Critical Virtue Ethics: From Aristotle to Adorno

The ethics of virtues is one of the oldest forms of morality. It is still in use and discussed aiding the impression that virtue ethics — unlike natural science — has not much improved beyond what was said more than 2,000 years ago. Ethics started with a man who lived in way that expressed the very opposite of the smartly dressed, highly paid and employed managers and their entourage of affirmative writers of today’s management ethics. He was a poor, unemployed, modestly dressed, and barefooted man with the name Socrates (469–399). He lived an ethical life and also thought that an unexamined life is not worth living. Today, management and managers represent all too often such an unexamined life. They engage in day-to-day affairs — called managing — without even taking the time to reflect, to examine, and to self-examine. They live a double life between what they do at work (profit-maximising, outsourcing, and downsizing) and how they behave at home (family-oriented, caring, and compassionate). In line with their day-to-day performance this leaves scarcely any time for any examination in an ethical sense.