Metaphor as a figure of speech began in Aristotle more than 2,000 years ago, and was studied by Black and Richards as a representation in the 60s of the 20th century. In the 80s of the 20th century, George Rakoff and Mark Johnson studied metaphor as cognition, that is, they believed that concepts created people's perception of things and the way they got along with the world formed a system, and even people's thinking, experience and behavior were conceptual systems created by metaphors.
Metaphor serves as a tool in the cognitive field, allowing people to form concepts about the world or transfer concepts already known to new things, while metaphors can also recognize the unknown through rhetorical metaphor. Cognition produces culture and forms social values, and different cognitions will produce different social cultures and social values.
Metaphors permeate all aspects of human life, timeless and fresh. In the field of economics, people have created many metaphors for summarizing economic behavior and cognition of economic behavior, and these metaphors have always accompanied economic life and influenced people's economic behavior. In the United States in the 80s of the 20th century, on the one hand, a large number of scandals in economic life were exposed, and on the other hand, economic metaphors also affected people's economic behavior. Therefore, Solomon started with economic metaphors, showing and subverting the economic metaphors that people were accustomed to at that time, the purpose of which was to restore people's correct understanding of the economy behind the metaphors, so as to pave the way for the exposition of economic virtues.
A metaphor about immoral economic activity
In the 80s of the 20th century, the powerful capitalist country of the United States was experiencing a financial crisis, through which even if these Wall Street business elites believed that the drive of self-interest would eventually bring about general prosperity in society, in Solomon's view, in fact, these elites from the top business schools would create "greedy and speculative bubble making."
Solomon used the New York trading floor as a cornerstone to discuss the ethical issues facing people in contemporary economy and society, emphasizing that it was not these financial mistakes that went wrong, but the rise of the Wall Street trading floor and the fact that other financiers around the world had become business models in their increasingly extravagant workplaces.
In Solomon's view, this is a deviation from the concept of business. Some stakeholders regard the economy as a game concept, which deviates from its original intention and becomes a gambling game with coldness, courage, and gambling as its basic characteristics, making money has become one of the important functions, and the subjects involved in economic action are assumed to be "rational economic people".
Even worse than seeing business as a life-and-death battle, Solomon overturned other esoteric and popular metaphors of the time, such as social choice, game theory, and so on, the assumption that individualism "man desires," and the concept of a "social contract" that temporarily binds all individuals together.
People liken economics to the jungle, and Solomon argues that even so, cooperation in the jungle is a fundamental principle of biological evolution. There is also a comparison of business to a very cruel war, in the war is bound to fight to the death, and even may lose both, but in his view, people seem to overly misinterpret business competition, competition needs to bring huge benefits to consumers and society, only the final benefit can be regarded as the success of business, not by a bloody war as a criterion for evaluating the success of business.
In the ancient West, war was a matter of the law of knights, and compromises, disagreements, or differences of interests in business could not simply be defined as war. In Solomon's view, business is a higher degree of order recognized by social communities such as mutual trust and cooperation based on mutual trust and cooperation, as well as compliance with contracts, laws, and equal competition.
Adam Smith compared economic activity to "a huge capital machine," but Solomon argued that the mechanistic metaphor lacks humanity and leads to the rigidity of business organizations and employee relations, and that the corporation may be seen as society, because we are first and foremost agents and the economy should be a series of activities led and executed by people.
Solomon also made a new interpretation and analysis of Adam Smith's concept of "self-interest" to emphasize the importance of social groups, he proposed that greed is not beneficial, in fact, Adam Smith did not propose that greed is beneficial at all, but the interpretation of later generations is too focused on the metaphor of the "invisible hand", that Adam Smith emphasized the importance of institutions, society and human relationships, and believed that Adam Smith's concept of competition was based on social groups and cooperation, rather than self-centeredness, so society took precedence over self-interest.
The most common metaphor for economics at the time was to compare economic activity to game activity, and it is clear that Solomon was against it, arguing that the game only affects those who participate in the game, while economic activity does not, it affects people outside the economic activity itself (all stakeholders), and this influence is not scattered, economic activity connects stakeholders.
In addition, Solomon criticized Edward Friedman's denim capitalism, which is fearless like cowboys in the American West and builds monopolistic markets through vicious competition. In his view, competition is about encouraging and rewarding innovative efforts, not about building monopolies.
In summary, Solomon's critique of the metaphor of immoral economic activity touches on all aspects of the commercial economy: the environment of economic activity (cowboy capitalism, jungle, war), the economic activity itself (war, huge capitalist machines, games, games), the motives of economic activity (abstract greed, the myth of the profit motive, selfishness and utilitarianism, etc.), and the agents of economic activity (atomic individualism, "entrepreneurs").
Solomon believed that thousands of years of people's definitions of business, that is, the perceptions formed through these metaphors, had deprived the economy of its most economical purpose and meaning, and Solomon believed that a new interpretation of the economy was necessary.
The essential meaning of restoring economic activity
Through his analysis and critique of economic metaphors, Solomon constructed an Aristotelian framework of economic ethics. The more popular term for the motivation of economic behavior is the profit motive. Regarding the description of the profit motive, Solomon criticized "abstract greed", arguing that the "profit motive" since the 19th century is an abstract greed, which comes from people's distortion and abstraction of real motives, desires that have no real personal needs, and only the forced concept that one should need.
"Abstract greed" does not give man a precise goal and meaning, but rather abstract desires.
So, what is the real profit motive? In the economic field, trade or investment will bring gross profits, and net profits will be obtained by removing costs. In Solomon's view, "earning profit purely in the form of monetary rewards" was the sole goal of the profit motive, and he believed that obtaining profit required risk-taking, so that obtaining profit was legitimate.
In modern enterprises, profit is not only about money as the ultimate goal, the redistribution of profits can be seen as one of the means of rewarding the entire economy and the company's employees. However, if we ignore productivity and public services, and simply believe that profit motive is the greatest motivation of economic activity, and profit is the ultimate goal of economic activity, it is a complete distortion. Our understanding of the economy is very narrow, and the economic behavior motivation is only defined as the pursuit of profit motive, but it paves the way for immoral economic behavior.
In order to show and analyze economic activities more clearly, many economists have created many theoretical models and theoretical ideas, such as game theory models, prisoner's dilemmas, and zero-sum game theory models, etc., these economic theoretical models seem to have the sophisticated nature of engineering, but Solomon still sharply criticizes these models, the richness and complexity of economic activities can not be fully reflected by some models alone.
Game theory also often equates "rationality" with safeguarding one's own interests, and this "rationality" tends to make people utilitarians and maximize their own interests. These models further distorted people's understanding of the economy, and the definition of economy that Solomon wanted to restore was that it could cooperate with each other in economic activity. He also argues that game theory about each participant trying to satisfy his own interests seems more like an abstraction of people's profit motives, i.e., "abstract greed."
Solomon believed that the economy is a practice or a series of practical activities, and economic activity is based on social organization, otherwise trade between people and groups cannot be carried out at all. Therefore, we should not understand economic behavior only in terms of human nature, but should see how we establish our desires in specific social groups and social distributions.
The construction of self-identity requires a social dimension and an individual self-dimension, so entrepreneurs are not only entrepreneurs defined by the personal dimension, but also a role under the definition of the social dimension.
Business is not a metaphor that implies the same, but rather a specialized profession. Solomon believed that when we talk about a profession, such as teachers and doctors, we always think of the profession of that profession first, and that business people should be regarded as professionals specializing in economic activities. The ultimate goal of economic activity is to benefit more people, and people who specialize in economic activities (including entrepreneurs and some modern professional managers) should understand the nature of the economy, rather than distorting the metaphor of economic activity.
Our discussion of corporate culture must not be regarded as a separate cultural phenomenon. The company's culture is a unique and indispensable part of the social culture, and the corporate culture also has metaphorical limitations, and the preference of a group is often understood as the best corporate culture.
However, in the context of economic globalization, should we take into account the collision of multiple cultures, and recognize the significance of unity and sharing culture through a cultural "overlapping consensus" Since the production of modern capitalist large machines, the division of labor has become more and more refined, to some extent, bringing about division and alienation within the company, and a closely united and organic corporate culture is expected to break this alienation and barrier. Culture has its own historical and unique structure, forming and influencing people's values, and it is necessary to build the concept of the enterprise and the corporate culture on which it is based.
Bibliography:
- GONG Tianping. Journal of Wuhan University (Humanities Edition), 2009;
- Dou Youju. Solomon's Virtue Theory and Review of Economic Ethics[J].Journal of Xiangfan University,2007;
- GONG Tianping,DOU Youju. The Virtuous Approach of Corporate Ethics and Its Conditions: A Case Study of Solomon's Aristotelian Method[J] Studies in Ethics, 2007;