Book Review Robert C. Solomon, Ethics and Excellence: Cooperation and Integrity in Business (Oxford University Press, New York: 1992), 288 pp., $29.95 (USD). This book advances three main theses. The first is a claim about the nature of business: Business as a social practice is inherently ethical. As a practice, business has a purpose (telos) - namely, "to promote prosperity, to provide essential and desirable goods, to make life easier" - and it is this purpose that determines what is ethical in business (l3. 118). Those practices that contribute to this purpose are ethical; those that thwart it are not. This conception of the nature of business as teleological and inherently ethical may be called Aristotelian. The second thesis is a claim about the nature of Business Ethics that follows from the first thesis: an adequate conception of Business Ethics as an area of study must be based on a recognition that business is inherently ethical. The third thesis is that the appropriate ethical theory for business ethics is teleological and Aristotelian in character, a theory of the practice of business which will focus on the character of those who engage in it and which will emphasize the role of virtues in contributing to the attainment of the purpose of the practice. Solomon's style is lively, witty, and accessible to a broad readership, and the plan of the book is straightforward. Part One is devoted to debunking unfortunate myths and metaphors which, according to Solomon, "have been largely responsible for the misunderstanding of business and much of the hostility and criticism of the past century or so." (p. 9) These include the metaphors of economic competition as war and as the struggle for survival in the jungle, as well as the metaphors of the corporation or the capitalist system itself as a machine (with the implication that individuals are cogs in it). Here Solomon is at his best, masterfully deflating the pernicious rhetoric and uncovering its impoverishing picture of business and of human relations generally. How are these misunderstandings to be avoided? Solomon seems to think that the problem is purely cognitive: All that is necessary is that we come to see (re-cognize) business for what it Journal ofBusiness Ethics 13: 94,

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really is, to understand the true nature of the practice, which includes the purpose of the activity, to promote general prosperity. But what if the causes of the error are deeper and more complex? Perhaps a number of cultural and economic factors have produced incentives which reward people for treating the means as if it were the end. If this is the case, then no merely cognitive change will dissipate the error. Even worse, what if many of us simply reject the idea that business has a (single) purpose, much less that it has the particular purpose that Solomon says it has? It will do no good to observe, as Solomon does, that purposiveness "defines every human enterprise," including business. (p. 103) It may be true that all human activity, at least so far as it is intelligible, involves purposive behavior, but it does not follow from this that every social practice has a purpose, an overarching telos, determined by the nature 6f the practice, by what the practice is. Instead, we must admit that business has many purposes - or rather, that various agents participating in business activity have a plurality of purposes. To say that inspire of this undeniable plurality of purposes business has a single purpose can mean only one of two things: either that this one purpose (according to Solomon, the creation of general prosperity) is the natural purpose of business, the one determined by the nature of business, or that this one purpose is the legitimating function of business, that purpose which justifies' business as an institution. Unfortunately, Solomon scrupulously avoids the second alternative: He never suggests that we determine what is ethical in business by articulating the legitimating function of business. Conspicuously absent is any attempt to justify capitalist institutions by showing how they contribute the realization of ethical values such as individual freedom and well-being that are widely accepted outside the world of business. Instead (although Solomon himself doesn't use the phrase "natural purpose") he opts for an internalist approach to Business Ethics which bases the ethical in business on the alleged purpose given by the nature of business. Yet why should one accept Solomon's claim that (Continued on p. 124)

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(Continued from p. 94) the purpose of business - a telos determined by the very nature of business - is to promote (general) prosperity? It is surprising that Solomon does not consider and attempt to rebut this fundamental and familiar skepticism about the project of deriving ethics from statements about purposes determined by the nature of things. Solomon should simply jettison the talk about the natural purpose of business and replace it with a focus on the legitimatingfunction (or functions) of business. Instead of saying that it is the nature of business that the purpose of this practice is to promote general prosperity, we may say that the legitimacy - the ultimate moral justification - of business as a social institution is the complex and heterogeneous array of human goods it provides and the worthy values it serves. These include not only general prosperity and individual reward for talent and effort, but also opportunities for creativity, for the exercise of complex cognitive and motivational skills, and for participation in cooperative enterprises which can provide the goods of community - a sense of the common good that transcends one's own private good, the pleasures of comradeship, the satisfaction of collective goals successfully achieved. Similarly, to justify the state as an institution and to understand the ethical constraints on the exercise of political authority, we focus on the legitimating functions of the state (provision of security, protection of rights, creation of a framework for the pursuit of communal goods, etc.), not upon the nature of the state or the purpose of the state. The real issue in business ethics is not whether we have mistaken the nature and purpose of business, but rather whether the particular social institution of business as it now exists in this or that country is doing a good enough job of achieving the goods that are supposed to legitimate that institution to justify the costs, broadly construed. With regard to business (or certain areas or aspects of business practices) in the United States at this time, we may ask, for example: To what extent is business providing goods that promote prosperity and make life easier and more pleasant and to what extent is it stimulating insatiable demands for luxuries which

consume disproportionate amounts of resources, while contributing both to degrading the environment and exacerbating of the gap between the developed and undeveloped countries in this world? And to what extent is business - or rather, particular aspects of this complex social institution - encouraging mindless conformity and careerism rather than nurturing creativity and a commitment to general prosperity? These are the vital questions Solomon is really interested in, and they can all be better posed and pursued without the dubious moral metaphysics of Aristotelian teleology. Part Two presents the framework of the Aristotelian approach to business and to business ethics. Here we get perhaps the most sustained development available of a set of crucial insights implicated in the fashionable phrase "corporate culture." Drawing on portions of Aristotle's ethics which do not depend upon the idea of natural purposes, Solomon emphasizes that corporations are communities and, like all communities, are on-going patterns of human interaction structured by ethical commitments, not merely, or even primarily by isolated exchanges between self-interested individuals of the sort who inhabit the pages of neo-classical economics texts. For political philosophers, this part-of the book is especially exciting: By expanding and deepening the now commonplace idea that corporations are communities, Solomon breathes new life into the stalled debate between Liberals and Communitarians. Instead of indulging in abstract speculations about the virtues of Fifth Century Athens or pining for highly idealized Nineteenth Century American town meetings, we can concentrate on understanding actual communities about which we know or can know, a great deal, and which are truly relevant to our lives. In the third part of Ethics and Excellence Solomon provides a valuable exposition of the role of virtues in successful business life, again drawing on Aristotle (but not on the moral metaphysics of teleology). He not only makes a major contribution to Business Ethics, but also provides a stimulus to the development of so-called virtue ethics in the heart of ethical theory. Here, too, so-called "applied ethics," so often disparaged by

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(Continuedfrom l). 124) ethical theorists, may come to the rescue of overly abstract theorizing about the difference between virtue ethics and rule ethics. The key to Solomon's approach - and the vital insight for the development of virtue ethics - is the recognition that the virtues, at least in general, make successful cooperation possible and that their role in facilitaring cooperation can only be understood in the context of the concrete communities in which cooperation occurs. Again, the insight is not novel in the Business Ethics literature, but Solomon provides a deeper appreciation of it. In particular, he emphasizes the importance of some of the less dramatic virtues, such as friendliness and wit, that are often neglected in the rush to praise more aggressive virtues such as toughness and pride. Aside from the unnecessary invocation of the discredited attempt to derive ethics from the natural purpose, Ethics and Excellence suffers another significant flaw. Solomon fails to support most of his major contentions about the role of the virtues in achieving successful business cooperation with relevant empirical work form the social sciences. For example, there is a burgeoning literature in Sociology and Economics which challenges the myth that business consists of isolated exchanges among purely self-interested individuals. (See, for instance, Beyond Self-Interest, edited by Jane Mansbridge, a set of essays exploring the question of whether the economists' maximizing models of human behavior can be adapted to take into account the fact that moral commitments do influence behavior.) 1Or consider the fascinating studies by Kim and Mauborgne providing empirical evidence to show that multinationals which satisfy principles of procedural justice in their global strategy development

achieve greater effectiveness in implementing their strategies? If the philosopher-business ethicist's generalizations about the role of the virtues in facilitating cooperation are not supported by empirical social science, the whole approach will lack credibility, especially among Business School faculty who, for the most part, are trained in the Social Sciences. Unless this defect is remedied, the predictable result will be the marginalization of the virtue approach to Business Ethics in the very environment in which it could have the most impact. Ethics and Excellence is perhaps best regarded as a manifesto about how Business Ethics ought to be done rather than as a sustained application of the approach it advocates. Since much of the book is concerned with clearing the way for the new approach, it would be uncharitable to chide Solomon too much for not actually appl)4ng the highly contextual, concrete approach he advocates to a broad range of urgent contemporary ethical problems in business. One can only hope that the author will now turn to the application of the method for which he has so eloquently argued.

Notes

1 Mansbridge,J.: 1990,BeyondSelf-Interest(Universityof ChicagoPress,Chicago). 2 R i m , W. C. and R. A. Mauborgne: 1991, 'Implementing Global Strategies: The Role of ProceduralJustice', StrategicManagementJournaI12, 125--43.

University of Wisconsin, Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, U.S.A

ALLEN BUCHANAN