Virtue Ethics Approach Research Articles

Public health, pluralism, and the telos of political virtue.

In the ethics of public health, questions of virtue, that is, of what it means for public health to act excellently, have received little attention. This omission needs remedy first because achieving improvements in population-wide health can be in tension with goals like respect for the liberty, self-determination, or non-oppression of various individuals or groups. A virtue-ethics approach is flexible and well-suited for the kind of deliberation required to resolve or mitigate such tension. Public health requires practically wise and careful thinking, which virtue ethics brings with it. Furthermore, too tight a focus on delivering outcomes in determining how public health should act has, in some cases, actually undermined its ability to achieve those consequences. However, the main concern about incorporating virtue into public health in a pluralistic society is likely to be that virtue is generally teleological, and we would surely need some widely agreed upon idea of something like flourishing or the common good for this to work. In this paper, I propose that for public health to express virtue in its work, it must express a commitment to justice as it goes about its business promoting and protecting the health of the population. Justice is both a contributor toward better health for groups in society, and a worthwhile goal in its own right. I will sketch an argument that justice as non-oppression - not merely health equity - is the right telos toward which excellent public health should aim in a pluralist society.

What Good Are We Seeking? Child Soldiers and Thick Ethical Concepts

In this paper, I show how a virtue ethics approach to child soldiering is centered on thick ethical concepts that seek to capture in a descriptively and evaluatively rich way how child soldiering affects children’s moral character development and their relationships with others. Virtue ethics thus provides a new perspective that departs from the standard ethical approach, which focuses largely on thin questions of the rights and responsibilities of children in war. The virtue ethics tradition reorients us toward a deeper concern for children’s moral good and thus provides an important and underexplored approach for thinking about child soldiers from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Striking the balance: ethical challenges and social implications of AI-induced power shifts in healthcare organizations

AbstractThe emergence of new digital technologies in modern work organizations is also changing the way employees and employers communicate, design work processes and responsibilities, and delegate. This paper takes an interdisciplinary—namely sociological and philosophical—perspective on the use of AI in healthcare work organizations. Using this example, structural power relations in modern work organizations are first examined from a sociological perspective, and it is shown how these structural power relations, decision-making processes, and areas of responsibility shift when AI is used. In the subsequent ethical part, opportunities for a fairer organization of work, but also dangers due to possibly changed power relations are elaborated and evaluated by presenting a realistic scenario from everyday clinical practice. After combining a proceduralist account of organizational ethics with a virtue-ethical approach, it is argued that certain organizational and character dispositions are necessary for employers and employees to meet the challenge of changing structural power relations in the future. With the same goal, a summative sociological perspective discusses challenges to workplace co-determination.

Towards an understanding of the embedded nature of everyday ethical reasoning in paramedic education and practice

Paramedicine is increasingly complex in affective, behavioural, and cognitive domains of practice. The ability to navigate this complexity is essential for paramedics who are required to simultaneously practice assertively, dynamically, sensitively, and professionally. Although these may seem to be superficially incongruent ways of practising, through insightful and reflexive practice underpinned by appropriate ethical approaches, paramedics can navigate the complexity inherent in paramedic work whether care episodes are routine or extreme. In what follows, we discuss the potential of virtue ethics as a way of navigating complexity in paramedic practice and preparing clinicians for the varied work they manage as paramedics. We do this by first describing some of the issues faced by the modern paramedic, outlining ethical approaches to practice, then working through a vignette showing how a deeper understanding of ethics and utilising a virtue ethics approach may have helped the clinicians navigate a typical ethical dilemma found in practice.

Phronesis (Practical Wisdom) as the Key to Professional Ethics in Coaching

I understand coaching as a multi-faceted profession; and the theoretical assumption undergirding this short paper is that the professional ethics of coaching is best grounded in a general virtue ethical approach to the professional ethics, centered around the ideal of phronesis (practical wisdom) in an Aristotelian sense. For Aristotle (1985), we seek evidence not only in the theories of “the wise” but also the views of “the many.” I would thus be inclined to ground a virtue ethical approach to coaching empirically in the extensive research already conducted at the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues into various professionals, and to ground it theoretically in recent efforts to revive an Aristotelian concept of phronesis as excellence in ethical decision-making (see further in Kristjánsson, 2024).

The ethical wisdom of AI developers

AbstractThis paper explores ethical wisdom in the artificial intelligence (AI) developer community. Despite robust literature about the need for virtue ethics approaches in AI development, little research has directly engaged with the developer community about their progress in this regard. We have thus conducted semi-structured interviews with a worldwide cohort of 40 developers, which focused on their awareness of ethics issues, how they navigate ethical challenges, and the barriers they encounter in developing ethical wisdom. We find developers are largely aware of the ethical territories they must navigate and the moral dilemmas they personally encounter, but they face limited and inconsistent resources for ethical guidance or training. Furthermore, there are significant barriers inhibiting the development of ethical wisdom in the AI developer community, including the industry’s fixation on innovation, the narrow scope of technical practice, limited provisions for reflection and dialogue, and incentive structures that prioritize profits and prestige. The paper concludes by emphasizing the need to address the gap in domain-specific ethical skill and provides recommendations for organizations, educators, and the AI developer community.

Aristotelian Practical Wisdom (Phronesis) as the Key to Professional Ethics in Teaching

This article is about a virtue ethical approach to the professional ethics of teaching, centred around the ideal of phronesis (practical wisdom) in an Aristotelian sense. It is grounded empirically in extensive research conducted at the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues into teachers and other UK professionals, and it is grounded theoretically in recent efforts to revive an Aristotelian concept of phronesis as excellence in ethical decision-making. The article argues for the need for a virtue-based approach to professional practice, based on time-honoured Aristotelian assumptions and culminating in a conceptually viable construct of phronesis as a psycho-moral integrator and adjudicator. After setting some of the historical background in Sect. 1, Sect. 2 charts the most relevant empirical findings. Section 3 introduces a call for phronesis as a guide to virtue-based professional ethics: its role, nature, and methods of instruction. Section 4 adds some caveats and concerns about if and how phronesis can be cultivated as part of teacher training. Finally, Sect. 5 offers some concluding remarks about the novelty and radicality of the approach on offer in this article.

Living well with AI: Virtue, education, and artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence technologies have become a ubiquitous part of human life. This prompts us to ask, ‘how should we live well with artificial intelligence?’ Currently, the most prominent candidate answers to this question are principlist. According to these approaches, if you teach people some finite set of principles or convince them to adopt the right rules, people will be able to live and act well with artificial intelligence, even in an evolving and opaque moral world. We find the dominant principlist approaches to be ill-suited to providing forward-looking moral guidance regarding living well with artificial intelligence. We analyze some of the proposed principles to show that they oscillate between being too vague and too specific. We also argue that such rules are unlikely to be flexible enough to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances. By contrast, we argue for an Aristotelian virtue ethics approach to artificial intelligence ethics. Aristotelian virtue ethics provides a concrete and actionable guidance that is also flexible; thus, it is uniquely well placed to deal with the forward-looking and rapidly changing landscape of life with artificial intelligence. However, virtue ethics is agent-based rather than action-based. Using virtue ethics as a basis for living well with artificial intelligence requires ensuring that at least some virtuous agents also possess the relevant scientific and technical expertise. Since virtue ethics does not prescribe a set of rules, it requires exemplars who can serve as a model for those learning to be virtuous. Cultivating virtue is challenging, especially in the absence of moral sages. Despite this difficulty, we think the best option is to attempt what virtue ethics requires, even though no system of training can guarantee the production of virtuous agents. We end with two alternative visions – one from each of the two authors – about the practicality of such an approach.

Duty, Virtue, and Filial Love

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to argue that the normative significance of the inner aspects of filial piety – in particular, filial love – is better captured when we understand filial love as part of the virtue of filial piety rather than as an object of duty. After briefly introducing the value of filial love, I argue that the idea of a duty to love one's loving parents faces serious difficulties in making sense of the normative significance of filial love. Then I show why the virtue-ethical approach to filial love, which views filial love as a constitutive part of the virtue of filial piety, can do justice to its normative significance while avoiding the difficulties.

“It’s a financial decision”: students’ ethical understandings of non-government faith-based schooling in a neoliberal society

ABSTRACT The expansion of faith-based schools as marketised non-government institutions raises ethical questions, including their appeal to students. This article utilises focus groups with 24 Australian secondary students to identify ethical virtues in their perceptions of non-government faith-based schooling in a neoliberal education market cultivating a conflicting ethics character seeking to respond to both collective and individual goals. Taking the virtue ethics approach, the paper portrays how students perceive faith-based schooling as a financial enterprise contesting the virtues of justice, self-improvement, and courage. Firstly, findings illustrate students’ ethical discomfort with how a push for more socially just outcomes in such schools has, ironically, resulted in greater injustice. Specifically, findings capture a disjuncture between the schools’ emphasis on fee/affordability programmes for greater accessibility and their implications, i.e., the creation of unjust social divides between the “haves” and “have-nots”. Secondly, a mixed picture portrays some students’ virtuous behaviour of self-improvement in a faith-based schooling space seen as a “client”-oriented environment that should be utilised for one’s advantage, while others illustrate how such a system can, in fact, alleviate their need to actively seek to improve their skills and/or social engagement. Correspondingly, some students highlight how being outside the non-government faith-based schooling system “forces” them to strive academically or be socially proactive– regarded as working towards developing their virtue of self-improvement. The paper concludes with the students’ call for a courageous course of action for faith-based schooling, envisioned to promote more affordable and equitable educational opportunities and produce ethical forms of socially just schooling.

Moral Cultivation and the Quantified Self: Assessing the Self Understanding of Data Profiles Generated by AI with a Virtue Ethics Approach

Supporters of personal data collection and analysis contend that data profiles generated from AI algorithms represent a desirable pursuit for the quantified self. Proponents of the quantified self claim that AI-generated data profiles represent a more objective and truthful account of individual lives. They also argue that the quantified self fosters human flourishing by supplying individuals with data-informed accounts about their lives. First, I will trace the technological origins of the quantified self. Second, the first claim will be critiqued by demonstrating that the quantified self presents a reduced and subjectively abstracted picture of human life. Third, the second claim will be questioned, from a virtue ethics approach, to show how the quantified self’s reduced concept of self-examination is detached from self-cultivation. Fourth, a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics framework will be applied to argue that the self-knowledge sought by the quantified self hinders agents’ practical reasoning.

VIRT2UE: A European train-the-trainer programme for teaching research integrity

Universities and other research institutions are increasingly providing additional training in research integrity to improve the quality and reliability of research. Various training courses have been developed, with diverse learning goals and content. Despite the importance of training that focuses on moral character and professional virtues, there remains a lack of training that adopts a virtue ethics approach. To address this, we, a European Commission-funded consortium, have designed a train-the-trainer programme for research integrity. The programme is based on (1) virtue ethics, (2) the ethos of science, (3) learning by doing and (4) learner-centred teaching. The blended learning programme combines e-learning modules with participatory group sessions. Trainers are taught how to guide researchers through a series of structured exercises for fostering reflection on scientific virtues, and how to promote understanding and application of the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity. Trainers are provided with adaptable tools and resources that can be used and combined in different ways. The programme implementation began in Spring 2020 and 470 trainers have participated to date. When trainers were asked to grade – between 0 (very bad) and 10 (excellent) – the e-learning modules and the participatory exercises, 60% scored a grade 8 or higher (median = 8, IQR = 2) for the e-learning modules, whereas 80% scored a grade 8 or higher (median = 9, IQR = 1) for the participatory exercises. A majority felt that the training helped them as a trainer to learn about ways to organise and teach a research integrity course (82%) and would recommend the interactive exercises to others (92%). Trainers have educated over 3300 researchers in Europe using our virtue-based approach. The VIRT2UE train-the-trainer programme fosters research integrity by providing trainers with exercises and tools which enable them to stimulate the development of good researchers across Europe.

Technology, Virtue and the Good Life: Between Production and Consumption


 
 
 This paper explores recent developments in the virtue ethics approach to human flourishing in technological societies. I discuss the merits of virtue ethics in a broader context of various philosophies of technology. I propose that a distinction can be made between two broad approaches to the question of the good life and technology: the production approach that focuses on the roles technologies could and do play in production for the elimination of various forms of labour and the consumption approach that focuses on the role of technology in everyday social settings and interactions outside the workplace. Finding that the virtue ethics approach currently remains almost exclusively focused on consumption, I conclude the article with a suggestion for how virtue theory can be advanced beyond consumption using the resources of the same virtue ethics tradition.
 
 

WITHDRAWN: A virtue ethical approach to the use of artificial intelligence

WITHDRAWN: A virtue ethical approach to the use of artificial intelligence

Credentialing Character: A Virtue Ethics Approach to Professionalizing Healthcare Ethics Consultation Services.

In the process of professionalization, the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) has emphasized process and knowledge as core competencies for clinical ethics consultants; however, the credentialing program launched in 2018 fails to address both pillars. The inadequacy of this program recalls earlier critiques of the professionalization effort made by Giles R. Scofield and H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr.. Both argue that ethics consultation is not a profession and the effort to professionalize is motivated by self-interest. One argument they offer against professionalization is that ethics consultants lack normative expertise. Although the question of expertise cannot be resolved completely, the accusation of self-interest can be addressed. Underlying these critiques is a concern for hubris, which can be addressed in certification and the vetting of candidates.Drawing on the virtue ethics literature of Alasdair MacIntyre and Edmund D. Pellegrino, I argue that medicine is a moral community in which ethics consultants are moral agents with a duty to foster the virtue of humility (or what Pellegrino and Thomasma call self-effacement). The implications of this argument include a requirement for self-reflection in one's role as a moral agent and reflection on one's progress toward developing or deepening virtuous engagement with the moral community of medicine. I recommend that professionalization of clinical ethics consultants include a self-reflective narrative component in the initial certification and ongoing renewal of certification where clinical ethics consultants address the emotional dimensions of their work as well as their own moral development. Adopting a teleological view of ethics consultation and incorporating narratives that work toward that purpose will mitigate the self-interest and hubris of the professionalization project.

Conscientious Objection Based on Patient Identity

Conscientious Objection Based on Patient Identity

COMMENT: Ethics and professionalism of a community health worker: A virtue ethics approach.

Community health workers are the link between the community and the health system, delivering primary care services at the frontline. Every profession has its own ethics and professional values, and there is a need to formulate the ethics of community health work which should be informed by their rich experiential wisdom. In one such effort, we interviewed a senior community health worker in the Tamil Nadu health system and present it here as a virtue ethics case study. Several situations of ethical conflict arising in her work, and her process for resolving these conflicts were discussed during the interview. The worker discussed some ethical principles: doing good, not doing any harm, maintaining justice, being honest, providing respectful care, maintaining self-respect, being accessible, earning the community's trust, and building solidarity. This interview confirms the assumption that ethics and professionalism are inherent in this community health worker, and emphasises the need for systematic research to document the experiences of such frontline workers, and to frame relevant standards of ethics and professionalism in the local context.

A virtue-ethical approach to cultured meat.

A virtue-ethical approach to cultured meat.

Applying Aristotelian and Confucian Virtue Ethics to Humane Work in the Business Context

What is humane work? What does such work look like in a business context? This paper articulates two ways of thinking about humane work using an Aristotelian and a Confucian virtue ethics approach. This approach reveals the need to think about (1) work’s connection not merely with autonomy but with self-refinement and self-perfection, with craft, and with the production of genuinely good goods; (2) possible dangers (e.g., the risk of generating envy) of focusing too much on pay issues in connection with humane work; (3) the relation between humane work and political regimes; and (4) the role played by stakeholders other than managers in the humanizing of work.

AI and society: a virtue ethics approach

AI and society: a virtue ethics approach