ETHICAL BASIS FOR HRM PROFESSIONALISM 153the correlative need-satisfiers) is enhanced or perfected via what are called
its virtues. The moral virtues are understood to enhance those capacities that
will help us attain eudaimonia and more particularly are taken to govern our
feelings and actions. Courage, for example, is a moral virtue that moderates
how much and when to feel fear as well as how much and when to act on this
fear. As such it is a virtue that helps us to pursue eudaimonia in the right way
given the particular fearful circumstances we are facing. The capacity that we
call ‘intellect’ has truth and knowledge as its end or goal, and the intellectual
virtue that helps us to perfect or enhance the intellect we call wisdom.
Eudaimonia: a more determinate conception
Adding specificity and depth to the notion of eudaimonia, for Neo-
Aristotelians there are more specific ingredient ends or goods that make up
or concretize the notion of well-being. Any end can be identified as needed
for well-being by meeting certain criteria or marks identified by wise people.
For Aquinas in hisSumma Theologiae(I–IIae, q. 2–8, 182), for example, the
objects or ends which display the marks are:
(a)The highest objects of the highest human powers:They are the highest
objects that can be assimilated by our ‘highest’ human powers, intellect,
and will. Aquinas thought this included God, but we might say conscious-
ness, or other humans and their works, as apprehended and enjoyed by
means of these capacities.(b)Perfecting:Ingredient goods help to exercise, perfect, and enhance the
capacities of the human agent, especially the higher most distinctive
capacities of thought and will.
(c)Ultimate ends, not instrumental only:Ingredient goods are capable of
being desired for their own sake even if they also serve as means to other
ends.
(d)Relatively permanent:The ingredient goods have a cumulative, relatively
permanent, and continuous nature that can be left and returned to with-
out difficulty.
(e)Autonomy/self-sufficiency:Ingredient goods express or enhance a person
or group’s human self-sufficiency and autonomy, and decrease unwanted
dependency on luck or scarce external material resources.
(f)Delight:The ingredient goods meeting (a)–(e) are also enjoyable and
result in deep satisfaction.
For a person to achieve eudaimonia, the attainment of goods of capacity which
accord with these marks is needed. Where a person is not able to attain these
ingredient goods of well-being, they can be said to have a need. This inability