Is personal moral inconsistency a challenge to overcome or embrace? This paper opts for the latter and argues for the Virtue of Encompassing the Contrary (VEC). According to VEC, an individual can balance and realize opposite values or virtues through time virtuously. This paper discusses critically various explanations given for moral inconsistency: Circumstantial Relativism, Moral Opportunism, the Consequentialist Solution, Moral Ambivalence, Kant’s Imperfect Duty and Dancy’s Moral Particularism. The paper argues that VEC fares better in answering the moral challenge of (...) inconsistent behavior. (shrink)

This article discusses the ordinary, the existentialist, and the virtue‐ethics senses of the word ‘authenticity’. The term ‘authentic’ in ordinary usage suggests the idea of being ‘original’ or ‘faithful to an original’, and its application implies being true to what someone (or something) truly is. It is important to see, however, that the philosopher who put this technical term on the map in existentialism, Martin Heidegger, used the word to refer to the human capacity to be fully human, not to (...) being true to one's unique inner nature. Authenticity might also be thought of as a virtue, and interesting questions arise whether such a virtue should be regarded primarily as a personal or as a social virtue. (shrink)

In the last decade, Australian federal and state governments’ commitment to the economic rationalist imperatives of performance measures, accountability for outcomes, and value-for-money has driven significant change in the Australian not-for-profit community services sector. In an environment shaped by neoliberal-inspired government policies and a renewed government commitment to austerity, Australian not-for-profit community service organizations are now, more than ever, actively engaged in a variety of income-generating strategies to achieve and/or maintain economic sustainability. Central to this process is meeting the dual (...) challenge of succeeding financially in a competitive environment and simultaneously serving mission. In this context, it is time to more closely examine the impact of these challenges, in particular the implications for the organizational values of not-for-profit community service providers themselves. This paper reports on a qualitative study of fourteen not-for-profit community service organizations, their core purposes, and their strategies for economic sustainability. In addition to the new data presented here, this paper contributes to the broader theoretical framework—the lens of value pluralism, which, we argue, provides a sharper focus on the relationship between mission and margin. (shrink)

In this paper we suggest an alternative approach to ethics in social work: virtue ethics. We argue that Habermas's theory of communicative action and discourse ethics needs to be supplemented with virtue ethics to provide an account useful to social work. In these times, sensitivity to others is needed for social work to succeed as a profession interested in combating the complacency, self-interest and lack of compassion evident in cutbacks to social welfare programmes and the resultant concerns with outcomes and (...) efficiencies that have all but obliterated care and compassion. We see in Habermas a furthering of Aristotelian and Thomist philosophy, most importantly with respect to his focus on emancipatory knowing?the critically reflective knower who knows self as the person doing the knowing. Habermas's distinction between values (objective), ethics (social) and morals (subjective) makes the province of emancipatory knowing (his epistemological theory) consistent with his moral theory?morality is personal. (shrink)

I argue for two theses. First, many arguments against violent gaming rely on what I call the contamination thesis, drawing their conclusions by claiming that violent gaming contaminates real world interactions. I argue that this thesis is empirically and philosophically problematic. Second, I argue that rejecting the contamination thesis does not entail that all video games are morally unobjectionable. The violence within a game can be evaluated in terms of the values the game cultivates, reinforces, denigrates, or disrespects. Games which (...) present violence in ways that disrespect objects of values are more objectionable than violent games that reinforce or cultivate those values. The resulting analysis evaluates games on a case-by-case basis and pays particular attention to the representational context of the violence. (shrink)

The paper opens with an account of moral ambition which, it argues, is both a coherent ideal and an admirable trait. It closes with a discussion of some of the ways in which this trait might differ from traditional virtues such as temperance, courage, or benevolence.

This article offers a straightforward reading of Hume's ‘narrow circle’ – the boundary employed to define those with whom we sympathize in assessing an agent's moral character – that follows from a more careful look at his account of virtue. Hume employs a principle that can be understood as a virtue ethical equivalent of associative obligation, which thereby delimits the boundaries of this circle. This reading avoids concerns about unjustified partiality, moral blind spots, and demandingness, and shows a clear path (...) for reaching uniform moral judgments; it also offers a new perspective on virtue of interest for contemporary virtue ethics. (shrink)

Virtue ethical theories typically follow a neo-Aristotelian or quasi-Aristotelian model, making use of various combinations of key features of the Aristotelian model including eudaimonism, perfectionism, an account of practical wisdom, and the thesis of the unity of the virtues. In this paper I motivate what I call a Humean virtue ethic, which is a deeply particularist account of virtue that rejects all of these central tenets, at least in their traditional forms. Focusing on three factors by which Hume determines virtue, (...) I show that this view of virtue resonates with the aims of the moral particularist, who holds that there are no general moral principles and that right action is determined only with reference to context and on a case-by-case basis. I use Hume’s texts to introduce and motivate three claims, which I find plausible, and which I will show can be read together as entailing an interesting and underappreciated picture of virtue that is also able to solve an important dilemma for particularist virtue ethics. (shrink)

This paper provides a sketch of an agent-centered way of understanding and answering the question, “What’s wrong with that?” On this view, what lies at the bottom of judgments of wrongness is a bad attitude; when someone does something wrong, she does something that expresses a bad, or inappropriate, attitude . In order to motivate this account, a general Kantian agent-centered ethics is discussed, as well as Michael Slote’s agent-based ethics, in light of analysis of the grounding role of attitudes (...) in the evaluation of two core cases. In light of these discussions, it is argued that there are advantages to preserving the grounding of the appropriateness of attitudes in facts about their objects , while cutting such an agent-centered ethics away from a Kantian grounding. (shrink)

Virtue epistemology has been divided into two camps: reliabilists and responsibilists. This division has been attributed in part to a focus on different types of virtues, viz., faculty virtues and character virtues. I will argue that this distinction is unhelpful, and that we should carve up the theoretical terrain differently. Making several better distinctions among virtues will show us two important things. First, that responsibilists and reliabilists are actually engaged in different, complementary projects; and second, that certain responsibilist critiques of (...) reliabilism miss the mark. With these distinctions on the table, we can see that the virtue reliabilist project is in some ways more fundamental than the responsibilist project, since the latter importantly depends on the former. I argue that the distinctively epistemic value of the responsibilist’s character virtues is derived from their connections to the reliabilist’s constitutive virtues. While this will give us a unified account of the epistemic value of intellectual virtues, it is not a reduction of the responsibilist project to the reliabilist one; rather, it as a way of securing the separate importance of each project by clarifying how they relate to one another. (shrink)

A standard thesis of contemporary Aristotelian virtue ethics and some recent Heideggerian scholarship is that virtuous behavior can be performed immediately and spontaneously without engaging conscious processes of deliberative thought. It is also claimed that phronēsis either enables or is consistent with this possibility. In the Nicomachean Ethics, however, Aristotle identifies phronesis as the excellence of the calculative part of the intellect, claims that calculation and deliberation are the same and that it is the mark of the phronimos to be (...) able to deliberate well. He also insists that for an action to count as virtuous it must issue from rational choice, which he characterizes as determined by deliberation. It thus seems that any exegetically respectable attempt to explain virtuous action within an Aristotelian framework would need to integrate with some account of deliberative choice. This creates a tension in Aristotelian scholarship. In this paper, I shall formalize this tension in terms of an apparently inconsistent triad of claims and shall examine the merits of at least one prominent interpretation of phronesis with respect to its reconciliation. (shrink)

This paper seeks to establish whether the categories of MacIntyrean virtue ethics as applied to business organizations are meaningful in a non-western business context. It does so by building on research reported in Moore : 363–387, 2012) in which the application of virtue ethics to business organizations was investigated empirically in the UK, based on a conceptual framework drawn from MacIntyre’s work. Comparing these results with an equivalent study in Sri Lanka, the paper finds that the categories are meaningful but (...) that there are both similarities to and considerable differences in the content of these categories from the UK study. The paper draws on aspects of institutional theory to explore and explain these findings. Overall, there is supportive evidence that the categories of MacIntyrean virtue ethics are generalizable, and so can be used to characterize problems of organizational virtue and vice around the world, while providing evidence that there may be polities which are more conducive to the ‘practice-like conduct of production’ : 77–91, 2008). (shrink)

Virtue ethics is generally recognized as one of the three major schools of ethics, but is often waylaid by utilitarianism and deontology in business and management literature. EBSCO and ABI databases were used to look for articles in the Journal of Citation Reports publications between 1980 and 2011 containing the keywords ‘virtue ethics’, ‘virtue theory’, or ‘virtuousness’ in the abstract and ‘business’ or ‘management’ in the text. The search was refined to draw lists of the most prolific authors, the most (...) cited authors, the most cited articles, and the journals with the most virtue ethics publications. This information allows one to chart how virtue ethics articles have evolved through the decades and to establish ‘schools’ or clusters of authors as well as clusters of themes. The results of this quantitative analysis of authors, ‘schools’, themes, and publications provide a foundation for the future study of virtue ethics in business and management, identifying its achievements and potentials. (shrink)

Virtue ethics (VE), due to its eudaimonistic character, is very anthropocentric; thus the application of VE to environmental ethics (EE) seems to be in contradiction with EE’s critical opinion of human centeredness. In the paper, I prove the claim that there is a possibility of elaborating an environmental virtue ethics (EVE) that involves others (including nonhuman beings). I prove that claim through analyzing Ronald Sandler’s EVE, especially his concept of pluralistic virtue and a pluralistic approach to the aim of ethical (...) endeavor which is not only focused on personal flourishing but also helps others (including nonhumans) to flourish. I start my analysis with a close look at the application of anthropocentrism in VE, beginning by discerning the three types of anthropocentrism that are most often used in discussion on EE and EVE, namely ontological, epistemological, and ethical. Subsequently, I analyze the concept of personal flourishing, which is responsible for the anthropocentric/egoistic nature of VE, proving that VE is anthropocentric/egoistic only formally, not in its content, and as such is only a rational theory, not a moral one. (shrink)

In Morals From Motives, Michael Slote defends an agent-based theory of right action according to which right acts are those that express virtuous motives like benevolence or care. Critics have claimed that Slote’s view— and agent-based views more generally— cannot account for several basic tenets of commonsense morality. In particular, the critics maintain that agent-based theories: (i) violate the deontic axiom that ought implies can , (ii) cannot allow for a person’s doing the right thing for the wrong reason, and (...) (iii) do not yield clear verdicts in a number of cases involving conflicting motives and motivational over-determination . In this paper I develop a new agent-based theory of right action designed to avoid the problems presented for Slote’s view. This view makes morally right action a matter of expressing an optimal balance of virtue over vice and commands agents in each situation to improve their degree of excellence to the greatest extent possible. (shrink)

In business ethics journals, Kant’s ethics is often portrayed as overly formalistic, devoid of substantial content, and without regard for the consequences of actions or questions of character. Hence, virtue ethicists ride happily to the rescue, offering to replace or complement Kant’s theory with their own. Before such efforts are undertaken, however, one should recognize that Kant himself wrote a “virtue theory” (Tugendlehre), wherein he discussed the questions of character as well as the teleological nature of human action. Numerous Kant (...) scholars argue that Kant already erected precisely the kind of integrative moral architecture that some of his modern interpreters (while aiming to supersede him) wish to construct. For business ethics, this divergence of scholarly opinion is of crucial importance. It shows first that the standard portrayals of Kant’s ethics in business ethics textbooks—as rigidly deontological, narrowly individualistic, and hence unsuitable for the specific demands of corporate agency—might have to be revised. Second, discussions in the business ethics literature on stakeholder-engagement and managerial decision-making likewise stand to gain from a more nuanced picture of Kant’s moral philosophy. Third, a reassessment of Kant’s ethics with regard to questions of personal character and moral sentiments might also lead to a more favorable view of the relevance of his ethics for managerial practice. Last, but not least, the many current attempts to reconcile Kant’s freedom-oriented philosophy with virtue theories stand to benefit considerably from a better understanding of how Kant himself conceived of one such synthesis between the formal and substantial aspects of morality. This, ultimately, could lead to an important overlapping consensus in the academic literature as to the role and relevance of virtuous conduct in business. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to single out four main kinds of moralism, which might be associated to virtue ethics, and to offer a virtue-ethical response to each. By doing so, I aim at defending virtue ethics, properly understood, from the intrinsic danger of a moralistic drift. I begin by proposing a definition of moralism and a list of its main forms. Then, I list the main features of the virtue-ethical perspective I embrace, and finally, I argue that such (...) normative approach can prevent a moralistic drift. Thus, I conclude that a virtue-ethical approach, thanks to its capacity of reconciling reasons and motives, and to its proposing an agent-related perspective on morality, has an advantage in presenting moral requirements in a non-moralistic fashion. (shrink)

What motivates the benevolent or charitable agent is regard for another’s good or well-being, but talk about regard for others’ good or well- being is simply talk about benevolence or charity in different terms. Yet Hume clearly holds that the regard for another’s good is a motive to produce benevolent acts that is distinct from a sense of their benevolence. So what is the difference? ‘Well’, one might say, ‘intuitively, rights are very different from wellbeing.’ Yes indeed. And that, I (...) shall contend, is Hume’s point. My general contention is that Hume’s discussion of justice is in fact an attack on that concept of rights we think of as having motivated the American and French revolutions, a concept that is still (deplorably in my view) prevalent. I think the very fact that it is so prevalent and so sanctified by its position in the American Constitution has blinded most readers to the power and plausibility of Hume’s attack, which I shall try to defend. (shrink)

Virtue ethics is currently one of three major approaches in normative ethics. It may, initially, be identified as the one that emphasizes the virtues, or moral character, in contrast to the approach that emphasizes duties or rules (deontology) or that emphasizes the consequences of actions (consequentialism). Suppose it is obvious that someone in need should be helped. A utilitarian will point to the fact that the consequences of doing so will maximize well-being, a deontologist to the fact that, in doing (...) so the agent will be acting in accordance with a moral rule such as “Do unto others as you would be done by” and a virtue ethicist to the fact that helping the person would be charitable or benevolent. (shrink)

Gender greatly impacts access to opportunities, potential, and success in corporate leadership roles. We begin with a general presentation of why such discussion is necessary for basic considerations of justice and fairness in gender equality and how the issues we raise must impact any ethical perspective on gender in the corporate workplace. We continue with a breakdown of the central categories affecting the success of women in corporate leadership roles. The first of these includes gender-influenced behavioral factors, such as the (...) requirements and expectations of gendered verbal and nonverbal communication styles as well as appearance. We move on to address the impact of family on corporate leadership opportunities and success, discussing the asymmetrical evaluation of an individual’s potential, authority, and competence based on gender stereotypes of familial obligations and expectations. Finally, we address how gender impacts access to networking and sponsorship opportunities and the long-term effects of systematic limitations on women’s inclusion in the upper echelons of corporate leadership. We conclude with a summary of the questions and issues raised by our discussion and direct individuals to consider how different ethical systems and moral requirements might influence their interpretations of gender and leadership in the corporate workplace. (shrink)

The overall aim of this thesis is to show how some ideas in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics can be interpreted and used as a productive way to approach a number of pressing issues in bioethics. Articles I-II introduce, and endorse, a social constructivist perspective on rights. It is investigated if the existence of property-like rights to biological material would include the moral right to commodification and even commercialisation. Articles III-V discuss similar questions and more specifically champion the application of an Aristotelian (...) virtue ethics perspective. The articles are preceded by an introductory essay on some of the central themes in the Nicomachean Ethics. This section also includes a very brief account of what the connection between virtue ethics and a theory of social construction, including rights, could look like. The thesis seeks to show that if read somewhat creatively many of the ideas in the Nicomachean Ethics make for a highly useful approach to modern moral problems. It should be noted, however, that this thesis in no way claims to be an exegetic, or a complete, study of the Nicomachean Ethics. Article I deals with ownership of biological material from a philosophical, as opposed to a legal, perspective. It is argued that a strand in liberal political theory that treats property relations as socially constructed bundles of rights, as developed by e.g. Felix Cohen and Tony Honoré, is well suited for discussions on ownership of biological material. Article II investigates which differences in biological material might motivate differences in treatment and ownership rights. The article draws on the social constructivist theory of ownership which was developed in Article I. Article III employs virtue ethics to explain why it is morally permissible to donate but not to sell organs such as kidneys. It is suggested that the former action will bring the agent closer to a state of human flourishing. Article IV argues that virtues like philia, justice, beneficence and generosity — traditionally all seen as other-regarding — contain strong self-regarding aspects. The central claim is that these self-regarding aspects of the other-regarding virtues are necessary components of complete virtue and thus that the fully virtuous agent has to act virtuously both in her dealings with herself and others. Article V applies the ideas that were developed in Article IV to the case of living organ donations to next of kin. It is proposed that such an act, although noble and fine, is supererogatory, rather than obligatory, as the donor is morally entitled to be partial to herself. This argument is made against the backdrop of a discussion on some Aristotelian ideas on philia and partiality. (shrink)

The article concerns the specificity of contemporary Virtue Ethics, its main problems and its main streams.

Sometimes we make the choice to rely upon the trait of being on time over making the choice to rely upon the trait of driving safely. So Gerry can run the red light to respect Stephanie’s time, while striking Paul’s car and disrespecting his property and life in the process. It appears that there are single situations with two or more morally salient features where we can apply different and ordinarily positive traits to our moral choices and by selecting the (...) wrong moral choice, we can be seen to behave abominably. Notice that when utilizing the trait attribution error as our excuse, we can still see ourselves as positive moral agents or “good persons” in the situation where we have behaved abominably. The trait attribution error takes place when we defend failing to perform the correct moral action with the motive of why we applied a specific positive trait to the wrong moral choice. So the Nazi soldier gets to remain “a good moral person” in his own eyes – because he applied the normally positive trait of following a superior’s orders – while at the same time performing horrific moral actions. In this paper I want to explain and explore aspects of the benefits of the phenomenon I call “trait attribution error,” with the two primary candidates being how it helps us both to avoid blame for improper moral acts and to dodge our negative psychology. The trait attribution error creates a cycle of error, preventing us from becoming virtuous moral agents by enabling us to make the same mistakes. (shrink)

Most work in neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics begins by supposing that the virtues are the traits of character that make us good people. Secondary questions, then, include whether, why, and in what ways the virtues are good for the people who have them. This essay is an argument that the neo-Aristotelian approach is upside down. If, instead, we begin by asking what collection of character traits are good for us---that is, what collection of traits are most likely to promote our own (...) well-being---we find a collection of traits a lot like the traditional slate of virtues. This suggests an egoistic theory of the virtues: the virtues just are those traits of character that reliably promote the well-being of their possessor. In addition to making the positive case for character egoism, I defend it from anticipated objections. I argue that character egoism doesn't inherit the problems of ethical egoism, and conclude by offering character-egoist accounts of two virtues traditionally thought to be fundamentally other-regarding: honesty and justice. (shrink)

This Thesis reconsiders the prospects for an approach to global justice centring on the proposal that every human being should possess a certain bundle of goods, which would include certain members of a distinctive category: the category of capabilities. My overall aim is to present a clarified and well-developed framework, within which such claims can be made. To do this, I visit a number of regions of normative and metanormative theorising. I begin by introducing the motivations for the capability approach, (...) and clarifying some of its most distinctive features. Next, I focus on Martha Nussbaum's version of the approach, and identify several problems therein. The most important concerns epistemology, and especially the challenges that constructivist theories pose. The middle part of the Thesis presents an alternative, based on the work of John McDowell, which I argue has superior prospects. Then, I turn to two further problems: that of making sense of the universalistic aspirations of cosmopolitanism, and that of integrating the microscopic prescriptions of ethics with the macroscopic analyses of political philosophy. Using the Aristotelian interpretation of its core framework that I have developed, I conclude that the capability approach can provide compelling answers to important questions about global justice. (shrink)

This dissertation is a defence of metaphysical ethical naturalism according to which there is a moral reality which is part of the natural world. The implication of this view is that moral properties, such as moral goodness, justice, compassion and so forth are part of the natural world, and inquiries concerning these moral entities are conducted in similar empirical ways of reasoning to that in which scientific inquiries are conducted. I defend metaphysical ethical naturalism by a variety of explanationist argument (...) in the tradition of Cornell realism. I examine preceding proposals for this argument, and focus on one version of it, which I call ‘the abductive argument for moral realism’. Although there was a suggestion about the abductive argument, the argument has not been discussed enough in the literature. This dissertation is a defence and discussion about the abductive argument which has not been properly examined. The defence of the argument requires the examination of how first-order ethical theory can be developed in the similar empirical ways scientific theories are developed. This will be an attempt to show the analogy between scientific inquiries and ethical inquiries. Describing the analogy between science and ethics, I will argue that the analogy can be best explained in terms of the approximate truth of normative theory which implies the existence of mind-independent natural moral properties. (shrink)

In response to prominent criticisms of virtue ethical accounts of right action, Daniel Russell has argued that these criticisms are misguided insofar as they rest on an incorrect understanding of what virtue ethicists mean by ‘right action’, drawing on Rosalind Hursthouse’s influential account of the term. Liezl van Zyl has explored, though not fully-endorsed, a similar approach. The response holds that virtue ethicists do not embrace a strong connection between (i) right action and (ii) what any given agent ought to (...) do in a given set of circumstances. Rather, ‘right action’ is a matter of action assessment, and indicates that a given action is morally excellent and praiseworthy. More generally, the proposed account of rightness emphasizes both (i) an agent’s past and how she came to be in certain circumstances - is it a result of her own vice or wrong actions? and (ii) the agent’s own future happiness and well-being - will an action be so terrible that her life is marred and ruined? The narrative structure of an agent’s life thus plays a significant role in determining whether an action is right. This revisionary conception of right action is the focus of the current chapter. (shrink)