7 ACTIVIST BUSINESS ETHICS IN PHILOSOPHY "Dr. Stockman: Well, but is it not the duty of a citizen to let the public share in any new ideas he may have? Peter Stockman: Oh, the public doesn't require any new ideas. The public is best served by the good, old-established ideas it already has." (Ibsen, An Enemy of the People, Act II) After the Bible, Aristotle is the founder of the philosophy of ethics in his book 'Ethics' or 'The Nicomachean Ethics'. According to Aristotle man aspires to be happy, in the sense of eudaimonia, happiness, as the summum bonum of his existence. Happiness is not identical to pleasure, and the ethical man will aspire to live a happy life but not necessarily a pleasurable life. Happiness is not the end of each action, but it is nevertheless the supreme goal of life. "For even if the good of the community coincides with that of the individual, it is clearly a greater and more perfect thing to achieve and preserve that of a community; for while it is desirable to secure what is good in the case of an individual, to do so in the case of a people or a state is something finer and more sublime." (Aristotle, Ethics, p.64) Aristotle maintains that wealth is certainly not the happiness that we are looking for, as it is only a means to obtain other goods. Money does not bring happiness, but it helps to obtain it. Man is by nature a social creature and his good should include his parents, his wife, his children, his friends, and his compatriots. "The conclusion is that the good for man is an activity of soul in accordance with virtue, or if there are more kinds of virtue than one, in accordance with the best and most perfect kind." (Aristotle, Ethics, p.76) "And if, as we said, the quality of a life is determined by its activities, no man who is truly happy can become miserable; because he will never do things that are hateful and mean. For we believe that the truly good and wise man bears all his fortunes with dignity, and always takes the most honourable course that circumstances permit." (Aristotle, Ethics, p.84) Virtue has two faces - intellectual and moral. The intellectual virtue is acquired by education and experience. But the moral virtue is acquired by habit and ethos. "The moral virtues, then, are engendered in us either by nor contrary to nature; we are constituted by nature to receive them, but their full development in us is due to habit. Again, of all those faculties with which nature endows us we first acquire the potentialities, and only later effect their actualization." (Aristotle, Ethics, p.91) A man is not ethical or unethical by J. Cory (ed.), Activist Business Ethics © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2002