Through a semi-structured interview with 40 senior executives from Indian multinational enterprises (MNEs), we use virtue ethics theory to examine the types of virtues that are promulgated by ...religiosity and spirituality in shaping ethical behavior. The responses were coded in NVivo and the themes and concepts were organized into four categories (e.g., environmental context, individual religious virtues, individual non-religious spiritual virtues, and organizational ethical virtues). These categories contributed to ethical decision-making. The findings suggest that it is critical to understand ethical decision-making by identifying virtues that are important in religious, spiritual, and humanistic contexts in countries such as India, which are religiously and spiritually diverse. The study findings assist in the development of a framework of ethical decision-making that can be used for further empirical testing across both non-Western and Western contexts in multi-faith populations. Several theoretical, practical, and methodological contributions are presented along with suggestions for future research.
Recent research in empirical moral psychology attempts to understand (rather than place judgment on) the salient normative differences that laypeople have when making moral decisions by using survey ...methodology that is based on the operationalized principles from moral theories. The PPIMT is the first measure designed to assess respondents’ preference for the precepts implied in the three dominant moral theories: virtue ethics, deontology, and consequentialism. The current study used a latent modeling approach to determine the most theoretically and psychometrically-sound model for the PPIMT using a combined sample of college students from a southeastern university in U.S. and MTurk respondents. The PPIMT model fit was acceptable (χ
2
= 84.125,
df
= 40,
p
= 0.001; RMSEA = 0.052, 90%CI = 0.037 to 0.068; CFI = 0.980; SRMR = 0.035) with four items for Virtue, four items for Deontology, and three items for Consequentialism.
Social robots are increasingly developed for the companionship of children. In this article we explore the moral implications of children-robot friendships using the Aristotelian framework of virtue ...ethics. We adopt a moderate position and argue that, although robots cannot be virtue friends, they can nonetheless enable children to exercise ethical and intellectual virtues. The Aristotelian requirements for true friendship apply only partly to children: unlike adults, children relate to friendship as an educational play of exploration, which is constitutive of the way they acquire and develop virtues. We highlight that there is a relevant difference between the way we evaluate adult-robot friendship compared to children-robot friendship, which is rooted in the difference in moral agency and moral responsibility that generate the asymmetries in the moral status ascribed to adults versus children. We look into the role played by imaginary companions (IC) and personified objects (PO) in children’s moral development and claim that robots, understood as Personified Robotic Objects (PROs), play a similar role with such fictional entities, enabling children to exercise affection, moral imagination and reasoning, thus contributing to their development as virtuous adults. Nonetheless, we argue that adequate use of robots for children’s moral development is conditioned by several requirements related to design, technology and moral responsibility.
Virtue and Meaningful Work Beadle, Ron; Knight, Kelvin
Business ethics quarterly,
04/2012, Volume:
22, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This article deploys Alasdair MacIntyre's Aristotelian virtue ethics, in which meaningfulness is understood to supervene on human functioning, to bring empirical and ethical accounts of meaningful ...work into dialogue. Whereas empirical accounts have presented the experience of meaningful work either in terms of agents' orientation to work or as intrinsic to certain types of work, ethical accounts have largely assumed the latter formulation and subjected it to considerations of distributive justice. This article critiques both the empirical and ethical literatures from the standpoint of MacIntyre's account of the relationship between the development of virtuous dispositions and participation in work that is productive of goods internal to practices. This reframing suggests new directions for empirical and ethical enquiries.
One natural application of Linda Zagzebski's exemplarist moral theory (EMT) is found in the context of moral and intellectual character education. Zagzebski discusses this application in her recent ...book, commenting that 'exemplars can serve as a guide for moral training' (p. 129) and endorsing 'the learning of virtue by imitation' (p. 129). This theme has been pursued compellingly by authors working at the intersection of virtue ethics and education, contributing to an emerging case for exemplarist-based approaches to character education. I focus on intellectual character education and draw attention to an interesting case in which exemplarism in the classroom may be seen to inhibit, rather than promote, the development of intellectually virtuous character. This is the case of virtuous inquisitiveness.
Hubris among CEOs is generally considered to be undesirable: researchers in finance and in management have documented its unwelcome effects and the media ascribe many corporate failings to CEO ...hubris. However, the literature fails to provide a precise definition of CEO hubris and is mostly silent on how to prevent it. We use work on hubris in the fields of mythology, psychology, and ethics to develop a framework defining CEO hubris. Our framework describes a set of beliefs and behaviors, both psycho-pathological and unethical in nature, which characterize the problematic relationship of the hubris-infected CEO towards his or her own self, others and the world at large. We then demonstrate how the development of authentic leadership may contribute to preventing or attenuating hubris by addressing its psycho-pathological nature through the true self and meaningful relationships with others. In addition to its psycho-pathological dimension, CEO hubris also contains an ethical dimension. We therefore propose that the development of the virtue of reverence might contribute to the prevention or attenuation of CEO hubris, because reverence makes the individual aware of his or her place in the world order and membership of the community of humans.
Recent discussions of “eco-anxiety” have brought attention to feelings of hopelessness and despair associated with climate change and ecological disaster. When we accept the claims made by science ...about climate change and realize that our near future is full of unprecedented ecological crisis it is difficult to avoid feelings of anxiety about the future of human life on our planet. While these discussions have largely taken place in the context of psychology and psychoanalysis, there is a need to engage in ethical deliberation about both “eco-anxiety” and “eco-trauma.” In this paper, I argue that an environmental virtue of wonder can help to articulate the intersection of environmental ethics and “eco-anxiety” by offering a mean between the excess of anxiety and the deficiency of boredom. I situate this discussion within trauma studies and make connections between the pre-trauma of climate change, wonder, and eco-cinema. More specifically, I argue for a weird environmental ethic that embraces fuzzy boundaries of entangled environments and show that the virtue of wonder allows for flourishing within this context. I use cinema, and specifically Eco-Weird cinema, to argue for a shift in narratives about our present and our future as it relates to climate change.
Character and organization du Gay, Paul; Lopdrup-Hjorth, Thomas; Pedersen, Kirstine Zinck ...
Journal of cultural economy,
01/2019, Volume:
12, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
In recent years, questions of 'character' have become increasingly prominent in a range of policy contexts, from education to social welfare and from business to healthcare. What unites these various ...contemporary paens is an assumption that building 'character' is a crucial component of ethics and that it holds the key to establishing and maintaining virtuous conduct; moreover, that the cultivation of 'character' is at best under-valued and at worst actively undermined and denigrated in any number of contemporary economic and organizational practices. In this paper, we seek to interrogate key aspects of this upsurge of interest in 'character' as it has been articulated in particular recent and on-going debates about the reform of organizational life. We argue that this 'turn' suffers precisely from an abstraction and lack of contextual specificity - not simply in relation to questions of 'character formation,' but also in regard to matters of organization, and indeed the relationship of the one to the other - that severely curtails both its ethical reach and explanatory power.
Buchanan mentions at several points in his oeuvre the necessary role for a constitutional attitude. This attitude is both explanatory and evaluative; it explains why citizens value liberty but also ...highlights one of the necessary conditions for the stability of a free society. We argue that Buchanan's idea of a 'constitutional attitude' is extremely relevant, though underdeveloped. Firstly, it remains an open question what exactly a constitutional attitude means in practice and it is unclear what kind of institutions would foster it. Secondly, we believe that the success of his constitutional political economy project depends on some account of moral learning. Although Buchanan stresses the individual aspect of the process of self-constitution, he doesn't take sufficient account of how the institutional environment and our social relationships structure this process. We discuss to what extent a broadly neo-Aristotelian account of moral learning can provide a more robust foundation for Buchanan's ideas.
The last two decades have seen a great deal of scandals in the business world. Many of them have to do with accounting and management control, but in substantially different ways. This paper focuses ...on the dysfunctional effects of systems of measurement and incentives, and the possible ways to overcome those dysfunctional effects, achieving a stable state of goal congruence through the introduction of justice in the design and use of management control systems, by contributing to the ethical development within the organization. We first analyze how the discipline of control systems came into being, and show how, in the last decades, both in theory and practice, has gone in a direction of becoming more 'automatic,' and then, we provide some case studies of how they are at the origin of many of the scandals. Borrowing from Rosanas and Velilla (J Bus Eth 57:83-96, 2005) and from Cugueró-Escofet and Rosanas (Manag Account Res 24:23-40, 2013), we develop a model of control systems based on justice, where we make the distinction between formal and informal justice. We are then able to show how informal justice is the key element in the dynamics of a control system: to preserve formal justice, or to evolve toward formal justice. In any case, it is a necessary condition to reach a state of maximum goal congruence, stable through time, as a consequence of the ethical development that this type of systems are able to generate.
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