10 Leading Ethically: What Helps and What Hinders Kurt April, Kai Peters, Kirsten Locke, and Caroline Mlambo 165 Introduction Ethics is concerned with moral obligation, responsibility, social justice, and the common good. It is about defining the practices and rules – writ- ten and unwritten – which inform responsible conduct and behaviour between individuals and groups in order to maintain, or enhance, the common good. Everything we do has a consequence, such that ethics is fundamental to the very essence of who we are, and what we value, both as individuals and as people. This chapter presents the findings of a study that aimed to identify those enablers that seem to help individ- uals to live and act ethically, and those stumbling blocks that prevent them from translating a theoretical knowledge of ethics and morals into action. The sample involved 646 middle managers enrolled on the MBA programmes of the University of Cape Town (South Africa) and Erasmus University (Netherlands). The chapter explains the approach taken and presents the findings, as a contribution to the debate on the practical steps that might increase ethical behaviour in individuals. Enablers Our theoretical starting point for the enablers of ethical behaviour uti- lises a virtue ethics approach. Virtue ethics, or character ethics, directs our attention not just to questions about what is the ethical thing to do, or how we are to act ethically, but to questions about what it means to be an ethical sort of person (Mahoney, 1998). The four cardinal (cardes, ‘hinges’) virtues of Aristotle and Greek philosophy – justice, wisdom (prudence), courage (fortitude), and moderation (self-control, temperance) form the basis of Western ethics. The intellectual virtue 9780230_275461_11_cha10.indd 165 9780230_275461_11_cha10.indd 165 9/30/2010 11:09:48 AM 9/30/2010 11:09:48 AM