart from membership in pohdcal community, and this stricture applies even to individuals who organize with others in society for private gain. To be sure, O'Toole and Brown come to very different conclusions, © 2007. Business Ethics Quarterly, Volume 17, Issue 2. ISSN 1052-150X. pp. 325-340 BUSINESS ETHICS QUARTERLY using what each of them takes to be the Aristotelian approach. Part of this difference is due to die specific tasks they set for diemselves. O'Toole's book seeks to idendfy features of community that contribute to individual happiness, whereas Brown's book aims to show how integrity might make our organizadons more conducive to both individualflourishing and the communal good. (As we will see, an addidonal explanadon is that they start from different assumpdons about the Aristotelian approach itself.) Sdll, both books begin with the goal of integradon and, moreover, with the conviction that Aristotle's view is our best bet for achieving it. O'Toole's Creating the Good Life brings us Aristotle as self-help gum or personal development guide. One of the main claims of the book is that Aristode's philosophy is a philosophy for the "Rest of Us" (xvi), a philosophy for ordinary execudves, academics, and other professionals. According to O'Toole, Aristotle's central point is that life is about development. It is not just about growing up during adolescence at one end, then retiring comfortably at the other; instead, it is about growing and learning throughout the course of our lives. He shows us that happiness comes about as the continual growth of our minds, character, and humanity. Truly happy people are engaged in realizing the full diversity of their highest, most human capabilities, (xv) An important part of realizing diis diversity, O'Toole thinks, is in working dirough Aristotle's arguments: "it is through the process of understanding how and why he reaches his conclusions that we develop the self-discipline to make the changes in our lives that may make us happy" (xxi). It is very surprising, then, that early on O'Toole discourages his audience from reading the works of Aristode. We are told that this is a bad idea because his writings can be tough sledding for modem readers. .. . Aristotle is hard to read, and his words require careful anention, analysis, and interpretation. .. . So, for philosophical virgins who have never read classical philosophy and for those who don't have the patience to tackle Aristotle's Ethics on their own, these pages are my interpretation of what Aristotle says practical people need to ask themselves if they want to lead a good life, (xix-xx) This advice is even more surprising when we leam—as we do throughout the book—that several of the people O'Toole considers to be "contemporary Aristotelians," people such as actor Will Smith and former Levi Strauss executive Peter Thigpen, made their Hfe changes after actually reading Aristode for themselves. Much later in the book O'Toole seems to change his tune: "[B]y the third dme through, almost everyone finds the exercise [of reading Aristode] rewarding. . . . So the challenge is to get through those inidal readings" (145). At the very least, O'Toole's book could stand to have more quotes from Aristotle himself, especially if readers really are to "sduggle with Aristode's exercises" (xxii). REVIEW ARTICLE As it tums out, passages from Aristotle are few and far between. More bothersome sdll, O'Toole neither gives citadons to support his interpretadon of Aristotle nor idendfies the quotes he does use, making it difficult to read Aristode along with O'Toole. (The very minimal index and bibliography are not much help either.) This omission would not be a real problem if O'Toole did not present the book as a contemporary discussion of what Aristotle really said and thought. Admittedly, O'Toole does say that "this book is as much a transposidon of Aristotle's thoughts to a modem context as it is a summary of what he said way back then. Think of it as 'Variadons on Themes by Aristotle'" (xx). But O'Toole cannot have it both ways. If his aim is not to give the reader Aristode's view, then he makes entirely too many references to what Aristode—or "die Ancient," as O'Toole calls him—said or thought and entirely too many appeals to the weight of Aristotle's authority. Quoting— or simply cidng—particular passages from Aristode would give the reader some sense of where O'Toole got the ideas he attributes to Aristode. A good stardng point for asking whether it really is Aristotle's view we are getdng in the book is with O'Toole's claim that Aristode "encouraged his own students to begin their personal analyses with reference to the lives of the Fortunate Few, men and women of their era who had most successfully achieved wealth, fame, power, and pleasure" (xx). This argumentadve strategy is cend-al to O'Toole's book. For example, he asks us to consider the lives of Jim Clark of Silicon Valley and Oracle's Larry Ellison. Clark's desire for money, O'Toole thinks, marks him as a particular kind of and-Aristotehan, a "voluptuary" (58). EUison wants power and success, which makes him a different kind of and-Aristotehan, a "sultan" (61). O'Toole asks, "Could I reasonably expect to find happiness living the way they have chosen to live ? . .. This is a 'threshold test' because, if we conclude diat people who choose the paths of voluptuaries and sultans do find happiness, then we don't have to make the effort to understand Aristode" (58). But is this what Aristode really asks us to do? The closest O'Toole comes to an Aristotelian jusdficadon for this strategy is in a general appeal to the Poetics: In Aristotle's Poetics, he explains why we leam valuable lessons by observ ing the lives of powerful individuals. He concludes that those more notable than ourselves are no more or less human; however, because their lives are projected on a larger screen, the moral dilemmas they face are clearer to see. When we see the tragicflaws of such great people dramatized, he posits, we empathize more easily than if the characters on stage are equally flawed but ordinary folk like us.... Not only are the virtues and vices of the powerful clearer to see, the consequences of their moral choices are more pronounced. When the powerful fall, there is collateral damage, and innocent bystanders are hurt in the process. If nothing else, that gets our attention. (57) However, if we look at Aristode's Poetics, the task Aristode sets for himself in the corresponding passages is how to organize the plot of a tragedy, not how we should look to die lives of die "Fortunate Few" to engage in an analysis of our own lives. To BUSINESS ETHICS QUARTERLY arouse the appropriate feehngs—namely, fear and pity—^tragedy should show "a man not preeminently virtuous and just, whose misfortune, however, is brought upon him not by vice and depravity but by some error of judgment" (P, 1467 [1453a8-9]). To be sure, Aristode does say that the heroes should be "of the number of those in the enjoyment of great reputadon and prosperity" (P, 1467 [1453alO]) and that a "Tragedy is an imitadon of personages better dian die ordinary man" (P, 1470 [1454b9]). He also says that we can judge the morality of words and acdons in poedy (P, 1484 [1461a4-8]). But this is a far cry from recommending that we use the examples of the "Fortunate Few" to decide whether we want to imitate their lives. The point is rather the other way around: the examples imitate life; life is not supposed to imitate the examples. As Richard McKeon puts it, the purpose of tragedy is "imitadon rather than .. . a mode of persuasion or excitadon" (P, xxxi). It is in his Nicomachean Ethics that Aristotle considers different concepdons of happiness. But he does not do so by looking to the lives of the "Fortunate Few." Instead, he asks that we consider the merits of the general kinds of hves that people pursue. Among these lives, Aristotle lists the hfe of gradficadon (pleasure), die hfe of money making (wealth), the hfe of acdon (honor or virtue), the life of study (philosophy) (NE, 7-8 [1095bl5-1096al0]). The life of pleasure is the favorite of "the many, die most vulgar" (NE, 7 [1095b 16])—not O'Toole's "Fortunate Few"—and Aristotle rejects this life because it is "completely slavish" (NE, 1 [1095bl9]). He dismisses the money-making life on the grounds that wealth "is merely useful, choiceworthy only for some other end" (NE, 8 [1096a7]). O'Toole classifies Jim Clark as a volupdiary, yet it sounds as diough Clark is actually committed to die money-making life, at least based on the descripdon we get from O'Toole. Clark uses his money to buy things such as sailboats and impressionist paintings, but wealth itself seems to be his real end, not the pleasure he gets from extravagant purchases. After all, O'Toole tells us diat Clark was wordi $875 million in 2000. If Clark wants more money, then it cannot be because he wants to buy more things. In any case, Aristotle's view is diat diese two kinds of hves call for two different kinds of arguments against them. The money-making life cannot be the best life because money is not an end in itself. In contrast, pleasure can be good in itself, but its pursuit nevertheless does not consdtute the best hfe. With respect to the hves of pleasure and wealth, Aristode's view is not dissimilar to that of Plato. The good life is the life of radonahty, not Utopian desire sadsfacdon. Yet O'Toole claims diat "[i]n this [Aristode] differs greatly from his own esteemed teacher" (14). According to O'Toole, Plato's Republic is premised on the assumpdon that almost all humans are material boys and girls content only when their purses arefilled with gold, their stomachs are stuffed with fatten ing goodies, and their possessions include the equivalent of a mortgage-free second house on Maui. To make such materialistic folk happy, Plato invents a class of patemalisdc guardians who mle a well-ordered economic and political system. Because the guardians manage society so effectively, their followers REVIEW ARTICLE are able to concentrate fully on trying to satiate their insatiable desires for wealth and sensual pleasure.... Were Plato alive today, it is clear what advice he would give us as we stmggle with how to live a good life: 'Kick back and relax'. .. . Platonism has been extremely popular with people who measure their lives by the goods they possess. (14) Even if we set aside issues about whether the Republic is a reflecdon of Plato's polidcal views, as opposed to a metaphor for thinking about jusdce in the individual, there are sdll good reasons to quesdon O'Toole's idiosyncradc reading of the Republic. First, it misses Plato's characterisdc ideahsm, which is clearly ardculated in his allegory of the cave. The material world is hardly real, let alone something to be ptirsued as an end in itself. Second, O'Toole's understanding of the role of the guardians contradicts Plato's claim that they must be made to "go down into the cave again" and, uldmately, "put the city, its cidzens, and themselves in order, using [the good] as dieir model" (R, 211-12 [539e-540a]). For Plato, the proper ordering of the city and the souls of its cidzens puts reason—with the help of courage—in charge. The claim that reason is put to work in the service of desire could not be further from the tmth. To miss this point is to misunderstand the Republic's central argument. Where Aristotle and Plato really differ in their views of happiness is with respect to the life of virtue. As we will see, however, O'Toole takes Aristotle to be making a different point altogether in this debate and, as a consequence, underesdmates the role of fortune in Aristotle's view of happiness. When Aristotle considers the hfe of virtue, he does so alongside the life of honor, which he rejects because "it seems to depend more on those who honour than on the one honoured, whereas we intuitively believe that the good is something of our own and hard to take from us" (NE, 1 [1095b25-26]). However, his objecdon to idendfying the life of virtue with happiness reads hke a direct response to Plato. The view of individual jusdce in the Republic is that the perfectly just person is happy, even if he seems perfectly unjust and, as a consequence, dies a painful and humiUating death for it. In the Republic, Glaucon raises what looks to be a counterexample, thus putting Plato's view to the test: a perfectly just person who seems unjust "will be whipped, stretched on a rack, chained, blinded with fire, and, at the end, when he has suffered every kind of evil, he'll be impaled, and will realize then that one shouldn't want to be just but to be beheved to be just" (R, 37 [361e]). Plato says that this person is happy nonetheless because his soul is in the proper order. His virtue does not lead to happiness in any kind of instmmental way; this state of the soul constitutes his happiness. Aristotle objects, however, that we would not count as happy the virtuous person who "suffer[s] the worst evils and misfortunes" (NE, 8 [1096al]), no matter how virtuous this person is. According to Aristotle, no one would do so, "except to defend a philosopher's paradox" (NE, 8 [1096a3]). Aristotle's point is that happiness also requires extemal goods, among them friends, wealth, pohdcal power, good birth, good children, and beauty (A^^, 21 [1099a3 l-b5). So it is Aristotle, not Plato, who draws a connection between wealth BUSINESS ETHICS QUARTERLY and happiness. For Plato, as virtue is sufficient for happiness, wealth plays no role in his concepdon of the good life. This difference reflects Aristotle's commitment to the view that good fortune is a necessary condidon for happiness. For example, happiness needs a complete life. For life includes many reversals of fortune, good and bad, and the most prosperous person may fall into a terrible disaster in old age, as the Trojan stories tell us about Pdam; but if someone has suffered these sorts of misfortunes and comes to a miserable end, no one counts him happy. (NE, 23 [1100a5-9]) Aristode quickly notes that he does not mean that a person can be happy when he is dead. Nor does he mean that we can know whether we are happy now only by looking at ourselves from the perspecdve of the end of our hves. We need a complete hfe for epistemic reasons, namely, to know whether it is correct to call a person happy. But an accurate determinadon of happiness for an individual requires this perspecdve because it is only by viewing the complete life that we know all that happens to him. This means that it is a great stretch to claim, as O'Toole does, that Aristotle suggests we ask ourselves the following: Imagine you are on your deathbed. Now, as you review thefinaldraft of your curriculum vitae, what in your record will cause you to look back on your life with a sense of satisfac tion ?... Aristotle's test of whether a person has led a good life—the measure of whether a man or woman is tmly happy—is the degree to which one is free of deathbed regrets about his or her unfulfilled potential. (68) O'Toole calls this "the deathbed test." It is not Aristode's test. For one thing, as we have seen, it misinterprets Aristode's reasoning for the claim that happiness needs a complete life. For another thing, it makes whether one has lived a good life a subjecdve assessment based on what one imagines will be one's perspective at one's death. Aristode's appeal to the complete life is neither an assessment tool for personal development nor an exercise in imaginadon about what one's life will be like. The complete life must actually be hved, and—therefore—its happiness must ultimately be assessed by others. O'Toole's deathbed test is closer to the tired quesdon, "On your deathbed, will you really wish you had spent another day in the office?" To prove the universal, cross- cultural vahdity of this test, O'Toole claims that "[i]t's the test Mohandas K. Gandhi applied to himself [and his law career] in his fordes, and the results of that personal assessment caused him to alter radically the course of his life.... To oversimphfy, he quit chasing ambulances and began to work on his previously undeveloped capabiUdes as a leader, statesman, and creator of a just society" (68-69). The fact that O'Toole's principles are not always tme to Aristotle—or any other philosopher, for that matter—does not necessarily mean that we ought to reject them. In this context, it is worth nodng that the book has an argumentadve strategy in addidon to the appeal to the authority of Aristotle. O'Toole also suggests that a REVIEW ARTICLE test of the book's principles is in their applicadon. Throughout the book, he uses his own personal joumey to apply the "Aristotelian" principles. Toward the end of the year 2000,1 reluctantly admitted I wasn'tflnding happiness on the life path I had been following for three decades. I had begun the year, myfifty-fifth,filled with millennially grand expectations. A book I had written had just been published, and I was convinced that this one, my twelfth, would bring the recognition I desired, the acknowledgment that I felt my work had long deserved but, for this twist of fate and that stroke of bad timing, the earlier works had been denied. And it was definitely respect I was after. Sure, I wanted more money; but in my gut, I hungered for America's most sought-after prize: fame, renown, a name. (5) So, notwithstanding the fact that O'Toole's "excessive passion for a 1937 Cord 812 Phaeton auto" (61) helps him relate to the voluptuary Jim Clark, it is really the sultan Larry Elhson with whom O'Toole idendfies. Applying the direshold test to his own life, O'Toole asks, "Could I reasonably expect poorer, less-powerful, less-famous, and less-envied individuals to be happier than those who pursue those same goals more successfully? " (65). O'Toole's answer is, "I could expect to be even less happy than Clark and Ellison so long as my models were voluptuaries and sultans, because there would always be someone with more goodies and public recognidon than I had. And the deathbed test demonstrated that I was flaihng around in the dark like Clark and Ellison with no clear idea of what moral end I was pursuing" (72). There are two issues here. One is whether a person ought to adopt an end that is pretty obviously unachievable. Since having the most money or the most esteem can only be achieved by one person at a time, it is essentially unachievable by all others. A second issue is whether wealth and respect are appropriate ends in the first place. O'Toole's argument somedmes goes back and forth between these two issues, though it is only the latter concem that has any force as part of an argument against the lives of the voluptuary and the sultan. The problem is not that people generally want to have the most wealth or respect but, rather, that they want more and more no matter how much they get. It is odd, then, that O'Toole says Clark's stock losses give us reason to ask the quesdon, "Can Clark ever look forward to being happy?" (69). Whatever Clark's chance of achieving his goal or Elhson's chance of achieving his, O'Toole wants to emphasize that the rest of us have little or no chance of having the most wealth or respect. But if O'Toole's argument is to be convincing in any sense, this cannot be the real reason that we should not adopt the money-making life or the life of honor for ourselves. These lives are improper even if we can achieve the ends that define them. O'Toole claims that we should instead opt for the contempladve life. This is the life of study (philosophy), the fourth general kind of life Aristotle lists. Aristotle describes it this way: But the activity of understanding, it seems, is superior in excellence because it is the activity of study, aims at no end beyond itself and has its own proper BUSINESS ETHICS QUARTERLY pleasure, which increases the activity. Further, self-sufficiency, leisure, unwearied activity (as far as is possible for a human being), and any other features ascribed to the blessed person, are evidently features of this activity. Hence a human being's complete happiness will be this activity, if it receives a complete span of life, since nothing incomplete is proper to happiness. (NE, 286[1177b22-26]) Now consider Aristotle's thinking alongside O'Toole's thinking. According to O'Toole, contempladon is really nothing more than what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "flow." O'Toole describes this as the ineffable feeling enjoyed by creative artists and writers when they are so absorbed in what they are doing that they lose track of time and place. In this blissful condition, one doesn't think about anything else, and all worries and concems are set aside. Skilled athletes call this being 'in the zone.' Weekend warriors have enough of a taste of being in the zone to appreciate the blissful feeling Michael Jordan must have gotten when totally wrapped up in a game of basketball. Watching him in action, we saw the pleasure in his eyes. But one needn't be a sports star to get into the zone. My aunt Virginia tells me she gets the feeling when painting ceramics. I have experienced it writing these chapters. I know I have been in the zone when I look at the clock and discover I have been at work for many hours, though it felt like minutes. (34) There are obvious differences between Aristode's understanding of the life of study and O'Toole's understanding of contempladon. Not least among these is a difference regarding what makes this kind of life valuable. Aristode calls the life of study "blessed," presumably because it is the life of the gods and because the person who lives it is most loved by the gods (NE, 289, 291 [1178b22-23, 1179a23-32]), whereas O'Toole calls it "blissful," presumably a reference to the subjective state of someone who is "in the zone." A second difference is in the variety of lives that count as hves of study for O'Toole. Admittedly, he ultimately rejects the view on which Jordan's basketball playing is the Aristotelian good Hfe. But he does so for what are merely condngent reasons: "Contempladon is the only acdvity that is absorbing 'good work' for all one's life" (35, my emphasis). Aristotle does say that the Hfe of study is "most condnuous" (NE, 284 [1177a22]). Yet it is hard to beheve that any advocate of the contemplative Hfe would put the Hfe of the athlete on a par with the Hfe of a philosopher, even if the athledcs could be sustained over a lifetime. In any case, in O'Toole's view, because we cannot engage in athledc acdvides all of our Hves, we must find our happiness in "posidvely absorbing mental work: playing the piano, woodworking, solving a sciendfic problem in a laboratory, and hundreds more sources of bHss," such as paindng ceramics (35). Nodce that many of these acdvides are not pursued only for their own sake, which makes it hard to see how they would count as Aristotelian contempladon. Other activides—for example, that of O'Toole's "contemporary AristoteHan" who "produced the series of highly enter REVIEW ARTICLE taining Freddie O'Neal detective stories" (46)—would probably also be rejected by Aristotle on grounds of their reladve triviahty. O'Toole's concepdon of die good Hfe is therefore less about theoredcal study than about broadening one's interests and capacities as part of a larger project of self-development. As always, he idendfies his own view with Aristode's: "In fact, [Aristode] is simply pro-stretching ourselves. Instead of doing what we have always done, instead of making an extra buck, wridng yet another academic ardcle, playing another round of golf, he encourages us to try new things, leam new skills, and leam about new places and new people" (47). In this passage and throughout the book, however, O'Toole's view is probably as close (or closer) to the individuahsm that characterizes modem liberal moral theory. The good Hfe is a Hfe of autonomous choice, and autonomous choice requires opdons for the development of radonal agency and the pursuit of an agent's ends. It is only in the context of the Hberal perspecdve that we can make sense of O'Toole's advice that a middle-aged person can up and choose to adopt a Hfe that is better for him and more conducive to his happiness. We also need HberaHsm to make sense of O'Toole's very cosmopolitan view of Aristode: "Aristode would ask if [needy neighbors] are needier than people who live a few miles farther north . . ., let alone people in Africa, Ladn America, and Asia" (288). And we need not just HberaHsm but John Stuart Mill to make sense of O'Toole's claim that "the Ancient says we need to embark on a series of exercises to develop our moral muscles" (152, my emphasis). Finally, O'Toole's view often comes across as much more Rawlsian (after John Rawls) than AristoteHan. For example, O'Toole claims that "Aristode suggests that a virtuous leader start by putdng himself in the place of his followers, asking How would I want to be treated if I were a subject of this state?" (226), and O'Toole recommends that board members and execudves take up the "AristoteHan exercise of imagining themselves in the place of those in their company, in some cases the majority, who work for $35,000 a year and less" (258). The standard Aristotelian view of the good Hfe stands in pretty marked contrast to O'Toole's way of thinking about the good Hfe. For one thing, Aristode holds that the good life requires proper educadon: "the soul of the student needs to have been prepared by habits for enjoying and hadng finely" (NE, 292 [1179b25]). Admittedly, pracdcal wisdom requires the experience that comes with age (NE, 166 [1143b6-14]), but it certainly does not begin diere. For Aristode, the good Hfe also depends on the kind of poHdcal arrangements under which one Hves. Despite O'Toole's claim that Aristotle "has no illusions diat... it is desirable for govemment to try to enforce virtuous behavior" (13-14), Aristode gives just this role to the state in his moral and poHdcal works. For example, he teUs us in his Nicomachean Ethics that the state must legislate for morality because "the base person, since he desires pleasure, has to receive correcdve treatment by pain, Hke a beast of burden" (NE, 293 [1180al2). The larger point, diough, is that O'Toole's view of die good Hfe essendally ignores the Greek commitment to the connecdon between happiness BUSINESS ETHICS QUARTERLY and community. In so doing, he neglects what might be caHed the "communitarian" aspect of Aristode, which has made Aristode so fashionable in recent years. This is not to say that O'Toole completely overlooks Aristotle's communitarianism. Midway through the book, in a secdon endded "Why We Need Friends," O'Toole notes that Aristotle sees humans as "political animals," which prompts a disdncdon between "the highest good (our personal moral development) and the complete good (creadng jusdce in our community)" (170). The best I can tell is that O'Toole is appealing to Aristode's view diat "complete friendship is die friendship of good people similar in virtue" (NE, 212 [1156b6]). But even here O'Toole's discussion of community is oddly motivated. For example, in a passage that takes us to the chapter "Friends, Family, Religion, and Odier Goods," O'Toole tells us that I hadn't attended professional meetings, hadn't formed relationships with people who could give me access to the resources needed for an academic writer to succeed, hadn't done most of the normal and expected things my professional peers had done to advance their careers. It now occurred to me that this was a major reason I had never been as successful as I had hoped. .. . With this insight, I now have to choose whether or not to change my behavior. Do I want to start schmoosing with people I sought studiously to avoid for 3 decades or keep doing things "my way"? ... Now I recognize that it was no one's fault but my own that things didn't work out as I had desired. (158-59) Not only is this a particularly un-AristoteHan way to think about one's connecdon to community, but it also forces us to ask again whether O'Toole really rejects certain kinds of lives—for example, the Hfe of recognidon—or instead thinks it can be achieved, but only "with a Htde helpfrom our friends" (163). Moreover, this passage seems to contradict his earlier claim, "I understood that I had to shift my focus to attaining other goods [besides praise and approval], noble ones that were not only good for me but over which I had control" (144, my emphasis). (This earlier claim is also more consistent with Aristode's above-noted argument against the life of honor.) O'Toole is on better foodng when he suggests that "seminars, study groups, reading clubs, Hterary salons, and the Hke can be designed to meet the need idendfied by Aristode for friends to engage in coHecdve deliberadon" (179) and that an Aristotelian concepdon of friendship might be developed as part of an argument for shared leadership within businesses. SdH, the communitarian aspects of O'Toole's book come off as reladvely thin, as evidenced by the last line of his penuldmate paragraph in the chapter on "Community Leadership": "I signed up for jury duty and decided to work alongside my wife in the upcoming presidendal campaign" (223). Once again, we have to ask whedier O'Toole's view of the good Hfe is compel- Hng, even if it is not Aristode's view. Surely there is something to the Hberal's caH for people to exercise their radonal faculdes for self-development. Furthermore, engaging in activides of requisite breadth probably precludes spending all of one's dme at work. It is not clear, however, that the business Hfe is incompadble with this REVIEW ARTICLE kind of development as an autonomous agent. (O'Toole is equally hard on academic speciaHzadon, cidng the degeneradon of the "Ancient's own field of philosophy" [148]). Of course, O'Toole urges that his view is not and-business. But, as it tums out, the "tmest AristoteHan [O'Toole] know[s]," Hke most all of his examples of contemporary Aristotelians, "abandoned his business career" (218). The book thus seems to recommend the stronger view that "members of the baby boom generation—at least those who have invested wisely—now say that they have accumulated 'enough' and devote the rest of their Hves to Aristotelian philosophy and poHdcs" (102). O'Toole does grasp the extremity of this view and its potential consequences for society. His response, however, is that "there are plenty of people so hooked on wealth accumuladon that the economy will keep humming even if a few affluent people take a step back" (109). This claim hardly reflects a view of the good Hfe for die "Rest of Us," which is what O'Toole promises. It is a view for the affluent. O'Toole's view also overlooks the downside of a very broad approach to leaming and the upside of speciaHzadon. Somedmes the devil is in the details, and this applies to both business people and to those who want to understand what the great philosophers have to say. O'Toole's view of the good life is much more attractive as a model for undergraduate educadon. Here, O'Toole is probably right to advocate "a Hberal educadon" and "career training in graduate school or on the job" (151). For instance, he claims that "the policies of universides .. . are narrow and limidng," quodng approvingly from an interview of Tom Peters: "I'm angry that I attended Comell as an undergraduate for five and a half years and basically never made it out of the engineering quad into die liberal arts part of die school" (45-46). Accordingly, in his discussion of philanthropy, O'Toole recommends giving money to "resource-starved undergraduate Hberal arts programs," not to resource-rich business schools (269). All this despite the fact that O'Toole draws on Aristode to argue that the young—unlike middle-aged people—are not yet ready for philosophy. O'Toole's book leaves one with the thought that undergraduates would be better off doing what O'Toole now claims to be doing himself: reading broadly, "particularly classical literature and philosophy . . . [and] spending far less time reading newspapers and magazines, particularly business periodicals" (314). Marvin Brown's Corporate Integrity: Rethinking Organizational Ethics and Leadership ardculates—in convincing fashion—the reladonal aspect of the good life that O'Toole seems to be grasping for. Instead of seeing our business Hves and our civic Hves as separate. Brown defends a concepdon of integrity on which the two fit together. As Brown puts it, "The book's civic perspective looks at corporadons as members of civil society and corporate members as cidzens .. . and it retums us to a new reading of Aristotle's ethic as a public, civic ethic" (12-13). BUSINESS ETHICS QUARTERLY Brown thus cridcizes commentators on Aristode such as Edwin Hartman and Robert Solomon for seeing the organizadon as the center of civic Hfe, referring to this tendency as "a privadzadon of Aristode's poHdcal ethics" (29). The pardcular kind of integrity Brown has in mind aims to connect the personal to the organizadonal and the organizadonal to the communal. Among other things, he advocates "reladonal wholeness," according to which corporadons with interpersonal integrity respect "people's need for security and theirright to pardcipate" (95-96). Brown also creates possibilities forfit between organizadons and community by distinguishing the consequences of an organizadon's acdvity from its purpose. So, for example, "To say that individuals intend to estabHsh or operate a hospital for profit, however, is not the same as to say that the hospital, as an organizadon, intends to make a profit" (111). Nor is it to say that making a profit is the purpose of the hospital. Organizational integrity requires some worthwhile purpose other than profit. By all accounts, Genentech—introduced at the beginning of this essay—seems to have this kind of integrity. According to CEO Art Levinson, "At the end of the day, we want to make dmgs diat really matter. . . . That's die d-anscendent issue" (Morris 2006). Like O'Toole, Brown is cridcal of business schools in which "worrying about profits . . . seems to occupy most of the curriculum" (117). To understand corporate purpose. Brown draws carefuHy on Aristotle. UnHke O'Toole's Creating the Good Life, Brown's Corporate Integrity makes very clear disdncdons between the pracdcal and theoredcal lives discussed by Aristode, correctly nodng that "[t]he funcdon of the theoredcal, which is beyond our interest here, is the contempladon of wisdom" (120). Applying Aristode's understanding of human funcdoning to the corporadon. Brown claims that a corporadon's pracdcal purpose is its funcdon in society, "what an organizadon is designed to do well" (120). Perhaps O'Toole's alternative understanding of organizational purpose explains why he leans so heavily on an adaptadon of Aristotle's theoredcal life. If the purpose of the business Hfe is to make a profit, which O'Toole seems to suggest (291), then it is no wonder that the AristoteHan must abandon this kind of Hfe to pursue other purposes. But a large part of Brown's contribudon is to show that the Hfe of business, properly understood, can be consistent with the Aristotelian good life. Brown also takes care to make sure that his theory of organizadonal integrity reflects virtue ethics' primary concem "not with doing, but with being" (129). As a consequence, "The development of good corporate character—a good community—should also define a corporation's purpose. So the intemal purpose of becoming a good community is somewhat different from the extemal purpose of producing excellent products and services" (129). According to Brown, we cannot fully understand a corporation's purpose without first understanding "its place in larger social systems" (137). To show the interdependence between sectors. Brown shares the following exercise from his business ethics class: REVIEW ARTICLE The exercise begins by asking the students to imagine that we are living on an island where work has to be done and we must find someone to do it. We decide to auction off different jobs, beginning with the most urgent.... The first urgent job put up for bidding is the job of developing and maintaining a sewer system.... [N]one of the business majors or other students want to do this type of work for less than $80,000 or $90,000.1 aucdon off a few other jobs, such as.. . someone to pick the strawberries in thefields, and someone to clean our offices and stores. AU these jobs go for more than $70,000 or $80,000. Then I tum to some office jobs, such as a job keeping track of income and expenses in mnning our community: an accountant. Some student will usually do that for around $40,000.1 also develop a job for a philosopher—someone who sits around and thinks about things, and sometimes teaches others. Almost without exception, a student will either volunteer to do that without pay, or for minimum wage. (145) The bidding depends on the preferences of the students. As such, its results are meant to conform to economic principles—for example, the principle of supply and demand. But the aucdon does not come close to mirroring die real-world disdibudon of wages. In fact, the aucdon tums this distribution on its head. Brown thinks this proves that "[t]he economy is not an independent system, but rather a subsystem embedded in other systems" (146). What is the best way to think about the whole of which the corporadon is a part? Brown suggests that we appeal to the contemporary city. Here again, he is tme to Aristotle and impresses upon the reader the extent to which human flourishing depends on the context of social relations. While we may not be convinced that Brown fully answers the objection that it is "rather old-fashioned to emphasize the importance of cides" (138), this way of idendfying the nexus of civic cooperadon certainly provides a rich, Aristotelian altemadve to O'Toole's concepdon of community. What Brown calls social integrity, as disdnguished from interpersonal and organizadonal integrity discussed above, defines a corporation's civic obHgation in terms of the city's mission. The obligation of business corporations is "not to prevent and sometimes to promote the mission of the city" (161). Brown tells us that the obligation not to prevent the fulfillment of the city's mission "refers to actions or policies that stifle the democratic participation of cidzens in collective self-government, such as exerting undue pressure on city officials or employees to influence their decisions" (161-62). However, he does not tell us very much about what it means to say that corporadons have an obligadon somedmes to promote the city's mission. Filling out this component of the principle would add to the richness of his account of civic cooperadon. The most Brown offers is that corporadons have an obHgadon to make sure that employees have the opportunity to act as cidzens in the workplace (for example, developing democratic competencies) as well as outside the workplace (for example, being involved in their children's education), and that profits go to the community in the form of wages and taxes (164). BUSINESS ETHICS QUARTERLY According to Brown's account, then, the corporadon should both promote the cidzenship of its employees and act with social integrity itself in its interacdons with the city. This claim raises two questions. First, in what sense are employees citizens? Second, in what sense can a corporation have this kind of agency? FoHowing Benjamin Barber, Brown answers thefirst quesdon by suggesdng that "[s]ome version of strong democracy should be established in the workplace, because the workplace does not exist beyond civil society, but belongs to it" (95). Here, Brown understands strong democracy in terms of the view that "political freedom is not primarily freedom from community, but rather freedom for the development of community" (90). But even if we accept that corporations have an obHgation to respect employees as cidzens—for example, to help them exercise their rights and responsibilides in society more broadly—it would not follow that the workplace itself must be organized along democratic lines. Why exactly must employees be free to develop this particular community, that is, the workplace community? Brown argues that [i]f corporations exist in the civic sphere, and if workers are citizens in that sphere, then why not give workers the benefit of the doubt and consider them as citizens at work as well? This would mean that workers would be treated as citizens unless there were good reasons for not doing so. The burden of proof, in other words, rests with those who would deny citizenship, not with those of us who advocate it. Until such reasons are forthcoming, the relationships at work should be recognized as civic relationships. Recognizing the civic aspect of work relationships, however, does not require that corporations set up voting booths.... Although worker participation may take different forms, from employee ownership, to collective bargaining, to autonomous teams, to online employee feedback programs, the principle remains the same: people should have opportunities to deliberate with others about the arrangements of their work life. (98) This appeal to the civic sphere would seem to get things backwards. Corporadons, as part of the civic sphere, must respect employees' idenddes as cidzens. Recognizing that corporadons exist in the civic context of democracy, however, would not mean that they ought to take on—as far as possible—the characterisdcs of this context, anymore than it would mean that the family or educational institutions ought to be democratic. Rather, according to this argument, corporations should be democratic to the extent necessary for the funcdoning of their employees as citizens in a democracy. So we can accept that "since the sphere of civic reladonships provides the context for work relationships, and since civic relationships are key to our modem identity, relational wholeness at work must in some fashion recognize the civic right to participate" (99, my emphasis). Yet, from the argument Brown gives, we can do so without also accepting that this right extends to the workplace itself. The second question is whether corporations can be moral agents. Appealing to the arguments of Peter French and Manuel Velasquez, Brown enters the debate about whedier corporadons have this capacity. The mistake in such debates. Brown REVIEW ARTICLE thinks, is to assume that moral agency requires intendonality. RecaH that he rejects the intendonaHty of corporadons, for example, when he argues that profit cannot be the purpose of corporadons because profit is a motive and corporations do not have modves. Instead of appeahng to intendonaHty to ground agency. Brown suggests that moral agency can be grounded in specific communicative practices, such as the practices of cor porate decision making. Furthermore, the questions of intention or conscious mind belong much more to the post office model of communication, which sees isolated individuals disconnected from each other, than to the contextual model, which sees individuals involved in a common process of living in communicative stmctures. ... If organizations' communication pattems are designed so that the people who participate in those pattems work together in a decision making process, and if the process is guided by the organization's purpose rather than the purpose of the individuals involved, then it makes sense to see the decision as a corporate decision. (125) It is not clear why Brown insists on putdng this argument, as well as many of the arguments in the book, in terms of "communicadon pracdces." Sdll, once the reader gets used to his all-encompassing view of what counts as communication—"as something in which we live rather than as something we use" (33)—the distraction caused by putting the argument this way is replaced by the idea that he may be on to something. Seeing corporations as "human communities designed to make decisions" gives us some reason to think that they have the kind of agency Brown attributes to them (128). As he puts it, their purposes are therefore different from "non-agent-centered purposes" such as the purpose of laws or traffic lights (127). Brown's book also offers chapters on cultural integrity and natural integrity (in addidon to interpersonal, organizadonal, and social integrity). Cultural integrity is a response to disagreement and difference, and natural integrity addresses questions about the place of corporations in the natural environment. In a strong final chapter. Brown focuses on leadership to put these five dimensions of integrity back together again. Initially at least, one fears that his vision of unity between the dimensions is overly opdmisdc: "Perhaps nothing prevents this type of synergy as much as the lack of a clear and worthwhile corporate purpose. The omission of a telos for organizadons, or the subsdtudon of individual or social purposes, such as profit or social prosperity, for an organization's purpose, compromises the human desire for working toward something good" (207). Some pessimism is jusdfied if—as I have argued elsewhere (Price 2006)—unbridled pursuit of a worthwhile purpose by leaders can be just as morally dangerous as the pursuit of profit, in which case Brown's account would seem to fall short of a complete answer to the corporate scandals he notes at the very beginning of his book. But Hke other chapters in the book, the leadership chapter is appropriately subtle and nuanced: Instead of striving to rise above all others, we need to leam how to live with others. The aggression of modemistic communication, which tends to BUSINESS ETHICS QUARTERLY drive everything from child rearing to technological development, becomes more and more of a liability as the population becomes larger and the earth becomes smaller Teams should be excellent; they do not need to be the best. Corporations do not have to be great. They can just be really good. Being the "best" almost always requires the sacrifice of some part of a whole for the advancement of another part. It almost always signals, in other words, a lack of integrity. (225) In other words, even the pursuit of a worthwhile purpose must be tempered by respect for the individuals who make up organizations and the larger community in which corporadons operate. On the whole. Corporate Integrity is systematic in its approach and admirably broad in its coverage, always putdng its own arguments in the context of the current debates. Brown is thus able to move easily between the Hterature in philosophy, business ethics, leadership studies, and popular management. I must admit that I am skepdcal about the usefulness of the questions at the end of each chapter—in a recurring secdon endtled "From theory to pracdce"—and the worksheets in the appendix. Nevertheless, the book certainly lends itself to widespread adoption in the classroom and to selection as a standard resource for organizations. Acknowledgments I want to thank Julia Annas and John Armstrong for advice and comments on this essay. References Aristode. 1941. Poetics (P), trans. Ingram Bywater. In The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon. New York: Random House. 1985. Nicomachean Ethics (NE), trans. Terence Irwin. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Brown, Marvin T. 2005. Corporate Integrity: Rethinking Organizational Ethics and Leadership. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morris, Betsy. 2006. "Genentech: The Best Place to Work Now." Fortune Magazine (January 9) (https://money.cnn.coni/magazines/fortune/bestcompanies/). O'Toole, James. 2005. Creating the Good Life: Applying Aristotle's Wisdom to Find Meaning and Happiness. New York: Rodale. Plato. 1992. Republic (R), trans. G. M. A. Gmbe, rev. C. D. C. Reeve. IndianapoHs: Hackett Publishing Company. Price, Terry L. 2006. Understanding Ethical Failures in Leadership. New York: Cambridge University Press.