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Handbook of the Philosophical Foundations of Business Ethics pp 89–107Cite as

The Empirics of Virtue Theory: What Can Psychology Tell Us About Moral Character?

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Abstract

In this chapter, I submit that virtue theory offers the best framework to account for our moral experience in life and in the context of business decision-making. And I argue against an empirically grounded objection to virtue theory, which holds that character traits of the sort postulated by virtue theorists do not exist because differences in social circumstances explain people’s behavior rather than any character trait. The objection does not succeed because virtue is rarer than we may expect, because the experimental evidence does not support the claim that character lacks any explanatory power, because virtues cannot be merely reduced to behavioral dispositions, and because virtue theory is concerned with the whole span of a human life rather than isolated behavior.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Aretaic is derived from the ancient Greek word arete, usually translated as “excellence” or “virtue.” Aretaic thus means “of or pertaining to virtue or excellence.”

  2. 2.

    What I describe in this section is the standard, Aristotelian, eudaimonistic version of virtue ethics. There are indeed other varieties of virtue ethics. Noneudaimonist versions of virtue ethics reject a strong relationship between virtue and eudaimonia. They include character or motive consequentialism, intuitionist theories of virtue, Kierkegaardian existencial virtue ethics, and Nietzschean theories [71, 57].

  3. 3.

    The replication of the experiment was presumptively unavailable – for ethical reasons – until recently, when Jerry Burger, a psychology professor at Santa Clara University, managed to replicate the Milgram’s experiment with slight variations. The results simply confirm the original findings.

  4. 4.

    Alternatively, Doris proposes that the situationist argument can be articulated as abductive: the variousness of human behavior is best explained by reference to the hypothesis that virtues are rarely substantiated in human beings [35, p. 633].

  5. 5.

    One may also make a distinction between the explanatory and the predictive power of virtue attribution. While the question about predictive power is primarily an empirical question that can only be answered through observation, one may contend that the explanatory power of traits does not depend entirely on their predictive power.

  6. 6.

    Notice that I wrote “according to virtue” rather than “from virtue.” I shall discuss this distinction in section “Irreducible Virtue.”

  7. 7.

    Virtue theorists disagree on the question of the relation between virtue and imperfection. Whether the person of good character may ever respond – behaviorally or attitudinally – in deficient ways, that is, less than the wholly virtuous way, is a controversial subject. Annas seems to disagree. She advocates the strongest view: “a courageous person must behave courageously in roughly every situation”: “It is hard to see how any situation could be excluded” [6, p. 33]. Aristotle is sometimes interpreted as providing a more realistic portrait of virtue: “Aristotle’s virtuous person may act wrongly in seven different ways while remaining virtuous” [56].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Legal and Ethical Studies, Fordham University, 1790 Broadway Ave, 11th FL, #1144, New York, NY, 10019, USA

    Dr. Miguel Alzola Ph.D. (Assistant Professor of Business Ethics)

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Correspondence to Miguel Alzola Ph.D. .

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  1. Peter Löscher-Stiftungslehrstuhl für Wirtschaftsethik, Technische Universität München, München, Germany

    Christoph Luetge

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Alzola, M. (2013). The Empirics of Virtue Theory: What Can Psychology Tell Us About Moral Character?. In: Luetge, C. (eds) Handbook of the Philosophical Foundations of Business Ethics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1494-6_48

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