As founder of modern political economics and prominent theorist of the commercial society, Adam Smith’s importance is universally recognized. Little, however, has been done so far to develop Adam ...Smith’s virtue ethics in the context of modern business, characterized by digitalization. This article aims to rediscover Adam Smith’s virtue of prudence and its relevance for the “e-commercial society”: It presents a framework that considers the central place of prudence in the relationship between a prosperous e-commercial system and societal flourishing. In Smith’s view of the commercial society, prudence enables people to develop habits of character related to industriousness, genuineness, spirit of sacrifice, and self-command, which help in the conduct of a prosperous business activity. This article translates Smith’s virtue of prudence into a language typical of consumers in the current e-commerce scenario, considering their development as persons and the contribution of their activities to the good of society.
Drawing upon the theory of virtue ethics, this study builds a decision tree predictive model to explore the anticipated impact of good traits (i.e., virtuous and personality traits) on socially ...responsible consumption. Using R statistical software, we generate a classification tree and cross-validate the model on two independent datasets. The results indicate that the virtuous traits of self-efficacy, courage, and self-control, as well as the personality traits of openness and conscientiousness, predict socially responsible purchase and disposal behavior. Remarkably, the largest segment of socially responsible consumers in the study (41 %) scored high in self-efficacy and openness. This result suggests that marketers should focus on these good traits when creating advertisements to encourage sustainable consumption. Our study contributes to enhancing knowledge about the social and psychological aspects of the sustainability movement and provides a new analytical approach to predicting socially responsible consumption.
The increasing use of People Analytics to manage people in organizations ushers in an era of algorithmic management. People analytics are said to allow decision-makers to make evidence-based, ...bias-free, and objective decisions, and expand workers' opportunities for personal and professional growth. Drawing on a virtue ethics approach, we argue that the use of people analytics in organizations can create a vicious cycle of ethical challenges - algorithmic opacity, datafication, and nudging - which limit people's ability to cultivate their virtue and flourish. We propose that organizations can mitigate these challenges and help workers develop their virtue by reframing people analytics as a fallible companion technology, introducing new organizational roles and practices, and adopting alternative technology design principles. We discuss the implications of this approach for organizations and for the design of people analytics, and propose directions for future research.
•More businesses are using People Analytics (PA) to manage their workforce•We describe three ethical consequences of PA: opacity, datafication of the workplace, and nudging•We examine the adverse effects of these challenges on members ability to develop their virtue•We offer three ways to mitigate these challenges: reframing PA, adopting new roles, and using alternative design principles
The urgent need for solutions to critical environmental challenges is well attested, but often environmental problems are understood as fundamentally collective action problems. However, to solve ...these problems, there is also a need to change individual behavior. Hence, there is a pressing need to inculcate in individuals the environmental virtues - virtues of character that relate to our environmental place in the world. We propose a way of meeting this need, by the judicious, safe, and controlled administration of "classic" psychedelic drugs as a form of moral bio-enhancement. Recent evidence shows that psychedelics can be given safely in controlled environments, and can induce vivid experiences of unity and connectedness. These experiences, in turn, can durably increase feelings of nature-relatedness and pro-environmental behaviors. Therefore, we argue that responsible psychedelic use can reliably catalyze the development of a key environmental virtue known as living in place. This is a "master environmental virtue" that subsumes the qualities of respect for nature, proper humility, and aesthetic wonder and awe. Our account advances the environmental virtues debate by introducing a relevant practical proposal, and advances the psychedelic moral enhancement debate by providing a much-needed conceptual framework.
Vices, Virtues, and Dispositions Azzano, Lorenzo; Raimondi, Andrea
Theologica (Louvain-la-Neuve),
04/2023, Volume:
7, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
In this paper, we embark on the complicated discussion about the nature of vice in Virtue Ethics through a twofold approach: first, by taking seriously the claim that virtues (and certain flavours of ...vices) are genuinely dispositional features possessed by agents, and secondly, by employing a pluralistic attitude borrowed from Battaly’s pluralism (2008). Through these lenses, we identify three varieties of viciousness: incontinence, indifference, and malevolence. The upshot is that the notion of vice is not as categorically homogeneous as that of virtue: some states of viciousness consist in interference of present virtuous dispositions, or mimicking of absent vicious ones, whereas others can be considered genuine dispositions themselves. Furthermore, this set-up can provide an interesting, albeit highly idealized story as to how, through the interference in one’s environment, one gets acquainted with vice in various degrees. Finally, this approach can be illuminating vis-à-vis Virtue Ethics in general; e.g. we can employ it to discuss more productively Johnston’s (2003) objection to Hursthouse’s (1999) account of moral conduct. Finally, this approach can be illuminating vis-a-vis Virtue Ethics in general; e.g. we can employ it to discuss more productively Johnston’s (2003) objection to Hursthouse’s (1999) account of moral conduct.
Anthropologists have sustained a varied and active engagement with ethics throughout the field’s history. In light of this long-standing engagement, what marks the distinctiveness of the current ...ethical turn? To think in Foucauldian terms, ethics/morality now looms large precisely because it has been problematized. Although there has been a recent outpouring of work on ethics, and a widely shared concern to move beyond overly collectivist accounts, much is nascent. Debates and schools of thought are still emerging. In this review article, we explore several resonate streams of disquiet or inspiration within the discipline that have generated new lines of inquiry. These include (a) emerging debates and confusion around the use of basic terms such as “ethics” and “morality” and their role in debates over ordinary ethics, (b) articulations of an anthropological virtue ethics (and the Foucault effect), (c) increasingly sophisticated treatments of moral experience informed by philosophical phenomenology, and (d) reinvigorated considerations of the political as connected to ethical life.
In this paper we consider how the three main approaches to ethics – deontology, consequentialism and virtue ethics – relate to the implementation of ethical agents. We provide a description of each ...approach and how agents might be implemented by designers following the different approaches. Although there are numerous examples of agents implemented within the consequentialist and deontological approaches, this is not so for virtue ethics. We therefore propose a novel means of implementing agents within the virtue ethics approach. It is seen that each approach has its own particular strengths and weaknesses when considered as the basis for implementing ethical agents, and that the different approaches are appropriate to different kinds of system.
The current socio-economic climate is marked by an increased focus on corporate responsibility and the role of business in society. In this climate, megamarketing – efforts to develop and sustain an ...industry or market by gaining the cooperation and support of various stakeholders and publics – is an increasingly relevant approach. Current research in megamarketing focuses on understanding how various industry actors and stakeholders establish the legitimacy of a given industry by accommodating prevailing regulatory, normative, and cultural-cognitive structures. In contrast, this paper examines megamarketing efforts that go beyond such attempts to establish legitimacy towards establishing an industry as a virtuous entity displaying qualities that surpass minimal accepted standards and ‘business-as-usual.’ Inspired by work on virtue ethics in organisational studies, we develop the concept of industry aura: a ‘halo’ of unique and authentic virtues that characterise an industry. We explore the development of industry aura by surveying the discursive megamarketing tactics through which microfinance has been established as a virtuous industry. We conducted qualitative and quantitative analyses of 589 articles about microfinance appearing in five selected newspapers between 1986 and 2016. Our findings reveal three sets of megamarketing discursive tactics: 1) diagnostic framing and social mission framing, deployed to establish microfinance as a virtuous entity; 2) virtue anchoring and frame bridging, used to defend the industry’s aura in times of authenticity crisis; and 3) diagnostic and social-mission reframing aimed at recovering the tarnished aura of microfinance. Our paper enriches megamarketing research by charting relevant terrain that stretches beyond the established vectors of legitimacy theorizing and offers important implications for megamarketing practitioners.
