Running an enterprise in ‘woke’ times

It's hard to avoid the “wokeness” overrunning American business. “Woke capitalism” is about businesses serving the politically correct ideology of the moment instead of serving customers, employees, and shareholders. It arose as a reaction against the mistaken belief that business is “amoral” and so now attempts to re-moralize business, but it risks destroying free enterprise in doing so by making an equal and opposite error: it replaces “business without ethics” with “ethics without business.”

We need both: a return to a way of being where excellence is understood to include both effectiveness and ethics, simultaneously and inseparably. Call this “human excellence,” and contrast it with what we might call “machine excellence”: the application of technology for gathering and processing quantitative information (which Pope Francis refers to as the “technocratic paradigm” in Laudato Si, 109). Which is more important? We are getting steadily better at machine excellence, but what really make the difference between successful and failed businesses, organizations, and societies are habits of self-discipline, courage, generosity, creativity, and fairness — in other words, human excellence.

How do we rediscover human excellence? The solution has been hiding in plain sight for centuries: the classical idea of virtue. Rooted in Greek and Roman philosophy and perfected over the centuries, the idea is that virtues are not just qualities, but habits. A virtue is a good habit that makes one good, and like any habit, it is cultivated through practice — and therefore anyone who is willing to put in the practice can become virtuous. The excellence produced by virtue is always simultaneously ethical and effective because virtues are habits of doing the right things in the right way.
Collectively, the four cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance, along with their many allied virtues, provide a systematic approach to cultivating excellence in all our thoughts, actions, and feelings. Prudence, the habit of making good decisions, perfects our thinking. Justice, the habit of giving to each his or her due, perfects our actions—so that we always act justly. Fortitude is the habit of managing feelings of repulsion (especially fear) so that we do the right thing even in the face of such feelings. Temperance helps us manage feelings of attraction, or desire, so that we only give in to them to the extent that they are rational.

Each of these virtues has many allied virtues (or “sub-virtues”). Temperance, for example, includes the virtues of humility and restraint for dealing with desires of the mind; abstinence, sobriety, and chastity, for bodily desires; and simplicity and contentment regarding desires for things.

How did we lose this important idea? Somewhere along the way we decided that there shouldn’t be a fixed ideal for human excellence: that excellence should be what each one of us wants it to be, and that one person’s morality is another’s straitjacket. And yet, there is little debate over physical or mental excellence. Who argues that cancer gives one better physical health, or that schizophrenia is a greater mental excellence? So why is it so hard to see that there is an ideal for human excellence: that self-discipline, courage, generosity, creativity, and fairness are universally better than lack of discipline, cowardliness, stinginess, destructiveness, or unfairness?
At a time when so many people are so grossly confused about morality, the one sure bet we can make is to grow in virtue personally and to help others to do the same. In doing so, we will give witness to this true, rational morality by showing that it works, making us more effective and more ethical — and happier.

ANDREW ABELA, PH.D., is the founding dean of the Busch School of Business at the Catholic University of America. For more information on this topic, view the recording of his keynote speech at the 2021 Legatus Summit East or visit his website at www.VirtuousAdministration.org.