Virtues and virtue ethics
By exploring the theories that underpin our participants’ experiences, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of how these frameworks apply in practical settings.
Summary
- Virtues are qualities or attitudes that help people become the best they can be. Virtue ethics believes that developing these qualities throughout life leads to good moral behavior and personal growth.
- Instead of following strict moral rules, virtue ethics suggests that a person with the right virtues will naturally make the right choices.
- A key strength of virtue ethics is that it recognises people are connected to others and shaped by their social and cultural environment. Developing good character traits is seen as a better way to encourage moral behavior than relying on strict rules that don’t consider real-life situations.
- In healthcare, especially when caring for frail older adults, professionals should focus on developing virtues like empathy, kindness, competence, honesty, trustworthiness, humility, and courage.
Virtues are most commonly defined as attitudes or character dispositions that strive for human excellence, or the best we can be. Developing virtues throughout our lives is believed by virtue ethics to result in optimal moral behaviour and full realisation of the human potential for the good. Virtues require a lifelong engagement with moral self-development. Rather than providing universal rules that guide us towards morally legitimate action, virtue ethics presupposes that someone possessing relevant virtues will be automatically inclined to do the right thing. It also works the other way around: the right thing to do is defined by virtue ethics as ‘what a perfectly virtuous person would do’.
Virtue ethics is an ancient form of ethics which predates modern alternatives such as Kantian ethics or utilitarianism. Notions of virtue were dominantly present in the work of thinkers such as Confucius and Aristotle. In recent times, a renewed interest in virtue ethics can be seen in philosophy. The advantage of virtue ethics is that it is more capable of acknowledging that human beings are interdependent and that they are always embedded in a socio-cultural context that guides their behaviour. It is believed that developing and maintaining virtuous attitudes is a better method for stimulating moral behaviour and remedying moral crises in society than prescriptive universal guidelines that do not take context into account. A virtuous moral actor possesses the practical wisdom to act in ways appropriate to a given contextual situation and is therefore more flexible.
Examples of classic virtues include, besides the overarching virtue of practical wisdom, dispositions expressing courage, justice, temperance etc. In these classic accounts, a virtue always exists in the proper mean between an excess and defect of a certain trait. For instance, courage as a virtue is the proper mean between fearlessness (excess) and cowardice (defect). This proper mean is relative to us and to the situation at hand. What may be rightful anger in one situation can be an excess in another situation. So virtuous actors should always be reflexive and adapting their choices and conduct depending on the circumstances.
Modern accounts of virtues have expanded the list of possibly relevant attitudes and dispositions almost endlessly. In the context of providing healthcare to frail older people we might think of endorsing the development of virtues such as empathy, care, competence, truthfulness, beneficence, trustworthiness, humility and courage in healthcare professionals.