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Chris Provis (2017) has discussed Aristotle’s Doctrine of the Mean and its counterpart in Confucianism. The Doctrine of the Mean informs an agent that ‘acting as a virtuous person will often be constituted by avoidance of choosing excess or deficiency’ (Provis, 2017, p. 118). Indeed, Provis (2017) argues against any act ‘oriented towards maximisation’ (p. 127). Provis’s (2017) focus is the encounter ‘between European and East Asian ethical traditions’ (p. 116). Our chapter is a response to Provis (2017). We respond to Provis (2017) by exploring a debate amongst Jewish scholars which originated in North Africa. Some of these scholars advocated Aristotle’s Mean. But others advocated forsaking that Mean and pursuing the extreme.

Within both Western and Eastern traditions of virtue ethics, there is a Doctrine of the Mean, suggesting that errors may lie either in excess or in deficiency. The need to avoid both excess and deficiency in the allocation of finite resources is a concern in many sorts of business decisions, some with ethical implications. One finite resource is the resource of attention, and ethical problems can arise from failures to attend to important things. Both Aristotle and classical Confucianism accept the importance of paying attention to circumstances rather than following fixed rules or blindly maximising value. For organisations to give appropriate attention to different things requires suitable intra-organisational reporting and communication. Then there is still need for awareness that resources are finite, and for activity that is sustainable, highlighting the related idea of harmony, especially salient in the Confucian tradition.

There are some notable ethical problems about role obligations, including the three prominent issues of role relativism, role definition, and role identification. The first is the problem to what extent roles may create duties or rights at odds with other moral requirements, the second is where roles are unclear or conflicting in what they prescribe, and the third is about the extent to which people commit themselves to their roles, or dissociate themselves from those roles. The three problems are significant in business ethics. A Confucian approach to roles can assist in dealing with them. Classical texts suggest a nuanced approach to roles, which allows greater flexibility, paying attention to context and detailed circumstances, always relating role prescriptions to respect and concern for other people, and emphasizing the importance of sincerity and authenticity in role performance. Such an account is consistent with virtue ethics approaches to business ethics.

The idea of ‘identity politics’ has become quite prominent in news commentary. It has been referred to in explaining the 2016 US Presidential election result, the 2016 Brexit vote and a variety of other events in contemporary social life. The idea emerged under that title in the late twentieth century, and refers to political conflicts where groups unite and act on the basis of some shared identity. While the term initially referred to action by groups seeking to remedy past oppression, ‘identity politics’ may now refer to a wider range of cases where there is contestation based on recognition of some shared identity. Individuals’ identity is central to resurgent modern virtue ethics, but it has been suggested that virtue ethics is less relevant to political conflict than utilitarian views or theories of justice. However, an important distinction can be made between narrative identity, on the one hand, and social identity that emerges from individuals’ self-perceived group membership, on the other hand. It is narrative identity that figures in major accounts of virtue ethics. In many situations, narrative identity is importantly affected by group identity, but it is still only narrative identity that has intrinsic ethical weight. This suggests that virtue ethics has relevance to identity politics just because it urges attention to individuals’ narrative identity rather than to group identity.