Aristotle’s ethics are based on the idea that the goal of life is eudaimonia, or happiness. He believed that happiness could be achieved through a life of virtue, and that virtue was defined as the mean between two extremes. This theory is known as the Golden Mean.
The Golden Mean is a philosophical concept that states that the best way to act is to avoid extremes and find the middle ground. This concept can be applied to business ethics, as it can help businesses to make decisions that are both ethical and profitable. This research will demonstrate the relevance of Golden Mean of Aristotle in Business Ethics.
In the contemporary society, businesses are increasingly facing ethical challenges. For example, businesses may be tempted to cut corners or engage in unethical practices in order to save money or increase profits.
However, the Golden Mean can help businesses to resist these temptations and make ethical decisions that are in the best interests of all stakeholders.
The Golden Mean can be applied to many different areas of business ethics, such as:
- Decision-making: The Golden Mean can help businesses to make decisions that are both ethical and profitable. For example, a business may be considering whether to outsource its production to a country with lower labor costs.
The Golden Mean would suggest that the business should consider the ethical implications of outsourcing, such as the impact on workers’ rights, before making a decision. - Marketing: The Golden Mean can help businesses to market their products and services in an ethical way. For example, a business may be considering using deceptive advertising practices.
The Golden Mean would suggest that the business should avoid using these practices, as they could harm consumers and damage the business’s reputation. - Employee relations: The Golden Mean can help businesses to create a workplace that is ethical and fair for all employees. For example, a business may be considering laying off employees.
The Golden Mean would suggest that the business should treat employees with compassion and respect during the layoff process.
In today’s society, the quest for a happy ending poses ethical challenges when going about our daily activities as individuals or groups. Considering the underlying principles of the Golden Mean and that Virtue Ethics apply to individual and their character, it relates to all aspects of life when it comes to making the right ethical decisions by striking a balance between excess and defect.
This part of the essay discusses the significance and relevance of the Golden Mean in business, media, and leadership ethics and gives contemporary examples to elucidate the points.
» MORE: Getting IT Right: The Golden Mean in Contemporary Society
Golden Mean in Business Ethics
Commerce has to do with markets, and markets are related to people and their relationships. Therefore, the right ethical decisions matter in business since it involves treating stakeholders, employees, and customers.
Business ethics is normative because it evaluates the practices and actions and suggests what organizations and their managers ought to do to get things right. For example, businesses can encounter ethical challenges in deciding the best candidates to employ for different jobs.
This part of the essay shows how Golden Mean improves the ethical decision-making of stakeholders, businesspersons, and organizations in commerce.
The relevance of Golden Mean in contemporary society
In contemporary society, especially in some African and Asian countries, moderation in hiring workers is highly neglected. For example, it seems to me that young child labor in commerce is considered a vice of deficiency and could lead to abuse of human rights in most cases.
Analyzing the situation, one would see it as a consequence of greed, which is a vice of excess, according to the Golden Mean theory. And according to recent research in Nigeria, there is a strong likelihood that the companies involved are more interested in hiring the less privileged to make the most of their business while paying peanuts to the workers.
Therefore, it is critical to consider striking a balance between the people who are too young to work and the elderly who are too old to carry out some duties.
» MORE: What is the Golden Mean Theory of Aristotle?
Practical example of Golden Mean in Nigeria Election
Taking the Nigerian government to be an enterprise where the electorates hire a manager as the president, the official campaign for the 2023 general elections started on the 28th of September 2022. And the frontline candidates are Peter Obi, Bola Tinubu, and Atiku Abubakar from different parties.
While Tinubu is over 80 years old and retarded, Atiku is in his late 70s, and Peter Obi is 61. Also, a few other candidates are way below 50. However, about 85% of Nigerians support Peter Obi because he is more energetic than other frontline contestants and has excellent antecedents.
Therefore, most Nigerians maintain Aristotle‘s Golden Mean principle by striking a balance between candidates who are too old and too young for leadership, among other imperative factors.
Golden Mean and other Disciplines
In addition, the Golden Mean relates to many disciplines, including mathematics, art, and nature. While it means the middle ground between the vices of excess and deficiency, it could also entail the middle way and happy medium in some cases. However, all the different perspectives boil down to the factor of balance, harmony, symmetry, etc.
Furthermore, some businesses seem to abandon the purpose of customer satisfaction. Thus, they focus more on making sales or double-billing customers to reach their monthly budget. For example, working with a manager at an Ice cream company, Icygroove, I found that the one of the company’s major goal was to meet a high monthly budget.
As a result, the enterprise employed different strategies to achieve this to the detriment of its customers. For example, the ice cream toppings, such as cashew nuts, caramel, and sprinkles, were doubled-charged without the customer’s consent.
In the scenario above, the CEO pushes the managers to do everything possible. The manager, in turn, orders the crew members to upsell and threatens them with debits and sack letters, and the crew members have no other option than to succumb. This is an example of where there is no moderation in business.
The Golden Mean suggests that companies should strike a balance between making too many sales and too low sales, especially regarding the right people, at the right time, and in the right motive and manner.
The Bottom Line
The Golden Mean framework helps us to develop moral sensitivity to ethical issues in global commerce. It is interested in doing business the right way, dealing with the right type of people at the right time, and with the right motive to attain happiness and Virtue excellence.
Again, applying the Golden Mean theory in contemporary business helps us not only identify business ethical dilemmas but also look at our actions from our perspectives and other people’s point of view and interests.
