Introduction

Alasdair MacIntyre has had a greater impact within business ethics than any other living virtue ethicist (Ferrero & Sison, 2014). His work has been drawn on in a variety of contexts, such as accounting (West, 2018), business (Bernacchio & Couch, 2022; Moore, 2002), circus arts (Beadle, 2013; Beadle & Sinnicks, 2023), corporate governance (Bernacchio & Couch, 2015), finance (Rocchi et al., 2021; Sison et al., 2019), healthcare (Toon, 2014), journalism (Borden, 2013), leadership (Sinnicks, 2018), management (Beabout, 2012; Dawson & Bartholomew, 2003; Potts, 2020), organisational learning (Halliday & Johnsson, 2010), public relations (Leeper & Leeper, 2001), retail (Fernando & Moore, 2015), risk management (Asher & Wilcox, 2022), software development (Bolade-Ogunfodun et al., 2022; von Krogh et al., 2012), education (MacAllister, 2016; Sison & Redín, 2023), and many others.

MacIntyre’s concept of practices, to which we return below, is the foundation of his definition of virtues and has been particularly central to the scholarly conversation (Beadle, 2008; Brewer, 1997; Moore & Beadle, 2006; Sinnicks, 2014, 2019). MacIntyre’s work has also been drawn on within the business ethics literature that relates to a variety of religious contexts, including Catholicism (Moore et al., 2014), Confucianism (Chu & Moore, 2020), and Quakerism (Burton & Sinnicks, 2022; Burton & Vu, 2021).

In this paper, we draw on MacIntyre’s ethical thought to illuminate a hitherto underexplored religious context for business ethics, that of the Amish. The Amish context is both intriguing and puzzling. On the one hand, the Amish community seeks to “be not conformed to this world” (Romans 12:2) and maintains non-permeable boundaries from the non-Amish (Nolt, 2016) in order to resist the forces of modernity. Yet, at the same time, their financially successful business enterprises have entailed significant interaction with the principles of capitalism and markets (e.g. Dana, 2007, 2021). How the Amish have navigated tensions at this boundary is informative for business ethics scholarship in its own right, but it also reveals the Amish as embodying, in a variety of ways, Alasdair MacIntyre’s moral philosophy. Our contribution, therefore, is, firstly, to deepen our understanding of Amish business ethics by bringing it into contact with an ethical theory that has had a significant impact within business ethics, and secondly to extend MacIntyre’s work by showing how it can help to illuminate a novel and intriguing context in virtue of, not despite, its hostility to the status quo.

Drawing on an empirical study with Amish settlements in Holmes County, Ohio, we unpack the connections between Amish business ethics and MacIntyre’s ethical thought. We posed an explorative research question—‘In what ways does Amish faith connect to Amish enterprise?’. In the following section, we provide an overview of the Amish tradition, detailing key beliefs and religious practices in order to contextualise the exploration of Amish business ethics that follows. We then go on to outline the methodology of the paper, before exploring a variety of MacIntyrean themes as they relate to Amish business.

To signpost our contributions, we outline the affinity between Amish values and MacIntyre’s critique of modernity. This feature of MacIntyre’s thought has not only been largely ignored by previous applications of his work within business ethics, but is ostensibly incompatible with such applications, which tend to treat MacIntyre’s account of practices and virtues as entirely distinct from his diagnosis of the ethical problems facing contemporary society. As a result, focussing on this feature both allows us to appreciate the philosophical resources available to support this facet of Amish business ethics, and to enrich our understanding of how MacIntyre’s work can be brought to bear on the field of business ethics. Secondly, we examine the skilled crafts central to Amish life as they relate to MacIntyre’s conception of practices and communities. These features of Amish life can help to explain how the success of Amish businesses, understood in terms of external goods, can co-exist with a broader rejection of modernity. Thirdly, we outline the key virtues that are central to MacIntyre’s ethical thought and lie at the heart of the Amish tradition, which again help sustain Amish life in the face of the challenges presented by contemporary capitalism. In so doing, we aim to bring greater philosophical depth to the study of Amish values, as well as showing that a MacIntyrean conception of ethical flourishing is possible for traditions and communities that co-exist with the emotivist culture of mainstream society. We conclude by examining some challenges facing Amish business ethics and noting possible avenues for future research.

Macintyre and the Amish Tradition

MacIntyre was a central figure in the revival of virtue ethics over the course of the twentieth century (Stohr, 2006), and is the most widely cited virtue ethicist in the business ethics literature (Ferrero & Sison, 2014). However, while virtue ethics has, beginning with the work of Solomon (1992, 1993), had a significant impact within business ethics, MacIntyre’s influence within the field has been largely a result of his concept of practices. Practices, which we will look at in more depth below, are forms of activity which possess what MacIntyre calls “internal goods” (2007, p.187), i.e. goods which cannot be experienced in any way other than by engaging in the activity in question. Thus, the goods of chess can only be experienced by playing chess. These internal goods contribute to the morally educative nature of practices. Since we need patience, constancy, self-honesty, and so on to master any practice, the pursuit of internal goods means that practices serve as schools of the virtues. In addition to practices, MacIntyre’s account of the virtues also emphasises the narrative unity of a human life (2007, ch.15; 2016, pp.231–242), which enables us to navigate potentially conflicting demands of the roles we may occupy, and the concept of traditions (2007, ch.15; 1988; 1990), which are historically constituted sets of beliefs which contextualise the values and practices of some group.

MacIntyre’s widespread scholarly influence may be somewhat surprising as a result of his own apparent hostility to contemporary capitalism. MacIntyre argues that ours is an emotivist culture in which ethical discourse is largely an expression of untutored feeling (2007). Accordingly, MacIntyre has suggested that the problems of business ethics are insoluble (1982), that teaching business ethics is a waste of time (2015), and that the modern economic order “provides systematic incentives to develop a type of character that has a propensity to injustice” (1995, p. xiv). Such critical views about capitalist society mean that, from the perspective of mainstream business ethics, “MacIntyre is, in a sense, his own worst enemy” (Moore, 2002, p.19). However, it is precisely this critical bent that makes MacIntyre’s work an appropriate framework for study of the Amish, given their well-known and uncompromising desire to maintain a separateness from mainstream society. Indeed, the case of the Amish can help us to appreciate that MacIntyre’s critique of modernity can itself contribute meaningfully to the conversation on business ethics and virtue but can also show that the problems of business ethics are perhaps not quite as insoluble as MacIntyre has suggested. Indeed, the case of the Amish suggests that a MacIntyrean conception of ethical business is possible, even if it remains extremely difficult to achieve given the challenges posed by the emotivist culture of mainstream society. In what follows, we outline a number of key elements of Amish life and key facets of Amish beliefs, before going on to applying a number of central MacIntyrean themes—the critique of modernity, practices and communities, and the virtues—to our data in the findings and discussion section.

The Amish trace their history to the Anabaptist movement in Switzerland during the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. No longer present in Europe, the Amish arrived in the United States (U.S.) as immigrants between 1736 and 1860 (Nolt, 2016), attracted by religious freedom and the opportunity to own land and create rural enclaves. The Amish brought an agrarian tradition and a reputation for skilled farming (Smith, et al., 1997), and even today in contemporary Amish culture, it is still important for families to farm the land or to work alongside each other in family-owned businesses (Wesner, 2010).

The Amish are one of the fastest growing North American ethnoreligious groups (Anderson & Kenda, 2015) with a tenfold increase in the number of church districts since the 1950s. As of 2023, Amish communities in the US are located throughout thirty-two states, four Canadian provinces, and two countries in South America. The estimated Amish population is about 377,000 in the US (Young Center for Anabaptist & Pietist Studies, 2023). The Amish are organised according to church districts—the religious, social, and political unit of Amish life—and each individual family attends a church within their own district (congregation). A district is typically headed by a bishop, two or three ministers, and a deacon, each of whom has a distinct role in managing church affairs. Each district contains about thirty families and is the spiritual centre of Amish life. The district also provides a number of services to its members such as maintaining an alms fund for members in difficulty, provides care for sick and elderly members, and organises social events.

Central to the ‘Amish way’ is a strong commitment to God and community (Dana, 2007). The commitment to ‘Gelassenheit’ runs throughout the Amish tradition (Hostetler, 1993). Gelassenheit refers to submission both to the will of God and to the community. It implies the conquest of selfishness and undermines materialism (Redekop et al., 1995). The attitudes of gelassenheit are a means of following the example of Christ and everyday life activities are perceived as ways to glorify God. Gelassenheit is coupled with a strong sense of ‘Uffgeva’ where the child is taught to ‘give up’ their will and to cultivate an attitude of submission. The Amish way is based on the ‘priesthood of all’ (O’Neil, 1997) and Amish life is strongly influenced through discernment of the collective wisdom of the church known as ‘Ordnung’—“the accumulated wisdom, the corporate guidelines that specify expectations for members” (Kraybill et al., 2010a, p.53). Districts in a settlement may have Ordnungs that differ in minor to significant ways. While each district is responsible for deciding its own rules, in most cases groups of districts (an affiliation) choose similar rules. Different affiliations can, however, display differing degrees of conservatism, acceptance of technology, style of dress, appearance of homes, transportation (buggy colours, carriages without a top cover), the extent to which they ‘pound the pavement’, the width of hat brims, use of refrigerators, and dozens of other behaviours and practices. Such rules are locally and socially constructed, and unwritten. These rules of conduct promote the community’s values such as simplicity, frugality, and humility, instil responsibility, pass down traditions and practices, and foster a strong sense of bond and community (Kraybill, 2001). However, it is an evolving tradition, with the Ordnung being regularly reviewed.

The Amish lifestyle implores its adherents to “be not conformed to this world” (Romans 12:2), which separates them from the ‘English’, or non-Amish. The Amish ‘separateness’ is exemplified in plain dress, marrying within the community, speaking a German dialect, and avoiding worldly encumbrances (Nolt, 2016). The Amish way is thus both non-conformist and counter-cultural, and the Amish resist trying to influence others to their way of life and do not proselytise, and this sharply sets them apart from their non-Amish neighbours and other religions. The Ordnung prescribes which aspects of modernity are and are not permitted (Hurst & McConnell, 2010). The more traditional conservative groups will not reach the same discernment as New Order groups. In terms of technological adoption, for instance, the choice is based on a measured consideration of what technological adoption might mean for their way of life (Donnermeyer et al., 1999). As the Amish perceive technological change as entwined with social change (Wetmore, 2007), underlying all decisions concerning the selective use of technology is the principle that any new technology must allow them to retain their simple and separated lifestyle (DeWitt, et al., 2006).

In contemporary Amish life, the number and type of enterprises is influenced by its social and economic context. Overall, approximately, 10,000 Amish-owned enterprises operate in North America (Kraybill, et al., 2011). Agriculture continues to dominate in many locations, and farming is held up as an occupation that integrates family and community with religious bonds (Anderson & Kenda, 2015; Dana, 2021). For the Amish, farming is a religious calling, something noted by Hostetler, who says, “[f]arming is a means whereby the Amishman has maintained himself and members of his family on the land while supporting the religious community of which he is a part” (1993, p.119). In some areas, a mix of enterprises and farms predominates Amish business practice, and yet in others, such as more urban geographies, many Amish people work in factories owned by non-Amish. Whereas prior to the 1970s, agriculture and small-scale craft enterprise dominated Amish enterprise, in the decades that have followed fewer than half of Amish households farm due to intensified mechanised competition, the need for significant capital due to land prices, and a cost-price squeeze (Kraybill et al., 2010a, 2010b; Mariola & McConnell, 2013). Where the Amish own businesses, a large proportion now work in Amish enterprises that are in sectors that are craft-based or require lower levels of capital such as retail, tourism, construction, and other forms of manufacturing (Kraybill & Nolt, 2004) and these trades are attractive as they also offer work for Amish children and extended family and keep employment close to home (Kraybill, 2001). Many of these non-farming enterprises continue to serve the Amish community, while others address the needs of the non-Amish, such as tourism (Martinez, et al., 2011).

Despite this shift towards non-agricultural enterprises, the Amish have become surprisingly well-known for their entrepreneurial success energised by community discipline, self-determination, a strong work ethic, integrity, and frugality (Dana, 2007; Wesner, 2010); “Work is viewed as wholesome, rewarding, and virtuous. Idleness and sloth are criticized” (Kraybill et al., 2010a, 2010b, p.13). The Amish preserve the Protestant work ethic, perceiving work as a communal vocation (Kraybill, 2001) and eschew work as a source of exhibition (O’Neil, 1997). A fundamental feature of the Amish enterprise is family cohesion, community, and mutual aid (Dana, 2007) and a desire to keep things small (Keim & Shadnam, 2020), and so the central aspiration for an Amish business is usually articulated in terms of a stable income and the ability of family members to work together. In general, however, Dana (2007) commented that “Profit is given less importance than is religion and its values…” (p.149). Amish enterprises are typically therefore sole proprietor businesses, partnerships, or cooperatives (Kraybill et al., 2010a, 2010b), typically employing family members and relying upon the Amish community for access to capital and finance, employees, supply networks as well as mutual aid (Kraybill et al., 2010a, 2010b).

Despite this community focus, the Amish have proven to be remarkably competitive even in an advanced industrial economy (Lutz, 2017). With the Amish having a reputation for product quality, truth, and integrity (Wesner, 2010), Amish businesses are adept at finding new opportunities and continue to be resilient (Hostetler et al., 1995). Accordingly, the failure rate of Amish businesses is thought to be very low (Dana, 2007; Wesner, 2010; Winpenny, 2017). Furthermore, while Amish businesses tend to be small, in some rare cases, larger Amish businesses reportedly enjoy a turnover in excess of $10 m (Kraybill, et al., 2011). Amish enterprises have also innovated in applying different organisational forms and business models to navigate the tensions between markets and religion. For instance, within the context of agriculture, Mariola and McConnell (2013), among others, have reported the Amish inventing new ways to maintain the Agrarian tradition of agriculture, while leveraging markets for efficiency and scale through developing an agri-food cooperative to engage in organic farming in order to generate “more value on less acreage” (p.146) for Amish producers. The initiative was fraught with challenges, as the Amish sought to navigate the boundary between markets and tradition. For example, the Amish navigated challenges over the structure and governance of the enterprise to ensure compliance with regulations and certification standards, as well as the distribution of power ensuring all affiliate voices were heard, and the extent to which organic certification should be accompanied by an ‘Amish’ brand and logo. As Mariolas and McConnell (2017) conclude, the new enterprise exemplifies a pragmatism. The enterprise required considerable trade-offs in terms of technology and electricity, navigated through outsourcing, and by encapsulating compromises in an intermediate cross-affiliate cooperative structure the Amish producers were able to maintain a non-permeable boundary between their community and the non-Amish and protect their way of life.

In the following section, we outline our empirical context and methodology, before moving into our integrated findings and discussion, where we relate Amish business ethics to MacIntyre’s moral philosophy, focussing in particular on the themes of the critique of modernity, which is an important point on convergence for Amish and MacIntyrean thought; MacIntyre’s conception of practices and communities in Amish life; and Amish and MacIntyrean virtues.

Research Context and Methods

Research Context

The Amish are not a single homogenous group (Kraybill et al., 2013; Nolt & Meyers, 2007). Amish society is organised into settlements, affiliations, and church districts (Choy, 2020). A settlement represents a distinct geographic area where Amish families relocate and establish their homes. In the United States, there are a staggering 617 Amish settlements, with a significant concentration in five particular counties: Lancaster in Pennsylvania, Elkhart-LaGrange in Indiana, Geauga County and Holmes County in Ohio. Ohio has the largest concentration of Amish communities in North America, with a population of over 84,000 spread across 671 church districts and 69 settlements. We based our study in the Amish community of Holmes County, which has a population of over 39,000, encompassing 317 church districts and 52 settlements (Young Center for Anabaptist & Pietist Studies, 2023). The Holmes County Amish community is among the most diverse, with a dozen distinct affiliations found in the settlement, including New Order (18 church districts), Old Order (140 church districts), Andy Weaver (30 church districts), and Swartzentruber (14 church districts). Hurst and McConnell (2010) have remarked that the Amish have different degrees of conservatism with the Swartzentrubers being the most conservative, followed by Andy Weaver, Old Order, and New Order. The Old Order Faith, the largest affiliation in Holmes County, is the affiliation we focus on in this study. They still farm with horses, drive a horse and buggy to town, have no electricity or telephones, and dress conservatively. Many Amish men work as artisanal craftsmen in areas such as woodworking and masonry, or as small business owners in retail or construction. Further, some Amish men work as unskilled or semi-skilled labourers, including for non-Amish employers. Finally, some Amish men remain in farming, but this is estimated to be as low as 5–10% (Mariola & McConnell, 2013). Married women rarely work outside the home.

Data Collection and Analysis

Our empirical study has been conducted in line with MacIntyre’s tradition-constituted notion of ‘truth’ (Moore, 2012; see also MacIntyre, 1988, 1990) and the methods we describe emphasise rich description of participant narratives (Coe & Beadle, 2008). We collected semi-structured interview data as “the most appropriate approach for exploring virtue in business organizations” (Moore, 2012, p.368) from 14 participants who described themselves as Amish or Amish affiliated (e.g. those who were growing up in Amish family but did not join Amish church or who left Amish church to join the Mennonite church) and involved in business. These are shown in Table 1.

Table 1 The profile of 14 interviewees in the Holmes County settlement, Ohio
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We gathered our sample of interviewees initially through personal contacts, and then through snowball sampling. However, in selecting participants, we endeavoured to ensure a spread of respondents across different church district, size and revenue of enterprise, and type of industry. Interviewing members of the Amish community is often challenging given some reluctance to associate with outsiders. In our study, this was possible as the first author has attended several Amish community events in Holmes County over an extended period and has regularly interacted with Amish and former Amish church members. She has also visited Amish homes, barns, and farms, and has spoken informally to many Amish communities. Thus, our approach included experiencing the lives of the religious community we were researching, as suggested by Burton et al. (2018). Each interview was conducted in English at the participant’s home or place of work and lasted between 60 and 90 min. The interviews were audio recorded and transcribed by the first author.

The interviews began by us describing to participants our broad interest in how the Amish faith interacted with and influenced their business ethics and practice. We approached the interviews without an extensive interview schedule, preferring instead to adopt a semi-structured and emergent approach. We began the interviews by describing to participants that we were interested in the connections between their faith and experiences of business, and the tensions and challenges they faced. Thus, we located the interview within the field of religion and enterprise to align with our research interests but allowed any specific connections to other concepts to emerge spontaneously. We posed an initial opening question: "Tell me about your faith and how this influences other aspects of your life?" to illustrate our interest in faith, and the question-ending “…other aspects of your life” was geared to elicit wide-ranging responses including enterprise, but also to capture connections to family, leisure, community, and so on. As a consequence, follow-up questions varied in each interview in order to more deeply explore responses of importance to each participant that related to our research interests. We recognize that by disclosing our a priori interests in the role of faith in their everyday lives, subsequent remarks by participants may be coloured accordingly. Therefore, in our follow-up questioning, we were mindful to search for alternative explanations. For instance, where participants remarked that Amish faith influenced their attitudes or actions, our follow-up questions offered opportunities for the narration of other personal, organizational, social, or cultural influences, such as “What else might have influenced this?” This approach helped us consider pragmatic validity (Sandberg, 2005) by asking follow-up questions that encouraged interviewees to provide concrete contexts and demonstrate how they related the role of faith to other factors. The interviews were thus conducted in the form of a dialogue because we wanted to avoid one-sided probing that could have limited our exploration of the lived experiences of the Amish and their understanding and reasoning of their experiences (Sandberg, 2005).

Following the interviews, we provided a copy of the interview transcript to each participant, offering opportunities for query and/or revision to the narrative. This resulted in a few minor clarifications.

Template analysis was used to analyse the transcribed interview data. Our coding followed the approach outlined by King (1998, 2004) and developed by Burton and Galvin (2018). Template analysis is a flexible type of thematic analysis. In our coding, we approached the data from a contextual constructivist perspective (Madill, et al., 2000). During this process of coding the data, we initially inductively analysed our data using first-order themes (Miles et al., 2013). We constantly reflected the data back to relevant ethics theory to begin to explain relationships between categories and to make sense of our data and presentation. Our analysis consisted of a number of steps. First, we familiarised ourselves with the entire dataset (Braun & Clarke, 2021) to make sure that the interviewees’ narratives are captured. All authors initially reviewed 6 randomly selected transcripts to get close to the data and then reviewed the whole dataset multiple times to produce a brief summary outlining the key points of the narratives. We started by open coding the statements made by the interviewees as a team to understand how Amith faith interacted with business and enterprise, and other aspects of their lives, and differences resolved through inter-coder discussion (King, 2004). We utilised a manual process of coding, using margin notes, post-it notes, etc. in order to stay close to the data, and we endeavoured to make the names of themes both thematic and intuitive. We kept a record of our coding process in a codebook that the team could access (Braun & Clarke, 2021). After coding all the statements, we reviewed the data set to ensure that our coding was appropriate. We made changes to some initial coding because we found that some statements coded early in the process matched better with first-order codes introduced later. We also found that a number of codes we had generated were similar to each other, and we were able to merge a number of codes into aggregate categories. For instance, our initial codes of “generosity”, “uncalculated giving”, “community cohesion”, and “communal support” were merged into a theme of “Communal Generosity”. Thus, the template was continually modified during this inductive analysis phase as interview transcripts were coded. Where new themes emerged or existing themes were merged, previously analysed interview transcripts were re-examined, and this iterative process continued until all interviews were analysed.

Once we had a final template derived from the data, we returned to the literature to identify existing business ethics theories that could help us interpret our data. At this stage, we were interested in identifying integrative themes (King, 2004) that permeated the entire data set and we drew upon MacIntyre’s moral philosophy to connect our creation of inductive themes to business ethics theory as a way to offer new and novel insights to moral philosophy. By revisiting our inductive themes through the lens of MacIntyre’s work, we were able to translate our participant narratives and our inductive coding to three key ideas that underscore MacIntyre’s moral philosophy: critique of modernity, practices and communities, and virtues. In the process of doing so, we were able to connect our first-order themes to these integrative dimensions to form a coherent theoretical synthesis. The process of connecting in vivo quotations to our inductive themes and to integrative themes using MacIntyre’s moral schemas is shown in Table 2.

Table 2 Coding template: quotations, inductive themes and integrative themes
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Findings and Discussion

Given the methods used, and our close attention to theory and data, in what follows we integrate our findings and discussion, focussing on three integrative themes that connect Amish business practice and MacIntyrean thought: the critique of modernity, practices and communities, and Amish and MacIntyrean virtues.

The Critique of Modernity

Alasdair MacIntyre is one of the key figures in the renaissance of virtue ethics in the second half of the twentieth century. One distinctive aspect of MacIntyre’s contribution to this revival of virtue ethics is his emphasis on the apparent ethical barrenness of contemporary society, a feature of MacIntyre’s thought which has played little role in extant applications of his work within business ethics. MacIntyre begins After Virtue (2007) with the following scenario:

Imagine that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe. A series of environmental disasters are blamed by the general public on scientists. Widespread riots occur, laboratories are burnt down, physicists are lynched, books and instruments are destroyed. Finally a Know-Nothing political movement takes power and successfully abolishes science teaching in schools and universities, imprisoning and executing the remaining scientists. Later still there is a reaction against this destructive movement and enlightened people seek to revive science, although they have largely forgotten what it was. But all that they possess are fragments: a knowledge of experiments detached from any knowledge of the theoretical context which gave them significance; parts of theories unrelated either to the other bits and pieces of theory which they possess or to experiment; instruments whose use has been forgotten; half-chapters from books, single pages from articles, not always fully legible because torn and charred. (MacIntyre, 2007, p.1)

While perhaps dishearteningly plausible today, upon its initial publication in 1981, this passage would have struck After Virtue’s readers as fantastical. Indeed, it is inspired by Miller’s (1959) post-apocalyptic science fiction novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz. This imaginary scenario is the basis for MacIntyre’s ‘disquieting suggestion’:

The hypothesis which I wish to advance is that in the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in the same state of grave disorder as the language of natural science in the imaginary world which I described. What we possess, if this view is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. (MacIntyre, 2007, p.2)

Having painted this resoundingly pessimistic portrait of our available moral resources (see also Lutz, 2008), MacIntyre goes on to suggest that the philosophical position known as ‘emotivism’ enables us to more fully understand the state of contemporary ethical discourse.

Emotivism is the ‘boo—hurrah’ theory of the meaning of moral utterances, according to which statements of moral praise and blame are nothing other than expressions of subjective feeling. On this view, to say ‘X is wrong’ is simply to say, ‘I dislike X, do so as well’ (MacIntyre, 2007, p.12; see also Mahon, 2013). While false as a theory of the meaning of ethical utterances, MacIntyre suggests that it nevertheless accurately captures contemporary moral practice. It is particularly evident in Weberian bureaucratic management (MacIntyre, 2007, p.30), but is, according to MacIntyre, a pervasive feature of our contemporary culture. The upshot of this is that manipulativeness is widespread within modernity: absent any possibility of rationally persuading others when engaged in moral disagreement, the only available option is to attempt to secure agreement through non-rational means.

While applications of MacIntyre’s work in business ethics have tended to assume that flourishing and virtue and readily available within contemporary capitalism, and thus have tended to ignore or distance themselves from this aspect of MacIntyre’s thought, the case of the Amish shows that, not only is this critique of modernity worthy of closer attention in business ethics, but also that it is in fact a position that is compatible with successful business, albeit not with a focus on profit-maximisation. In light of the ethical and political barrenness (MacIntyre, 1998) of the contemporary scene, MacIntyre often seems to recommend a disengagement from various aspects of modernity. He also closes After Virtue by suggesting that we are awaiting “another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict” (2007, p.263), highlighting the importance of creating counter-cultural communities in which the ethical life may be preserved, just as St. Benedict had done in founding Western Christian monasticism. The sense of withdrawing from modernity has an affinity with the distrust of outsiders within Amish life, which is evidenced in Amish attitudes to ‘seekers’ who wish to join the faith. As Foster puts it, “the Amish are likely to react to inquiries from non-Amish persons with skepticism” (1997, p.95). Conlin notes that the “Amish have historically chosen to remain insulated from the greater American society, referred to as English” (2021, p.419, original emphasis). Non-Amish people are seldom able to join the Amish church, and marriage in the Amish community occurs only within the community.

Indeed, this scepticism regarding modernity—modern institutions, mainstream modern practices, etc.—was a central theme in responses from participants. There was a sense in which standard business practices outside the Amish tradition tended towards the manipulative or unscrupulous, underlining the notion that mainstream moral discourse is lacking. One participant suggested that businesses with relatively thin connections to the Amish community were keen to align themselves with the Amish ‘brand’: “if you have a dog from an Amish farm, you’ll say it’s an Amish farm” (R5, Former Amish, Tour Guide of Heritage Center). This suggests an awareness of the appeal of Amish business, but also hints at a tendency towards unscrupulousness or manipulativeness on the part of non-Amish businesses, i.e. in using a tenuous connection to the Amish in order to present oneself as having Amish credentials.

In a similar vein, another participant pointed out that Amish businesses do not “get faith in order to get more customers… we talk about God in our newsletters… but we don’t believe in just putting it in for a sales promotion” (R9, Old Order Amish, Owner of Horse Equipment Business). The implication here is that the practice of appealing to religious belief as a sales tactic may exist elsewhere in order to secure a more favourable impression. Such responses clearly attempt to highlight the differences between the Amish community and perceived norms in mainstream, ‘English’ society. In general, partaking in mainstream business practices can be challenging as a result of the Amish’s distance from mainstream contemporary culture, and their uncompromising commitment to their faith. For instance, “marketing is a little tough for us Amish…because we intentionally refrain from all the styles and fashions. And our mind is set that way” (R8, Broom maker at an Amish gift shop).

In contrast to approaches to business which emphasise adversarial competition and profit-maximisation, the Amish approach emphasises learning to be satisfied with what one has. As one of our participants put it, “to me, it’s very important not to worry if somebody else is making a lot of money, even off of you. It’s more important to…try to make a nice living and be thankful for what you have and be thankful for other people’s successes” (R10, Old Order Amish, Lumber business owner). This aligns with MacIntyre’s comments on ‘pleonexia’ (i.e. acquisitiveness), a vice according to the Aristotelian schema, but a ‘virtue’ in contemporary society (MacIntyre, 2016, p.127). For the Amish, this acquisitiveness is a grave ill. As one participant put it, “it’s not money that’s evil, it’s the love of money that’s the root of all evil” (R10, Old Order Amish, Lumber business owner).

The Amish still want to work hard and succeed financially, but this desire is tempered by their faith. One participant commented:

We believe in the dignity of hard work, in living a life of gratitude and simplicity, and in success that doesn’t stem from greed but from the quality and integrity of our work. There’s a common notion out there that to be successful in business, you have to be ruthless, adopting a dog-eat-dog mentality, stepping over others to reach the top. But that’s not our way. You see, we live by the Sermon on the Mount every day, not just on Sundays. Our business practices can’t be one thing in the marketplace and another in the place of worship (R9, Old Order Amish, Horse Equipment Business Owner).

The emphasis here on integrity—on consistency across contexts regardless of the particular role-demands of working life—is markedly out of step with how business conduct is embodied in mainstream society.

While some work in business ethics has emphasised the radical potential of MacIntyre’s thought (e.g. Beadle, 2002; Couch & Bernacchio, 2020; Sinnicks, 2021), and other scholars have explored the relationship between MacIntyre and Marxism (e.g. Blackledge, 2009; Gregson, 2018; Lazarus, 2019), it is worth noting that, despite an unmistakable hostility to many features of contemporary capitalism, MacIntyre is not anti-market. Indeed, while MacIntyre believes that production should be organised so as to meet local needs in particular, and the common good more broadly, this is compatible with the existence of independent businesses (MacIntyre, 2011, p.320) and use of markets (MacIntyre, 2008, p.268). Thus, there is a key difference between a society which has a market for its economic and social benefits, and a market-society i.e. one that is organised in a way that grants the market an undue pre-eminence. This distinction maps onto Aristotle’s distinction between economics (i.e. household management) and chrematistics (money making), described by Polanyi, a major influence on MacIntyre’s thought (McMylor, 1994, 2003), “probably the most prophetic pointer ever made in the realm of the social sciences” (Polanyi, 2001, p.56; see also Dierksmeier & Pirson, 2009; Stahel, 2006).

While market societies tend to marginalise or destroy “traditional ways of life” (MacIntyre, 2016, p.100), there is still at least some space for the former conception of production and the market, and it is here that “networks of giving and receiving” (Bernacchio, 2018; see also MacIntyre, 1999a) can emerge and flourish. This latter conception clearly animates Amish business ethics, as we will detail below in our discussion of the importance of community for both MacIntyre and the Amish.

More broadly, scepticism about modern institutions is also manifest in Amish attitudes to a variety of more particular institutions and practices, including education and training. Formal Amish education stops when children are typically 13 or 14 years old because the Amish are permitted by law, because of Wisconsin v. Yoder, a 1972 Supreme Court ruling, to take their children out of school after the eighth grade. For most families in the U.S., the law governing compulsory education mandates that children cannot leave school until they are 16 years old. In its ruling, the Supreme Court decided that sending Amish children to high school would interfere with their ability to practice their religion. Amish education, while lacking in science, technology, and popular culture, teaches what the Amish deem to be practical and necessary to sustain their way of life. As such, the Amish regard Wisconsin v. Yoder as a great victory for the Amish that helps preserve their heritage (Kraybill, 1998). Amish children are expected to work full time after their eighth grade. Their work at Amish family businesses can teach them the practicalities of financing and bookkeeping necessary skills to succeed in Amish business.

One participant articulated a preference for training employees over employing people who had experience elsewhere: “We’ll train him. I’d sooner train a guy than [if he had] ten years of experience-because then we can train him the way we want him” (R12, Old Order Amish, Lumber Business Owner). This suggests a belief in the value of a distinctively Amish process of training, education, and enculturation. Another participant expressed scepticism about the value of formal education: “We go to school to learn how to learn…Extended formal education is anything but a panacea…you lose too many core values. You lose too much common sense” (R7, Old Order Amish, a Wife of Furniture Store Owner). This emphasises the Amish belief in both ethical and practical deficits in mainstream education, a theme in some of MacIntyre’s extended comments on education (see, e.g. MacIntyre, 1987; MacIntyre & Dunne, 2002).

Amish communities have an ambivalent, and sometimes outright hostile, attitude towards technology (Kraybill, 1998). The Amish do not automatically embrace that which is novel, modern, and convenient. Amish shops have no electricity except that powered by an on-site gas or diesel generator. The Amish do not drive cars and, when the need arises, hire non-Amish as drivers. They hire non-Amish businesses to design and run their business website and advertise for them. Among Amish businesses, adopting business technology including a computer and cell phone have been a heated topic. In Holmes County, most Amish business owners have computers and use cell phones at work. However, they put the computers and other office technology in a different building that was not accessible to the public to show respect for Amish values and only use them for business purposes. Most business owner participants felt that new technologies were not a danger to the Amish community if used appropriately, and can even help strengthen the community insofar as it helps younger generations feel more at home. As such, many Amish choose to consult their conscience in community to ensure that they and their employees use technologies in ways that did not conflict with their Amish values. One Amish respondent (R6, Old Order Amish, Owner of Amish Furniture Store) stated that adopting new technologies helped to retain farming and young members of the church.

Our people (Old Order Amish) allow more technology for farming like pick-up balers and hay loaders…The percentage of farmers in our church is larger than the more conservative because we have more technology…It helps business and keeps young people in our church. We try to nurture young people and make them feel at home so we have a nice church with a program for young people.

Another way in which Amish business practice is distinct from mainstream business is demonstrated by the fact that the Amish prefer not to resort of legal action, as it is considered as a form of aggression. In one example, a participant had faced bankruptcy due to a major contract that took the majority of his stock without payment. He recalled it as the hardest time during his business cycle but explained he did not resort to, nor even fully consider, a litigation process. He added “we don’t believe in confrontation, and legal action is a form of aggression” (R12, Old Order Amish, Lumber Business Owner).

This reluctance to make use of litigation clearly connects to MacIntyre’s thought. MacIntyre (1980) argues that within modernity, we embrace two systematically inconsistent ethical standpoints: that concerned with the making and sustaining human communities, and on the other hand, social life as an arena of competing desires. According to MacIntyre, law is most effective when it reflects the first of these standpoints, and yet the law is most needed when the second standpoint is dominant. Indeed, he says that within “a good community [the law] will be enforced as rarely as possible” whereas “[f]rom the competing view of society as the protector of individual interests, law is not a last resort at all. Law is the immediate sanction we invoke in order to protect ourselves from invasion by others” (1980, p.32). Thus, the Amish way of life aligns with MacIntyre’s conception of the good community, and stands in contrast to the litigiousness of contemporary mainstream society.

Finally, and relatedly, the Amish reject the individualism characteristic of modern society (see Kraybill et al., 2013), and indeed modern management (Dyck & Schroeder, 2005), which is also a recurring object of MacIntyre’s critique of liberalism (1988, see also Pinkard, 2003), which informs our discussion of the importance of community in MacIntyrean as well as Amish thought below. Indeed, highlighting the affinities between Amish values and MacIntyre’s rejection of modernity allows us to see that such a rejection remains compatible with surviving, perhaps even flourishing, within modernity. But the reason for the financial and ethical success of Amish business is not the rejection of modernity itself, but rather the practices and communities of the Amish, which are both partly enabled by this rejection, and at the same time partly motivate it: the ethical barrenness of mainstream capitalist society create the imperative to foster an alternative way of living, and that way of living makes the barrenness of mainstream society all the easier to perceive. All moral philosophies presuppose a sociology, argues MacIntyre—“it would generally be a decisive refutation of a moral philosophy to show that moral agency on its own account of the matter could never be socially embodied” (MacIntyre, 2007, p.23)—and the case of the Amish shows how a rejection of modernity can inform and be informed by a rival conception of the good life.

Practices and Communities

As we noted above, the concept of practices has been central to applications of MacIntyre’s work in business ethics. This is in part because MacIntyre concept of a practice seems to “offer the best understanding of the promise of work” (Muirhead, 2004, p.167). MacIntyre uses the word ‘practice’ in a highly specific way:

By a ‘practice’ I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. (MacIntyre, 2007, p.187)

Practices are activities which are in possession of distinctive, internal goods, and the enjoyment of these goods is what makes engaging in practices intrinsically rewarding. Goods internal to an activity are those goods which cannot be achieved in any other way—the internal goods of chess can be achieved only by playing chess—and contrast with external goods, which can be achieved in any number of ways as a result of being external to the activity, such as power, fame, and money. MacIntyre gives the examples of practices include football, chess, architecture, farming, and physics (2007, pp.187–188), and subsequent research has made a case for understanding practices as diverse as accountancy (Francis, 1990; West, 2018), investment advising (Wyma, 2015), journalism (Borden, 2013), nursing (Sellman, 2000), software design (von Krogh et al., 2012), and strategy (Tsoukas, 2018), amongst others.

Practices occupy a vital place in MacIntyre’s broader ethical thought as a result of constituting the first stage in MacIntyre’s definition of the virtues, with the narrative unity of a life, and traditions of enquiry constituting the second and third stages. MacIntyre notes that practices are present in all of our lives (2007, p.191), but, in line with his critique of modernity, holds that they can only flourish in social formations which value the virtues (2007, p.193). Thus, even the concept of practices contains a counter-cultural element that accords with the Amish separateness from mainstream society.

According to MacIntyre, a “virtue is an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices” (MacIntyre, 2007, p.191). In order to master a practice, we need the virtues. Indeed, virtues such as justice, truthfulness, and courage are required by all practices (2007, p.192). Truthfulness, including truthfulness with oneself, is needed to give and receive honest feedback; justice is required so that the contributions of practitioners are rewarded according to impersonal standards of merit; and courage is required “because the care and concern for individuals, communities and causes which is so crucial to so much in practices requires the existence of such a virtue” (2007, p.192).

The importance of the surrounding community is a central theme in MacIntyre’s writing (e.g. 1994a; 1999a; 2016). It is also an important facet of Amish life (Dana, 2007; Keim & Shadnam, 2020), and part of what sustains Amish separateness from mainstream society. As one participant put it, business is about “more than just making money…we feel it’s a service to the community” (R12, Old Order Amish, Lumber Business Owner). Furthermore, according to MacIntyre, when in good order, work should be “thought of as a kind of prayer and performed as an act of prayer” (2011, p.323) which is mirrored in the Amish view of work as a kind of sacrament (Kraybill, 1989, pp.188–211), and is a conception of work deeply at odds with that which is dominant in mainstream society. For the Amish, work is “cooperation with God and a noble pursuit” (O’Neill, 1997, p.1136). This sense of cooperation enables the Amish to develop a sense of acceptance that reduces the stresses of working life and facilitates social contribution. This approach to business also allows for an emphasis on the importance of family life, another example of a practice, according to MacIntyre (2007, pp.187–188). As one participant put it, “to me making money wasn’t the most important thing. I wanted to raise my family too” (R9, Old Order Amish, Horse Equipment Business Owner).

On communities MacIntyre says: “They must afford expression to the political decision-making of independent reasoners on all those matters on which it is important that the members of a particular community be able to come through shared rational deliberation to a common mind” (MacIntyre, 1999a, p.129). Again, this stands in stark contrast to the norms and expectations of contemporary mainstream society. The scale of the modern nation state precludes such shared deliberation (1999a, p.131), in part because such scale ensures that ‘politics’ is principally about bargaining (2016, p.177). The suggestion that small-scale communities are particularly conducive to human flourishing is also a tenet of Amish business ethics, and indeed of the emphasis on the local Ordnung that shapes life in Amish communities. The Amish believe that “bigness spoils everything” (R9, Old Order Amish, Horse Equipment Business Owner). A small-scale facilitates trust, whereas a large scale can undermine trust, and has connotations of mainstream society and modernity about which the Amish—like MacIntyre—are sceptical, as we detailed above. Amish business is intentionally small-scale in its operations because the overriding focus is not on the maximisation of profit but on the survival, and indeed the flourishing, of their community. Hence, there is an important relationship between the critique of modernity and the emphasis on local practice-based communities both in MacIntyrean thought and in Amish life. Amish business emphasises the local, in keeping with their religious philosophy of separation from the non-Amish world and keeping their works closer to their family and community members, and MacIntyre sees local communities are essential to the task of sustaining the tradition of the virtues in the face of a hostile mainstream society.

R11 (Old Order Amish, Furniture Store Owner) said that “back in the late’90 s, we probably turned more businesses down than we sold to”, which again indicates that doing things in the right way is deemed more important than growth or financial success to the Amish. External goods are important, but they are subordinate to the internal goods central to the practices of Amish life. As another participant put it:

My business got to the place where it was too much. We needed more buildings, and we needed more employees and I think the main reason why we quit is because I wanted to be able to work with my children. I didn’t want to manage a corporation. And so we decided we would just stick to tractors and get out of the combines. (R9, Old Order Amish, Horse Equipment Business Owner)

The Amish approach to business is a testament to their deep-seated values of simplicity and community. This is evident in the Amish practice of organic farming. As one participant, a former Amish and now a Gospel bookstore owner, points out, “we have a lot of farmers that got into organic farming, doing that as they can make a living on a small farm because they get a higher price for their products. And also, many of them practice grass farming because a cow should have only grass. This approach is not as labour-intensive, so they can manage it with their families” (R4). Here, we see that the pursuit of external goods, i.e. in the higher price organically farmed goods command, is subordinate to the internal goods of Amish family life.

By choosing to maintain business operations at a relatively small-scale, and by simultaneously prioritising family participation over expansion, the Amish demonstrate a deliberate effort to balance work with family life, in accordance with the tenets of their faith. This local, community-centric approach to business contributes to the sustenance of Amish traditions and values. In resisting the mainstream societal push for growth, Amish businesses offer a powerful expression of Amish identity and beliefs.

While practices are universal features of human societies, in line with his critique of modernity, MacIntyre holds that they tend to be marginalised in contemporary mainstream society. However, practices remain central to Amish life, which suggests that MacIntyre’s vision of the ethical life, while difficult to sustain within modernity, remains possible. This possibility is reflected in the place that skilled crafts—activities which typically fall under MacIntyre’s definition of practices (Moore, 2005)—occupy in Amish life. Examples of such skilled crafts that are common amongst the Amish include farming, quilt-making, buggy-building, home building, etc. Young Amish are taught that work is pleasurable (Dana, 2007), a belief that it would be hard to sustain outside of practice-like work.

Amish practices are cooperative rather than competitive human activities and possess certain standards of excellence that make them what they are. Practices are passed on from groups to individuals, who in turn sustain and revise the cooperative practice of Amish ways, highlighting the moral education at the core of practices. As one participant put it:

When [our children] see us tell the truth, when they see us have an opportunity to cheat someone yet we do not, or if we do cheat someone, they catch that too. So it’s important. There’s a lot of things taught by running our business with our children. A lot of times, we feel that the best way to grow a business is with our children…I think that there’s a lot of teaching that goes on, a lot of passing on the faith, when we work with our children, when we get our hands in the dirt with them. (R11, Old Order Amish, Furniture Store Owner)

This pre-eminence of ‘practices’ is unsurprising, given that Amish society has attempted to shield itself from what Polanyi called ‘the great transformation’ (Polanyi, 2001) of modernity, a concept which greatly influenced MacIntyre’s understanding of the history of morality (MacIntyre, 2007, p.239; 1988, p.211). This Polanyian account of economic history also seems to inform MacIntyre’s emphasis on traditional societies’ connection to the land. Some have seen a rather romantic pastoralism in MacIntyre, e.g. D’Andrea, who suggests that “MacIntyre always seems to have been beset by a bias for the rural and a prejudice against the urban” (2006, p.422). While we might wish to dispute the appropriateness of terms such as ‘bias’ and ‘prejudice’ here, there is at least a grain of truth in this characterisation, with MacIntyre’s fondness for rural life evident in his discussions of fishing and farming (1994a; 2016). A similar emphasis on rural life is manifest in the Amish predilection for agriculture, which we noted above, as well as the more general avoidance of urban centres both as sites of worldly temptation, and as possessing a scale that makes them poor homes for communities (for nuanced discussions of the Amish view on nature, see McConnell & Loveless, 2018; Inglis, 2018).

Finally, MacIntyre suggests that practices always require institutions to support them (2007, p.194). Whereas practices focus on internal goods, i.e. the distinctive goods particular to each practice, institutions focus on external goods, such as money and power. When in good order, the relationship between practices and institutions allows external goods to be sought and used to support practices (MacIntyre, 2007, p.194; Moore & Beadle, 2006). Yet, this relationship can easily become dysfunctional, with institutions—and their pursuit of external goods—coming to dominate practices, a dynamic which is arguably dominant within contemporary capitalist society. However, the Amish community has maintained its practices and their focus on internal goods. Furthermore, the central institutional aspect of Amish life, the church, supports and strengthens such practices, rather than undermining them. Several Amish men in our study emphasised that money, an external good within MacIntyre’s schema, is not a driving focus in their attempt to sustain their practices, instead emphasising the support of their family and job provision for community members as the main motivators guiding their decisions. Again, this emphasises the fact that the case of the Amish demonstrates that something akin to MacIntyre’s vision of human flourishing is available, even if it seems to require the kind of community that is difficult to sustain within our present society.

The notion of institutional support in the Amish context comes as functions of the church playing in roles of ‘keeping them out of bankruptcy’ with communal support and limiting ‘too much of money, success, pride and power of individual business’. Typical external goods (i.e. money and power) are powerful forces in modern capitalistic society, and yet are perceived as dangerous within the quintessential Amish institutions, churches.

If somebody would come and ask us to buy our business…it’s really not for sale… a lot of people say, well anything is for sale if you give enough money, but we have so many people that depend on us for their income (R12, Old Order Amish, Owner of Lumber Business).

Here, we see that the goods of both the broader community, and the family, guard against the kind of instrumental thinking inherent in the notion that ‘everything has a price’. Another participant highlights the importance of generosity and sharing within the community:

My business has been good enough that it’s given the opportunity to be generous with others and share. Really no need to be selfish with yourself with all of it [money] so we feel if the lord blesses it that’s your responsibility then to share it with others, community and church. (R1, former Amish and a former owner of a butcher shop).

The Amish church is directly and indirectly involved in almost all aspects of Amish business practices: business opportunity identification, initial funding, risk management, supply chain management, and human resource management. Many Amish businessmen note that, in their church, they offer low-interest loan programmes (4%) out of the Amish Fund to help young adults buy their own land or a house and get their start in the business world. Community members with money contribute to these funds and do not ask for high payoffs in return. “That’s what some people do with their money—they funnel back into the community and provide low-cost loans” (R9, Old Order Amish, Horse equipment business owner). At the same time, 1% of any contribution made to the Amish Fund goes to the community fund to address issues such as fire or flood that causes property damage, as well as medical expenses and personal hardship facing church members. Such practices help sustain the Amish community in the face of their rejection of mainstream society.

When Amish businesspeople reach a certain level of achievement, they are expected to take on advisory and mentoring roles for young business owners, fostering a positive business environment for others. There were several examples shared during visits to Amish stores. Young business owners who struggled with their businesses were taken over by an Amish business committee composed of senior business owners whose financial success enables them to help others. They mapped out the path of financial robustness, monthly plan of revenue and expenses, savvy business practices of lowering costs, plan to pay out all debts, etc.

He was a good carpenter, but not an excellent manager. He was about to break his contract. Our church stepped in and we actually finished two houses for him so the customers were happy and the church advised him to get a job where he was using the hammer and not the pencil, and not do his own managing. At that time, he accepted that (R10, Old Order Amish, Lumber business owner).

Because the Amish share much of MacIntyre’s critique of modernity, as we discussed above, and because Amish business ethics prioritises practices and communities, Amish business ethics is particularly resistant to such institutional domination. Where institutional concerns are to the fore—as when the home builder discussed here is advised to put down the pencil and take up the hammer—they are bound up with communal care and concern, and thus ensure that the goods internal to the practice-based community are served. This aspect of Amish business ethics underlines the importance of the virtues in Amish life, which both inform the rejection of mainstream society, and sustain the community outside of that society, and are thus the focus of the following section.

Amish and MacIntyrean Virtues

The Amish affinity with MacIntyre’s ‘negative’ argument (Lutz, 2012), i.e. his critique of modernity, informs the emphasis placed on a number of virtues which also receive particular attention from MacIntyre. While MacIntyre distances himself from the category of ‘virtue ethics’ (2006, pp.117–118; 2013, pp.29–30; 2016, p.66), he is nevertheless concerned to articulate and defend what he calls the ‘tradition’ of the virtues (2007, passim), and one which emphasises the difference between “man-as-he-happens-to-be”, in particular as he is within contemporary society, and “man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-essential-nature” (2007, p.52). The rejection of modernity is the negative aspect of MacIntyre’s account, but MacIntyre’s opposition to modernity has as its rationale a rival conception of the well-lived human life, a kind of life which requires the virtues. The case of the Amish helps us to see how these two aspects are related. Clearly, a conception of a well-lived life, and the set of virtues it requires, animates Amish thought, and helps to sustain its separateness from mainstream society. Thus, in this section, we aim to articulate a number of virtues central to the Amish tradition, and to highlight the ways in which they overlap with MacIntyre’s various comments on the virtues.

The first virtue to consider is one which is a subject of both convergence and divergence between the Amish and MacIntyrean thought: that of faith. MacIntyre is deeply committed to Catholic Christianity (see MacIntyre, 1988, 1994b), something that has featured in a number of discussions of MacIntyre’s work within business ethics (Moore et al., 2014; Sison, Ferrero, and Guitián, 2018), so, while faith is clearly important to the Amish, MacIntyre’s thoughts on natural law (MacIntyre, 1996), for instance, ensure a pronounced difference from the religious convictions of the Amish, which derive from the Anabaptist movement, as we noted above. Nevertheless, there is an affinity in the rather demanding attitude towards religious belief, again closely related to a shared rejection of secular mainstream society, and it is worth noting the importance of religious faith, which shapes much of both MacIntyrean and Amish thought, and differentiates them from both standard, secular conceptions of virtue ethics, and mainstream business practice, respectively. MacIntyre claims that the perfectly completed life requires us to go beyond ethics and politics to “natural theology” (2016, p.315), and likewise it is impossible to fully understand Amish values in secular terms. One respondent captures this importance of faith to Amish business:

We (my brother and I) always felt that we didn’t want to do anything that was not according to scriptural teachings and prayed for guidance and tried to treat employees in a pleasant and respectful way, and also the customers. And so we just simply practised our faith along with our work and know that we earned our bread with the sweat of our brow and work and trust and just say thy will be done in all things (R1, former Amish, a former owner of a butcher shop currently managing a grocery store)

Another participant commented that “God should be part of business, we don't separate anything in our life from its relationship to God. All life is a service to God, what we do to our fellow men, we do upon God” (R12, Old Order Amish, Owner of Lumber Business).

For MacIntyre, ‘just generosity’ (1999a, 2009b) names the virtue of uncalculative giving that we owe to others in our communities and which is a personal virtue that expresses concern for communities and contributes to their sustenance. Just generosity is a virtue of acknowledged dependence (MacIntyre, 1999a, ch.10), and reflects the “need to go beyond the strict proportionality of justice” (Bernacchio, 2018, p.379). Just generosity “achieves the common good of caring justly for those in need” (MacIntyre, 2009a, p.125). This virtue has an affinity with the Amish emphasis on mutual aid, which can be free labour to help with various tasks or financial support. This virtue is perhaps best understood as a kind of uncalculative or unqualified giving: “You haven’t helped someone today until you help someone who can’t repay. It’s a philosophy that we live by” (R4, former Amish, Owner of a Gospel bookstore). Although such generosity perhaps falls short of being entirely unconditional given that Amish assistance is sometimes reserved for those who commit to remaining part of the Amish community, it remains something alien to mainstream business practice, and perhaps even to mainstream culture.

Members of the Amish congregations take care of those in need. The Amish refuse to purchase health insurance and reject any government sponsored aids such as Medicaid and Medicare and they depend on Amish aid when needed. Following any natural disaster of a flood, tornado, hurricane, or fire, the Amish community rallies quickly to clean up the debris, construct a new building, and make frequent visits to those affected to offer extra additional help. This informal mutual aid can often help members with large hospital bills or other financial hardships in part because they do not buy commercial business liability insurance or medical insurance, instead using various forms of mutual aid to mitigate risk. In these cases, local congregations take a special offering, collected by the deacon in door-to-door visits with each family in the district. Bake sales or a public benefit auction may also be held to raise funds for those needs (Kraybill et al., 2013).

Another virtue which has a central place in both MacIntyrean and Amish thought is humility. MacIntyre claims that humility “is the necessary first step in education or self-education” (1990, p.84), thus occupying a position akin to honesty and truthfulness in his account of the morally educative nature of practices. MacIntyre further suggests that “humility, the ability to view oneself and one’s achievements without either congratulatory complacency or self-denigration, is a virtue with a peculiar importance” (2016, p.113). MacIntyre is also strongly critical of the absence of humility, which he regards as a major ill of contemporary capitalism. He criticises financial traders for their excessive self-confidence: “Traders have to be too self-confident and therefore lacking in self-knowledge” (MacIntyre, 2015, p.10), and thus not able to “see things as they are” (2015, p.10).

The Amish place a strong emphasis on humility (Keim & Shadnam, 2020). We noted above the importance of such virtues as ‘Gelassenheit’ (yieldedness, resignation, conquest of selfishness) and ‘Uffgeva’ (submission, prioritising others), such virtues are key to the sustenance of the Amish community. Humility is also central to Amish business practice (Dana, 2007). The emphasis on humility is often expressed in their plain life style with simple and practical clothing and frugal material ownership limited to buggies with horses, a bike, no electricity, no phone which make it hard to distinguish the have from the non-have. Small changes of dress code including hooks, buttons, and colours of pants, width of hat brim are often main discussion topics during church meetings on Sunday. Any material ownership that is not necessary for Amish lifestyles can be perceived as egotistical purposes.

There’s a lot of wealth in the Amish community…But…there’s no big ‘I’s and little ‘You’s. And so money isn’t what distinguishes from one another. That’s the reason for the simple common dress, that we don’t put on a show to show someone that we’re better. (R13, Old Order Amish, Bakery Owner)

Integrity is a further example of a virtue of great importance to both the Amish and MacIntyre. Indeed, MacIntyre stresses that this virtue is particularly hard to sustain in contemporary society (see 1979, 1999b), and regards it as being essential to moral agency. This is connected to MacIntyre’s critique of modernity: he suggests that within our present culture, “[o]ur lives are divided between different spheres, each with its own roles and its own set of norms” (2008, p.3) which makes it difficult to assess our lives and our commitments from a properly holistic and role-transcendent position. Indeed, MacIntyre suggests that

Compartmentalization goes beyond that differentiation of roles and institutional structures that characterizes every social order and it does so by the extent to which each distinct sphere of social activity comes to have its own role structure governed by its own specific norms in relative independence of other such spheres. Within each sphere those norms dictate which kinds of consideration are to be treated as relevant to decision-making and which are to be excluded (1999b, p.322)

Amish business ethics, however, is resolutely opposed to the kinds of role-structured activities which prevent a role-transcendent perspective, and hence moral agency, from being adopted. This is manifest in a willingness to forego business and professional opportunities should they clash with Amish values. The role of ‘businessperson’ is always subordinate to the principles of Amish belief. As one participant puts it: “If there’s gonna be swearing, dishonesty inside this contract, then I’m out…Principle trumps extra profit ten times out of ten” (R10, Old Order Amish, Owner of Lumber Business).

Honesty and integrity are regarded as central to their way of life within the Amish community. According to one participant:

When a contract is signed, it’s viewed as something that’s agreed to and unless you die you better try to fulfil what you agreed to do to keep your word. And people know that. They learn that. They understand that. That you’ll finish what you started, that you’ll do it to the best of your ability. So that sells itself. You know it's part of Amish heritage (R3, a wife of former Amish, Owner of Amish Tour Business).

Another participant expressed the view that it is better to be a victim of dishonesty, than the perpetrator:

I’ve had a couple customers give me bad checks and I’m always thankful that I’m on the other end of that. I’d rather receive a bad check than give one…I think that’s just part of our heritage, to be hardworking, to leave the world a better place than when you found it when you leave. And it applies to our businesses, our religious practices, and the Christian experience first. And it applies into all aspects of our life (R10, Old Order Amish, Lumber business owner)

The integrity at the heart of Amish values is also expressed in the cooperative, rather than competitive and adversarial, nature of Amish business. According to another participant:

One contractor avoids bidding a job if he knows a neighbouring business is already competing for it. Gauging a potential client, he’ll contact a competitor who he knows did previous work for the person…this prevents infringing on foreign turf but also allows him to learn of any problems with the customer…as far as really getting competitive and getting nasty, I don’t see any of that (R12, Old Order Amish, Owner of Lumber Business)

Clearly, there is much to commend in Amish business ethics: it reserves an important place to the virtues, as we have argued in this section, prioritises practice-based communities, and is resistant to a number of the undesirable features of contemporary capitalism, as we saw in the preceding sections. Furthermore, by exploring these virtues through a MacIntyrean lens, we have brought an influential philosophical perspective to bear on Amish business ethics, and tried to illustrate how the Amish separateness from mainstream society is sustained by the practices and virtues present in the Amish community.

Concluding Remarks

Our arguments enable us to contribute to the business ethics literature, and in particular, we deepen existing understandings of both MacIntyre’s ethical thought and its connection to religion and enterprise. MacIntyre’s critique of modernity has played virtually no role in the business ethics literature that has been inspired by his work, and yet helps us to appreciate the Amish approach to business ethics.

Our account of Amish business ethics recognises that the Amish lifestyle is ‘world-rejecting’ (Wallis, 1984), it seeks separation (Nolt, 2016). As such, it has a deep affinity with MacIntyre’s rejection of modernity and helps us to appreciate how MacIntyre’s conception of community and the virtues can facilitate such separation. The Amish fear that, without non-permeable boundaries between the church and the world, the forces of modernization and capitalism will erode traditional values and practices (Kraybill et al., 2011). The anchor for the ‘separated’ Amish life has been the traditional focus on agriculture and a rural lifestyle which, in turn, has protected a family and community-based society. The Amish aim to “be not conformed to this world” (Romans 12:2) is possible only because of the emphasis they place on practices and communities, and on the virtues central to Amish life. As a result, the Amish example shows that the ethical life is possible for those who are able to practice the virtues and thus sustain MacIntyrean communities. The injunction “be not conformed to this world” is coupled with the injunction to instead be “transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2). For the Amish, this renewal is achieved through their communal life and commitment to the virtues, which simultaneously underpin their rejection of modernity and their commitment to ethical business.

The example of the Amish can help us to understand how something akin to a MacIntyrean conception of a flourishing ethical life is possible, even within the broader context of an emotivist mainstream society. Co-existence with this society clearly presents many challenges for the Amish as the boundary between the community and the world has become blurred and more permeable (Smith, et al., 1997). While Amish enterprises acknowledge and place a high value on separation from the world (Kraybill, 2001), by their very nature, enterprises and paid work require interaction with the ‘world’ through non-Amish employers, suppliers, distributors, services, and customers – interactions which have reciprocal and potentially transformational influences. Further, the Amish who enter into non-farming enterprise or work “experience some conflict between their work schedule and the rhythm of Amish life” (Meyers, 1994, p.173) as enterprise often entails working away from home and places a burden on maintaining existing markers of separation such as dress and dialect. Nevertheless, the Amish have so far managed to navigate these challenges, and thus provide hope for those who wish to carve out space for the tradition of the virtues even in an inhospitable environment. Indeed, one avenue for future research is that of exploring other contexts in which a separateness from mainstream society can facilitate virtuous flourishing.

The limitations of our study also offer further research opportunities. Our study was conducted in one geography, with predominantly one affiliation in one Amish settlement. Follow-up studies that explore the heterogeneity of business ethics across the Amish communities, or that explore changes in ethics and practice longitudinally, would deepen existing understandings. For example, we did explore whether there were important differences in the narratives and our coding between those participants who described themselves as Amish or Amish affiliated (those who were growing up in Amish family but did not join the Amish church or who left Amish church to join the Mennonite church). We did not find any substantive differences in responses. This may be due to their continued close connection with the community. However, further studies of businesses that have left the Amish would be interesting and theoretically valuable to deepen understandings of the tensions between embracing modernity and the Amish way of life.