Aristotle's Ethics Applied to Modern Workplace Relationships

Introduction: Aristotle's Ethics and the Modern Office

Aristotle's ideas and thoughts on happiness, friendship, and justice are central to his Nicomachean Ethics, one of the key texts in the history of philosophy. In many ways, the principles that Aristotle laid down in this work remain remarkably relevant across time, despite the new dynamism and challenges of twenty-first-century society.

This paper aims to present some of the key elements of Aristotelian philosophy and connect these to the relationships formed in a modern working environment. At the same time, it will also examine aspects of workplace relationships that Aristotelian ethics cannot fully explain.

Aristotle on Happiness, Friendship, and Justice

For Aristotle, happiness in all beings takes a functional form: a being is happy as long as it accomplishes its most important function. In the case of a human being, this function is rationality — the only characteristic present exclusively in humans, and the one that makes human beings so different from all other creatures. In order for the individual to be happy, he must function in accordance with his rationality. As long as his decision-making process follows rational approaches, he should, in theory, be happy.

At a later point in his works, Aristotle also enumerates elements that, according to his philosophical approach, can make an individual happy. These include wealth, good health, friends, and good luck, as well as the capacity to engage in intellectual and moral activity — again, in accordance with one's proper function.

Friendship, as Aristotle conceives it, belongs to one of three categories: friendship of pleasure, friendship of utility, and friendship of the good, or of character. The friendship of pleasure is the type encountered between individuals who simply enjoy each other's company. This type of friendship may have no deeper implications and may go no further than getting together and feeling at ease with one another.

The friendship of utility is the friendship in which at least one of the parties has an interest in some gain. This type of friendship need not carry the negative connotations that might be attributed to it today. Aristotle includes in this category something that today might amount to no more than a business relationship or a simple acquaintance. The utility element can thus be understood as two parties working together to make their relationship as efficient and productive as possible.

The third type of friendship is also the most complex. It is long-term and based on mutual affinities — on characters that complement one another. As such, it is the most profound of the three types and the one most likely to endure over time.

Friendship in the Workplace: Utility, Pleasure, and Character

Justice, in Aristotle's view, is also related to the idea of gain. An action is unjust if it produces an unjust gain. It is often difficult — though Aristotle offers an extensive treatment of the subject — to distinguish between vice and injustice, since the former operates at a different scale and does not necessarily produce material advantage for the wrongdoer.

The working environment today has become increasingly complex, as have the relationships between individuals within organizations. The issues discussed above, viewed through the lens of Aristotle's ideas, often arise in ethical contexts at work. However, because of the complexities of contemporary relationships, it is sometimes difficult to map them directly onto Aristotle's categories, or even to determine whether his ideas apply at all.

Consider the idea of friendship, with its three different dimensions. It is difficult to believe that the individual today can readily attain the third and highest level — friendship of character — within the office. There are several reasons for this.

First, many corporate cultures do not encourage the development of deep, character-based friendships at work. Team-building activities, for instance, tend to foster the first two categories — utility and pleasure — rather than the third. The interest of management is generally to stimulate relationships between individuals in the organization to the degree that they better understand one another and become more productive.

Happiness at Work: Aristotle and Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

There is often more to consider. Contemporary technology also facilitates the development of friendships over the Internet — a phenomenon particularly common among individuals who spend long hours at work but do not find the office a suitable environment for building close relationships. The growth of online social networks is a defining characteristic of today's society, but it is also a response to the dominance of work in an individual's daily life, which leaves limited time and space for friendships to form elsewhere. Like all social products, it emerges as a response to the human need to socialize — a need that often transforms into the desire to build friendships, sometimes of a deeper kind than the pleasure or utility categories alone would suggest.

Translating Aristotle's idea of happiness into the workplace, one finds it approximated most closely by Maslow's hierarchy of needs, with one or two important adjustments. First, happiness as brought about by good health corresponds to the first two levels of Maslow's pyramid: physiological needs (food, water, and other basics applicable to the workplace) and safety needs (such as physical security in the working environment).

Both of these translate directly into Aristotle's health component in his enumeration of what can make a person happy. One's health is affected if workplace conditions are unsanitary or physically unsafe. This means that when evaluating a job, an individual will look first at these foundational elements before considering whether the position also offers the other components Aristotle identifies as conducive to happiness.

Many of Aristotle's other components of happiness correspond to the fourth and fifth levels of Maslow's pyramid — specifically, the capacity of the workplace to allow the individual to exercise intellectual and moral skills and to be recognized by colleagues and management. These correspond to Maslow's categories of esteem and self-actualization. Self-actualization, in particular, goes slightly beyond Aristotle's framework, adding not only the exercise of moral and intellectual skills but the ongoing need to develop and improve them. Other elements from Aristotle's account — most notably good friends — are largely absent from the workplace context, for the reasons already discussed.

The justice element as Aristotle conceives it also deserves brief consideration from the standpoint of how a company's actions toward outside parties — and the degree to which employees are implicated in those actions — can be evaluated in Aristotelian terms. To illustrate: a company may decide to launch an insufficiently tested product in order to boost revenues during a particular period.

Conclusion: Aristotle's Enduring Relevance and Its Limits

However, the complexity of contemporary society and the vast volatility of interactions between individuals often mean that additional elements must be brought into the discussion in order to obtain a complete picture. The fact that some companies prohibit romantic relationships in the office is not necessarily, by Aristotelian standards, an act of injustice by management. It could, however, mean that the company's interests might be undermined by such a relationship — and through that reasoning, the policy itself could be seen as a just one.

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by W. D. Ross. Available at Last retrieved October 5, 2009.