scholarly journals The Possibility of Virtue

2012 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 377-404 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miguel Alzola
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Moral Virtue ◽  
Character Traits ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Moral Good ◽  
Observational Equivalence ◽  
Business Context ◽  
Overt Behavior

ABSTRACT:To have a virtue is to possess a certain kind of trait of character that is appropriate in pursuing the moral good at which the virtue aims. Human beings are assumed to be capable of attaining those traits. Yet, a number of scholars are skeptical about the very existence of such character traits. They claim a sizable amount of empirical evidence in their support. This article is concerned with the existence and explanatory power of character as a way to assess the possibility of achieving moral virtue, with particular attention paid to business context. I aim to unsettle the so-called situationist challenge to virtue ethics. In the course of this article, I shall defend four claims, namely, that virtues are more than just behavioral dispositions, that at least some virtues may not be unitary traits, that psychologists cannot infer virtues from overt behavior, and that the situationist data do not account for the observational equivalence of traits. Since it rests on a misconception of what virtue is, the situationist objection remains unconvincing.

scholarly journals The Corporate Character of Eudaimonist Virtue Ethics Cautioning the Invisible Environment of Harmful EMFs Resulting from 5G Technology

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Joseph Komrosky
Keyword(s):  
Breast Cancer ◽  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Strong Support ◽  
Environmental Harm ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Animal Kingdom ◽  
The World ◽  
Corporate Person

There is a current concern in environmental ethics that stems from the development of cell phone communication technology; namely, do the electromagnetic frequencies (EMFs) linked to the development of technology of 4G and 5G cause harm to the environment (e.g., plants, bees and other insects, the animal kingdom, and human beings)? Do EMFs cause or correlate to the collapse of bee colonies and/or lower sperm counts in men and increased rates of breast cancer in women? This concern deals with EMFs that are inextricably linked to the development of telecommunication technology of current 4G and future 5G. More specifically, there are concerns that these EMFs may cause harm to various members of the environment, such as plants and trees, bees and insects, other members of the animal kingdom, and humans; and that some of these harms are expressed as sperm reduction in men, breast cancer in women, and brain cancer in men and women. The thesis of this dissertation is that a normative person-based theory of neo-Aristotelian eudaimonistic virtue ethics provides an ethical framework that gives strong support for the conclusion that it is morally impermissible for a telecommunications corporate person with good character, to allow harmful EMFs associated with the implementation of 5G technology. Particularly in light of numerous studies and anecdotal evidence that suggests that this technology might be harmful to humans and the environment. I draw an analogy between persons and "corporate persons" to argue that corporations ought to consider character when making decisions about whether to introduce new technologies--in this case, the EMFs that accompany 4G and 5G into the world. Furthermore, the primary point of this dissertation is the application of the practical ethics of character. I am specifically interested in the question of character in relation to the vetting questions, of the introduction, by telecommunications corporations, of new 5G technology into the world. The normative view developed in this dissertation has real-life practicality that if adopted by a telecommunications corporate person, of good character, would provide a model of practical moral reason sufficient to guide them to act compassionately towards the environment regarding the problem of 5G technology and the potential environmental harm EMFs can bring. Moreover, my argument based on eudaimonistic normative principles does something that utilitarian and deontological action-based normative theories do not do, namely, focus on the nature and role of character. Character is able to provide insight and explanatory power even for an ordinary person to see why their actions are guided a certain way. Finally, I will demonstrate the efficaciousness of the character-based, eudaimonistic normative framework that brings to the application of the problem 5G and potentially harmful EMFs in our environment.

Justice as a Personal Virtue and Justice as an Institutional Virtue: Mencius’s Confucian Virtue Politics

2020 ◽  
Vol 2019 (4) ◽  
pp. 277-294
Author(s):  
Yong Huang
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Affirmative Answer ◽  
The State ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Character Traits ◽  
Social Policies ◽  
Moral Principles ◽  
The Government

AbstractIt has been widely observed that virtue ethics, regarded as an ethics of the ancient, in contrast to deontology and consequentialism, seen as an ethics of the modern (Larmore 1996: 19–23), is experiencing an impressive revival and is becoming a strong rival to utilitarianism and deontology in the English-speaking world in the last a few decades. Despite this, it has been perceived as having an obvious weakness in comparison with its two major rivals. While both utilitarianism and deontology can at the same time serve as an ethical theory, providing guidance for individual persons and a political philosophy, offering ways to structure social institutions, virtue ethics, as it is concerned with character traits of individual persons, seems to be ill-equipped to be politically useful. In recent years, some attempts have been made to develop the so-called virtue politics, but most of them, including my own (see Huang 2014: Chapter 5), are limited to arguing for the perfectionist view that the state has the obligation to do things to help its members develop their virtues, and so the focus is still on the character traits of individual persons. However important those attempts are, such a notion of virtue politics is clearly too narrow, unless one thinks that the only job the state is supposed to do is to cultivate its people’s virtues. Yet obviously the government has many other jobs to do such as making laws and social policies, many if not most of which are not for the purpose of making people virtuous. The question is then in what sense such laws and social policies are moral in general and just in particular. Utilitarianism and deontology have their ready answers in the light of utility or moral principles respectively. Can virtue ethics provide its own answer? This paper attempts to argue for an affirmative answer to this question from the Confucian point of view, as represented by Mencius. It does so with a focus on the virtue of justice, as it is a central concept in both virtue ethics and political philosophy.

Liberal Civic Education, Religious Commitment, and the Spillover Thesis: What Psychology Can Teach Us

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
John L. Phillips ◽  
Laura McMillian
Keyword(s):  
Civic Education ◽  
Religious Commitment ◽  
Moral Virtue ◽  
Spillover Effects ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Public Servants ◽  
Marcus Aurelius ◽  
Secular Society

AbstractThis article addresses an idea central to liberal debates on civic education: the spillover thesis. Both egalitarian liberals and their religious opponents in these debates claim that liberal civic education creates spillover effects into the way individuals assess the meaning of their own lives. Some religious citizens fear that their politically reasonable conceptions of the good life are being undermined by education that emphasizes the practice of autonomous reasoning. Egalitarian liberals usually acknowledge this risk or cost, but deny that religious citizens should be given special dispensation from the burdens of autonomous reasoning. Some may even hope that conservative religious beliefs will be eroded by the practice of liberal civic education. This article disputes the spillover thesis. Given the best evidence available from the field of cognitive psychology, we challenge the notion that critical personal reflection about public matters is bound to spillover into critical reflection about private moral matters. On the contrary, the evidence suggests that human beings are usually well equipped to compartmentalize and are capable of reasoning in different ways depending on the context. Thus, reasonable citizens of faith are not necessarily unduly burdened by programs of civic education; nor are liberal programs of civic education necessarily going to lead us to a more secular society of autonomous thinkers. The article also speaks to a broader civic humanist tradition in political philosophy that includes Plato, Tocqueville, Rousseau, and Marcus Aurelius. For these authors, the success of a political enterprise is seen to crucially depend on the inculcation of a robust and comprehensive system of private virtue. For without private virtue, there is no public virtue. If we are correctly interpreting the available psychological research, private virtue need not be as crucially relevant for the success of common political enterprises. The inculcation of private moral virtue does not so clearly translate into making good leaders, voters, and public servants.

On Social Psychology, Business Ethics, and Corporate Governance

2000 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 725-733 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy L. Fort
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Corporate Governance ◽  
Business Ethics ◽  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Corporate Law ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Ethical Business ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Large Corporations ◽  
Business Behavior

Abstract:This paper is a response to a recent colloquy among Professors David Messick, Donna Wold, and Edwin Harman. I defend Messick’s naturalist methodology, which suggests that people inherently categorize others and act altruistically toward certain people in a given person’s in-group. This paper suggests that an anthropological reason for this grouping tendency is a limited human neural ability to process large numbers of relationships. But because human beings also have the ability to modify, to some extent, their nature, corporate law can organize small mediating institutions within large corporations in order to take ethical advantage of this grouping tendency. Within a corporate law taking seriously a mediating institution’s formulation of business communities, a virtue ethics approach can be integrated with a naturalist approach in a way that fosters ethical business behavior while mitigating the dangers of ingrouping tendencies.

Karl Barth's Moral Thought

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald McKenny
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Theological Ethics ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Moral Norms ◽  
Moral Good ◽  
Moral Thought ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
God's Grace ◽  
The Right

Does theological ethics articulate moral norms with the assistance of moral philosophy? Or does it leave that task to moral philosophy alone while it describes a distinctively Christian way of acting or form of life? These questions lie at the heart of theological ethics as a discipline. Karl Barth’s theological ethics makes a strong case for the first alternative. This book follows Barth’s efforts to present God’s grace as a moral norm in his treatments of divine commands, moral reasoning, responsibility, and agency. It shows how Barth’s conviction that grace is the norm of human action generates problems for his ethics at nearly every turn, as it involves a moral good that confronts human beings from outside rather than perfecting them as the kind of creature they are. Yet it defends Barth’s insistence on the right of theology to articulate moral norms, and it shows how Barth may lead theological ethics to exercise that right in a more compelling way than he did.

Moral psychology

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Slote
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Moral Evaluation ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Psychological Issues ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
Moral Weakness ◽  
Moral Requirements ◽  
Wrong Action

Moral psychology as a discipline is centrally concerned with psychological issues that arise in connection with the moral evaluation of actions. It deals with the psychological presuppositions of valid morality, that is, with assumptions it seems necessary for us to make in order for there to be such a thing as objective or binding moral requirements: for example, if we lack free will or are all incapable of unselfishness, then it is not clear how morality can really apply to human beings. Moral psychology also deals with what one might call the psychological accompaniments of actual right, or wrong, action, for example, with questions about the nature and possibility of moral weakness or self-deception, and with questions about the kinds of motives that ought to motivate moral agents. Moreover, in the approach to ethics known as ‘virtue ethics’ questions about right and wrong action merge with questions about the motives, dispositions, and abilities of moral agents, and moral psychology plays a more central role than it does in other forms of ethical theory.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariska Leunissen
Keyword(s):  
Practical Wisdom ◽  
Moral Virtue ◽  
Craft Production ◽  
Moral Sense ◽  
Character Traits ◽  
Chronological Order

The conclusion brings together the results from the book and shows that for Aristotle, the process of habituation is long and arduous, and that nature can hinder one’s chances of developing virtue in the full, moral sense. The process of habituation is compared to craft-production and the process of perfection, and the lawgivers are compared to producers who use men with the best natural character traits as their materials for building the best possible (or most virtuous and happy) city. Finally, the conclusion lays out the path from natural character to moral virtue in chronological order, starting with conception and Aristotle’s theory of eugenics and ending with the unified disposition of the soul that includes both virtue of character and practical wisdom. It also briefly discusses why women and natural slaves cannot achieve full virtue and happiness according to Aristotle.

scholarly journals Education for Loneliness as a Consequence of Moral Decision-Making: An Issue of Moral Virtues

2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (6) ◽  
pp. 591-605
Author(s):  
Jarosław Horowski
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Moral Evil ◽  
Character Traits ◽  
Moral Decision ◽  
Moral Decision Making ◽  
Moral Good ◽  
Cardinal Virtues ◽  
Moral Virtues ◽  
Point Of Interest ◽  
Moral Decisions

Abstract The direct reference point for these analyses is the process of making moral decisions, but a particular point of interest is the difficulty associated with making decisions when acting subjects are aware that their choice of moral good can lead to the breakdown of relationships with those close to them (family members or friends) or to their exclusion from the group(s) that have been most important to them so far in their lives, consequently causing them to experience loneliness. This difficulty is a challenge for education, which in supporting the moral development of a maturing person should prepare her/him for choosing moral good even if this requires personal sacrifices. In these analyses, assuming that knowledge of moral good is not sufficient for morally good actions, I refer mainly to the virtues of character that facilitate making morally good decisions and I seek the answer to the question: what character traits (moral virtues) should be shaped in maturing persons, so that as adults they can resist moral evil, even when this will clearly lead to the experience of loneliness? I propose these character traits as expressing moral virtues—especially the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude (neo-Thomistic approach). In this way, I join in the discussion relating to the teleology of education. I do not touch on the methodology of education, however. The argument is presented in two parts. In the first, I introduce the problem of decision-making implying consent to loneliness. In the second, I reflect on the characteristics of a person who is capable of making such a decision.

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