Virtue Ethics - Philosophical Concepts

VIRTUE ETHICS 🙢 Ethics of Character Company and Values 🙢 Apple as a company values: Apple Core Values 1981 🙢 🙢 Below you can find the some of the original Apple core values: 🙢 One person, one computer. 🙢 We are going for it and we will set aggressive g...

VIRTUE ETHICS 🙢 Ethics of Character Company and Values 🙢 Apple as a company values: Apple Core Values 1981 🙢 🙢 Below you can find the some of the original Apple core values: 🙢 One person, one computer. 🙢 We are going for it and we will set aggressive goals. 🙢 We are here to make a positive difference in society, as well as make a profit. 🙢 Each person is important; each has the opportunity and the obligation to make a difference. 🙢 We are enthusiastic! 🙢 We are creative; we set the pace. We care about what we do.  🙢 🙢 Starbucks Coffee 🙢 -Creating a culture of warmth and belonging, where everyone is welcome. -Acting with courage, challenging the status quo and finding new ways to grow our company and each other. -Being present, connecting with transparency, dignity and respect. -Delivering our very best in all we do, holding ourselves accountable for results  🙢 Core Values of JFC 🙢 Customer Focus, Speed with Excellence, Integrity, Spirit of Family and Fun, Humility to Listen and Learn.  🙢 🙢 Aristotle’s ethical treatises 🙢 Nicomachean Ethics 🙢 Eudemian Ethics, and 🙢 Magna Moralia 🙢 Modern virtue ethics theories such as those developed by Alasdair MacIntyre, Martha Nussbaum, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscome, Rosalind Hursthouse among others, take their inspiration from Aristotle.  🙢 🙢 What kind of person should I be? 🙢 Ethics that concentrates on character rather than action. (not to suggest that there’s no correlation between the two)  Aristotle’s Ethics 🙢 Dominant themes: a. human good b. eudaimonia c. intellectual and moral virtues d. cardinal virtues e. moral education  Moral Education 🙢 🙢 What makes people good? To answer this question, Aristotle discloses that nature, habit and teaching are all essential in making us good  Agree or Disagree 🙢 🙢 Virtuous parents will more likely produce virtuous children. Vicious parents are likely to beget vicious children. 🙢 VIRTUE THEORY 🙢 🙢 Emphasizes an individual’s character rather than following a set of rules 🙢 Emphasizes the value of virtuous qualities rather than formal rules or useful results 🙢 Aristotle is recognized as the first philosopher to advocate the ethical value of certain qualities or virtues in a person’s character 🙢 Proper Functioning  🙢 Aristotle: Virtue leads to happiness or human flourishing Virtue is 1. A habit or disposition of the soul 2. Involving feeling and action 3. To seek the mean in all things relative to us, 4. Where the mean is defined through reason as the prudent man would define it  🙢 🙢 Habits of the soul 🙢 We are not born with virtues 🙢 We acquire virtues through practice 🙢 Moral education focuses on the development of a person’s fundamental character (soul for Aristotle 🙢 Feeling and action 🙢 Virtue involves emotion and action 🙢 Aristotle's account of moral life emphasizes the emotive or affective character of virtue 🙢 Seeking the Mean Relative to Ourselves 🙢 Finding the Mean between two extremes 🙢 Excess and deficiency are vices  🙢 🙢 Defining the Mean Through reason and the Prudent Person PRACTICAL WISDOM (phronesis or prudence) involves a. The practical dimension of judgment (apply something general (concept of good life) to specific cases b. Goes beyond mechanical application of rules (both reflective and affective) What exactly does it mean to be virtuous? 🙢 Having virtue just means doing the right thing, at the right time, in the right way, in the right amount, toward the right people  🙢 🙢 No need to be specific, because if you’re virtuous, you know what to do. All the time. You know how to handle yourself and how to get along with others. You have good judgment, and you know what’s the right thing to do and when to do it.  🙢 🙢 On Honesty Means knowing how to deliver hard truths gracefully. How to break bad news gently, or to offer criticism in a way that’s constructive, rather than soul-crushing.  🙢 🙢 Virtue 🙢 A skill, a way of living, and that’s something that can only really be learned through experience. 🙢 Practical Wisdom  Virtue as Habit 🙢 🙢 Aristotle said your character is developed through habituation – if you do virtuous thing over and over again, eventually it will become part of your character.  Some examples of virtues and vices 🙢 Deficiency MEAN Excess Cowardice Courage Foolhardiness Anhedonia (inability to Temperance Lust feel pleasure –symptom of Gluttony depression) Callousness Gratitude Overindebtedness Remorselessness Remorse Scrupulosity  Case Study 🙢 https://www.ethicsops.com/phantom-expenses-case Phantom Expenses 🙢 Jane Adams, a new employee, joins a team that pressures her to fake expenses on her company travel report. Her instinct is that this is wrong, but the experienced department members don't want her to submit lower average totals, which might cause management to question their previous reports. 🙢 What should she do?  🙢 The Character/Virtue Test Introduce the test 🙢 “Does this action represent the kind of person I am or want to be? Does it represent my organization's reputation or vision of what it wants to be?” 🙢 Validity 🙢 The kind of person I am, and the kind of organization I work in are both important to living a good life and are influenced by the specific actions we do. If we know who we are and aspire to be, we can decide how to act by considering whether an action is something that would be done by the kind of person or organization we want to be.  🙢 Apply the Test 1. Will this action help to make you the kind of person you want to be? If Jane thinks of herself as a person who is honest and trustworthy in her business life, then padding her expense account on a regular basis will weaken her habit of acting according to the pattern set out by these virtues or good ways of acting. Departing from her ideals in small increments makes it easier to take larger steps later. Giving the other reps time to change their reporting practices would strengthen her habit of being compassionate toward others. If she thinks that taking even one action against her ethical principles will damage her character by changing her expectations for herself, she should tell the other reps that she will file an accurate report and that they should change their practices as soon as possible to avoid being discovered by the company.  🙢 2. Will the action fit the company’s reputation or vision of what it would like to be? The company has indicated in its training that it aspires to honesty in its employee’s actions. Padding goes directly against those aspirations. Conclusion 🙢 Since padding will weaken Jane’s habits of honesty and trustworthiness and goes against the aspirations of the company, it is unethical for her to pad her expense account. Her habit of compassion may lead her to file one false report in order to give the others an opportunity to reform.  🙢 🙢 EUDAIMONIA A life well lived Human flourishing  🙢 🙢 Aristotle: Our final end is eudaimonia, the activity of the soul according to reason or at least not independent of reason. -NE, I, X, 1098a7; 127  🙢 🙢 For lack of equivalent term, eudaimonia is loosely translated as happiness, felicity, the good life and a flourishing life, a thriving life, life of abundance or life of prosperity. 🙢 But this should not be confused with our common understanding of happiness as a subjective psychological state. 🙢 an inadequate translation of eudaimonia.  🙢 🙢 Eudemonia- flourishing or well-being 🙢 A life of eudaimonia is a life of striving. it’s a life of pushing yourself to your limits, and finding success. A eudaimonistic life will be full of the happiness that comes from achieving something really difficult, rather than just having it handed to you.  🙢 🙢 Human Flourishing according 1. to functional context 🙢 Example: A hammer is good if it does what it was designed to do well 🙢 A guitar is good if it is capable of making good music 2. In terms of unique properties What is the unique characteristic that sets human being apart from other being? Answer: the ability to reason or think  🙢 🙢 THUS, human flourishing is defined in terms of reasoning of thinking- ultimately in terms of contemplative life  🙢 🙢 In Magna Moralia 🙢 happiness is equated with doing and living well 🙢 it consists in living virtuously; and 🙢 happiness is a complete good and end.  🙢 In the Eudemian Ethics, it is defined as the activity of the complete life. In relation to this, Aristotle asserts that children are not truly happy, since “they have not yet attained the sufficient age for the performance of virtuous deeds. Children are called happy because they give the promise of happiness, while real happiness needs perfect virtue and a complete life”  🙢 Aristotle’s ethics weaves the fabric of what are seemingly disparate aspects of human life into organic whole where the boundaries between logos and pathos, theōria and praxis, soma and psukhē becomes very fluid and fleeting. Ethics, in the Aristotelian sense, is a parapoiēsis, a kind of “bringing forth” and grafting upon becoming; this receptivity and openness refuses to enframe itself in prescriptive formulas and formalized rules or rigid codes. It extolls character and elevates virtue as aretē. Man’s personal quest for eudaimonia becomes an incessant effort to do good and abide by it.  Discussion 🙢 Less Sugar Marketing Campaign https://www.ethicsops.com/phantom-expenses-case The marketing team presents a children's cereal brand manager with “Less Sugar” ad campaigns for three of her brands. Large print and dynamic type on the packages exclaiming “75% LESS SUGAR” will catch the parent’s eye and increase sales. Concerned about their children’s weight gain, parents will purchase the cereal. The carbohydrate content of the less sugar products, however, is the same as high sugar version, at best only 10 fewer calories per bowl, so it offers no weight loss advantage.  🙢 The brand manager’s immediate reaction is “This marketing campaign is unethical.” 🙢 How can she be sure of her judgment? 🙢 How can she convince the marketers? 🙢 How should she act in this situation?  🙢 Guide Questions 🙢 Will this action help to make you the kind of person you want to be? 🙢 Will the action fit the company’s reputation or vision of what it would like to be? 🙢 Will the action maintain the right balance between excellence and success for the firm?  🙢 🙢 How can virtue ethics approach solve the issue? 🙢 What do you think are the right questions to be raised that will lead to a solution of the problem? 🙢 What are the issues that need to be addressed? 🙢 How do we address these issues?  Case 1 To transfuse blood or not 🙢 🙢 A competent adult patient loses a massive amount of blood from a blood vessel bleeding in an acute duodenal ulcer. The best chance of saving his life is an urgent blood transfusion along with the operative intervention to arrest the bleeding. The patient refuses blood but asks for treatment instead with the best available non-blood products and surgery, accepting the substantial risk that surgery without blood transfusion is much less likely to save his life than surgery with blood transfusion.  Case 2: To transplant or not 🙢 🙢 Mr S. is a 38y/o patient who is being seen by Dr. H for a lipid disorder related to renal failure. He is being considered for a renal transplant in the near future, and Dr. H. has been asked to evaluate and make a recommendation to the transplant program regarding the patient’s suitability for transplantation. 🙢 In taking the history, Dr. H happened to comment to Mr. s that he looked like a Harley rider. The patient told Dr. H. that he was that, in fact he has ridden his cycle to the appointment. When asked where his helmet was, he told dr. H. that he did not use one saying, “When it’s my time, it’s my time.” Indeed dr. H. thinks that Mr. S should not be given a kidney transplant since he has such a blatant disregard for his personal health and safety. Do you agree with dr. H? Why or why not?