The Best Bits from Leaders for Humanity With Alejo Sison

10 min readFeb 21, 2022

In our webcast series “Leaders for Humanity” we engage with distinguished thought leaders who are passionate about human-centric change, bridge theory and practice in their work, and are willing to provide guidance and personal wisdom to our #GoodOrganisations Inquiry. In “Socratic Dialogues” we examine three critical questions together: a) what is good? b) how can we craft good organisations? c) how can we as leaders or individuals contribute?

For the full transcript and additional resources: https://goodorganisations.com/leadersforhumanity
Webcast on YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/goodorganisations
Podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3B5NN89pIDPgGDEPqNv0W7
Podcast on Anchor: https://anchor.fm/good-organisations
Podcast on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/leaders-for-humanity/id1605487911

To note: We work on the basis of a semi-automatic transcript. Please forgive orthographic errors and inaccuracies. Sometimes the script might be missing context — it is best “consumed” as a complement to the full webcast.

Alejo Sison

Alejo Sison is a professor for business ethics at the School of Economics of the University of Navarre. He is Visiting Ordinary Professor at the Busch School of Business of the Catholic University of America and Adjunct Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University. He was President of the European Business Ethics Network (EBEN) from 2009 to 2012. In 2019 he was elected to the board of the Society for Business Ethics and in 2023 he will be President.

His research is at the juncture of ethics, economics, and politics, with a focus on the virtues and the common good. In our interview, we discuss a virtue ethics perspective on the theory of the firm, corporate governance, the moral capital of leaders, Ethics and AI, and also his latest sole-authored book on “Happiness and Virtue Ethics in Business: The Ultimate Value Proposition” (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

What is good?

On the good life

There are many ways of understanding it. One, it’s not so much the destination, but the journey. But of course, I mean, the journey only makes sense if there’s a destination, right? So, you can’t really separate one from the other. So, the good life is the inquiry about the good life. And in philosophical terms, it’s what you call an axiom, an indemonstrable first principle, without which everything else falls apart. In any given science worth its soul, you have a first principle, which, unfortunately, is indemonstrable, at least in that system alone. For us human beings the first principle of our existence is our inclination towards happiness as eudaimonia and everything else draws from there.

On the meaning of relationships for the good life

We are social and political beings. Now, how do I get that idea across? I say, okay, who of you doesn’t have a navel? I see no hands going up. So, if you have a navel, what is that telling you? That’s telling you, that you’re here, thanks to someone else, thanks to other people. And that’s just going to be the way it is. I mean: live with that. We are social beings, we always need other people. And then I also tell them that, look, what we’re looking for, is not something you could achieve isolated from the rest individually. Rather, all the other people have to be able to achieve it at the same time as you do. That is how I bring on the idea of the common good. […] The good has to fulfill both conditions, you have to like it, it has to benefit you. And the utmost good that we desire, flourishing or happiness is a common good. It’s something you could achieve only together with everyone else in the political community.

Good is not an idea, it lies in the constant action

The good life is not an idea. Rather, it’s an activity. Something that we do, that we engage in. Why is it so important? Because of Plato, who was Aristotle’s teacher, who thought that the good was an idea. Hence, in that frame, it would be enough that some really brilliant fellow saw the idea and told everyone else about. So, he had the master plan. And people just had to fall in line, do as they were told, and it was all worked out. Obviously, this is a recipe for disaster. Right? So, what Aristotle says, is that the good is not an idea, at least when we’re talking about flourishing, it’s not an idea, rather it’s an activity. It’s an activity that we all share, hence, the need for joint deliberation.

What is “good” needs to be deliberated

The starting point is morality. Yes, everyone thinks they have what they consider to be the best version of a good life. So, what do we do with this when there are disagreements? Let’s talk about it. Yeah. So speech, language is the “killer app”.

Contemporary critques on virtue ethics

One of the main critiques against virtue ethics is that it’s tautological. It presupposes the very thing that it’s supposed to prove, right? Why this so? So, because it says: virtue is what the virtuous person does. If I am not virtuous, or cannot claim to be virtuous, I will never know what virtue is, what a virtuous action is. So that’s one difficulty. The other difficulty is that it clashes with modern scientific knowledge. […] Objective data, which is what anyone could verify and hence is seen as universal in terms of time and place. So, I mean, it wipes out everything else that’s based on subjective experience, on knowledge that has accrued through time to a person, through narratives. […] This, of course, the death note for virtue ethics, because what virtue ethics says that only people of a certain kind are qualified to be judges of virtue. So, it’s not something that a neutral third party observer could distinguish.

The logic of virtue ethics lies in the “becoming” virtuous

[not tautological nor unscientifical] And what is the explanation? We have referred to developmental moral psychology a lot. Becoming virtuous is a transition. First, we have what we call vicious people, vicious people like doing evil, and they will do it, they enjoy doing evil things. Thankfully, I think they’re outliers. The majority of people would fall between one of the following two categories, first of the acratic person, meaning the person who knows what they should be doing, but nonetheless, experiences a weakness of will, that they’re not able to do what intellectually rationally they know they should be doing. So that’s the second stage. The third stage is the incratic, or continent person who knows what they shouldn’t be doing and does it, but doesn’t really feel good inside. In other words, they’d rather be doing something else. So, because it’s painful for them, it requires a bit of effort to do the good thing. Yeah. And then the last stage is, is the decision of the virtuous person, who does the right thing and wouldn’t do it any other way and actually enjoys doing the right thing.
We are living subjects. In other words, we’re changing. And what virtue does, is that it transforms us. Meaning I’ve ever played the violin. Yeah. So I mean, the street musicians, I think they’re doing great. But a professional violinist, they could tell just how is the rendition of this musical piece? I think I’m fairly good at hearing. But certainly, we’re not referring to like biological or medical acoustics here. We’re talking about something else, perception integrated with judgment, etc. So, a concert violinists have changed, have transformed themselves, so much so that they’re aware of the standards of excellence in a way that I am not. I think something similar occurs regarding the moral good. Some people are further ahead in the stages of moral development, they have an appreciation for the finer things.

Learning to become virtuous

Well, there are many ways — one is practice. And the other is instruction. Yeah, I was just going through a few notes yesterday, I’m doing a revision for a journal article, and how do we learn writing articles? So one is through instruction, someone tells us, which I call learning discipline. And another way would be through what Latins call inventio, finding out by ourselves. I think they do complement each other. We learn things by finding out by ourselves. After all, we have this innate curiosity for things and that innate curiosity, whether we like it or not, is oriented toward what is good or what is true, and sometimes we have to take on what other people say. Thats learning discipline.

On “virtue lists”

I share with you that disappointment, and in no small degree, and frustration regarding the plethora of virtue lists. You go through them and sometimes, it all boils down to wordplay. With the best of intentions, but in the end, I think it’s wordplay. Why so? Remember that the virtues aren’t values. Virtues aren’t values. Virtue ethics isn’t a supermarket of values. A supermarket shelves stocked with values. So, whatever is valuable to you may not be valuable to me, but let’s put them side by side on the supermarket shelf. And we’re fine. Yeah, you just pick and choose. Virtues need an anchoring. We’ve mentioned one of the anchors: telos, eudaimonia, which is the good life. But it also has another anchor. And I wouldn’t be called essentialist for saying so. But there’s such a thing called human nature.

Internal, external and the common good in practices

MacIntyre would come in, he has some sort of a triple level notion of virtue. The very first level refers to what he calls practices. These are socially complex activities, which have internal goods, meaning goods that cannot be achieved or obtained through any other way. And that the standards of excellence, virtue means excellence, could only be known to those who are engaged in such an activity. And, most importantly, the goods of these activities aren’t zero sum they could be shared. These are common goods.[…] But this is just the first level of virtue, because MacIntyre says that we’re not violinists 24/7. No one is. So, virtuous actions have to be embedded in virtuous lives, in virtuous biographies. That means in our lives, I mean no one is just a violinist, they happen to be a son, or daughter, or spouse, girlfriend, the neighbor, etc. And amongst these different roles, we experienced conflicts, should I continue playing the violin when my child has a 39 degree fever? Probably not. […] Then there’s a third level, which for MacIntyre means participating in community traditions. So, as I said, virtuous acts enrich not only the individual, but the whole community. That is something that can be shared somewhere, can be participated in. So, the whole community has a say, because it affects them on the standards of excellence.

Good Organisations

Why do firms exist?

First, we create organizations, because there’s certain activities that you cannot do by ourselves. We need a collaboration of other people, because those objectives are necessary, and they benefit not just us, but everyone else in a given way. […] Firms exist because there are certain objectives which cannot be reached except through collaboration, cooperation and joint deliberation. […] The common good of the firm is work. By work, we understand any productive activity, in so far as it processes this double dimension again, on the one hand the objective dimension, which would be the products, the services, and if you’re efficient at what you’re doing and the use of resources, you’ll be rewarded by the market with profits, that’s part of it as well. […] But more importantly, part of work is the subjective dimension, or the subjective meaning, which refers to the knowledge that we gain by engaging in our work, the skills that we develop, the information that we’re able to acquire, the skills and the virtues that we develop by performing our work. The only caveat proviso is that we have to prioritize the subjective dimension over the objective dimension. Why so? Because the subjective dimension in here is immediately in human beings, you cannot separate a person’s ideas from the person themselves, nor the habits nor the virtues from the person themselves. So, in a nutshell, I think that’s a common good theory of the firm. It simply means that the first objective cannot be reached individually. It’s a collaborative effort. And in that collaborative effort, aka work, we have to prioritize the subjective over the objective dimension.

Embarking humans on the journey towards virtue ethics

What can we do instead of offering a list? It is more about understanding a story. It’s understanding a story. You referred earlier, to the Catholic tradition, and the Gospels. These are stories. So, it requires some getting into the story. And then you realize now I understand. And this is very powerful. I do not think the way to influence other people’s behavior certainly is through PowerPoint presentations and graphs, and pie charts and numbers and financial statements. No, they get bored with that. People change their behavior and their conduct through stories. Yeah, you tell them the story with which they can identify. And they realize the pros and cons of the alternatives, of the dilemmas and how there is growth in the characters. That’s how you change their behavior.

For our full Leaders for Humanity interview with Alejo Sison see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8mHjq-gEK0&list=PLAPiHnsKsNHvIX9ScwluwGVsMH8DI5z-1&index=8

Transcript, Materials and Notes: https://goodorganisations.com/LeadersForHumanity_S1/#ALEJOSISON

More information about the Good Organisations inquiry: https://goodorganisations.com

Good Organisations LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/good-organisations/

Good Organisations Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LeadersForHumanity/

Good Organisations YouTube channel: https://lnkd.in/ea3nhQqD

Leaders for Humanity Podcast on all major stations:

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3B5NN89pIDPgGDEPqNv0W7

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/leaders-for-humanity/id1605487911

Anchor: https://anchor.fm/good-organisations

Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/LeadersForHumanity

Deezer: https://www.deezer.com/en/show/3318142