Episode 6: Virtue Ethics

Episode 6: Virtue Ethics in our series, Ethics in Finance is Good!

Episode 6: Virtue Ethics, the sixth part of Seven Pillars Institute’s financial ethics video training series, “Ethics in Finance is Good!” is an easy to understand explainer on Virtue Ethics (really).

In most other theories of ethics, whether an act is moral depends on the act itself. When someone cheats on an exam, we evaluate that act of cheating in its context, to decide if cheating in that case is ethical. Act-based ethical theories (utilitarianism, deontology) make ethical assessments by looking at the act.

In contrast, virtue ethics is an agent-based ethical theory.  Aristotle more or less founded virtue ethics sometime in the fourth century BCE. So he would say, whether an act is right or wrong depends on an evaluation of the character of the moral agent who performed the act. It’s rather politic these days to say we should not judge another.  If a person cheats constantly over time, can we judge her to be a cheater? Well, Aristotle would say yes, a person is a cheater if she keeps cheating all the time. Yup.

Aristotle:

Virtue, then, is of two sorts, virtue of thought and virtue of character. Virtue of thought arises and grows mostly from teaching; that is why it needs experience and time. Virtue of character results from habit…And so the virtues arise in us neither by nature nor against nature. Rather, we are by nature able to acquire them, and we are completed through habit.

Read more about virtue ethics here and here.