The Virtuous Life of Pleasure: Aristotle, Contemplation, and Corporate Sustainability

This article sketches an answer to the call for a normative foundation for the paradox perspective on corporate sustainability and also enriches an understanding of firm objectives that ought to be otherwise than profit by offering a rendering of Aristotelian virtue ethics—what I call the virtuous life of pleasure—that highlights how contemplative activity or theorein cultivates, and is essential to, virtue and eudaimonia. My claim is that the virtuous life of pleasure not only characterizes how to live the most meaningful and pleasant life, rendering it good and thus worth pursuing, but it is also, as a flourishing life, the normative foundation for safeguarding the intrinsic value of nonfinancial corporate aims, as the paradox perspective prescribes. It does so by establishing a principle of enough, which seeks to preserve integral, interdependent parts as ends in themselves and as constitutive of a larger ecosystem.