Virtue Ethics and Action Guidance

2021 ◽  
Vol 82 (4) ◽  
pp. 565-582
Author(s):  
Daniel J. Daly
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Substituted Judgment ◽  
Moral Exemplars ◽  
Action Guidance ◽  
Practicable Method

Theological ethicists rarely allow the virtues to perform the heavyweight work of guiding action. This article contests this tradition and argues that, and demonstrates how, virtue ethics provides a practicable method of normative action guidance. The article contends that there are five interrelated but distinct modes of virtue action guidance. The first three modes—dialogue, emulation, and substituted judgment—invite the agent to take counsel with moral exemplars. The interrogative and discovery modes direct agents to morally deliberate using thick accounts of the virtues.

scholarly journals Eudaimonism about Virtue and Qualified Agent Right Action: Some Prospects for Environmental Virtue Ethics

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Duncan Christian Martin
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Environmental Ethics ◽  
Right Action ◽  
Environmental Virtue ◽  
Concrete Action ◽  
Environmental Virtue Ethics ◽  
The Right ◽  
Action Guidance

<p>In this thesis, I aim to show that virtue oriented approaches to environmental ethics are in a position to provide satisfying answers to two central ethical questions: “What kind of person should I be?”, and “What should I do?” I argue that two such approaches – Rosalind Hursthouse’s environmental virtue ethics and Philip Cafaro’s account of environmental vice – provide insights about how we ought to be with regard to the environment, in terms of character and attitudes. I then defend Hursthouse’s account of right action against several objections. First, I respond to the worry that a shortage of environmental exemplars might count against Hursthouse, by showing that non-virtuous agents can conceive of what to do by seeking to avoid acting from environmental vices. Second, I respond the worry that her account of right action fails to generate the right result for non-virtuous agents in some cases, by showing that such cases can be accounted for by appeal to the distinction between action guidance and action assessment. Third, I consider the worry that her theory will fail to provide concrete action guidance. Theories which seek to provide concrete action guidance in all contexts face serious problems of their own, I respond. Further, I maintain that Hursthouse is not ruled out from providing the sort of action guidance her critics are interested in.</p>

Communication Ethics and Virtue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janie M. Harden Fritz
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Media Ethics ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Moral Exemplars ◽  
Communication Ethics ◽  
Philippa Foot ◽  
Major Branch ◽  
Theoretical Foundations

Virtue approaches to communication ethics have experienced a resurgence over the last decades. Tied to rhetoric since the time of Aristotle, virtue ethics offers scholars in the broad field of communication an approach to ethics based on character and human flourishing as an alternative to deontology. In each major branch of communication scholarship, the turn to virtue ethics has followed a distinctive trajectory in response to concerns about the adequacy of theoretical foundations for academic and applied work in communication ethics. Recent approaches to journalism and media ethics integrate moral psychology and virtue ethics to focus on moral exemplars, drawing on the work of Philippa Foot and Rosalind Hursthouse, or explore journalism as a MacIntyrean tradition of practice. Recent work in human communication ethics draws on MacIntyre’s approach to narrative, situating communication ethics within virtue structures that protect and promote particular goods in a moment of narrative and virtue contention.

Agent-based Virtue Ethics and the Problem of Action Guidance

2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liezl van Zyl
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Fundamental Problem ◽  
Right Action ◽  
Agent Based ◽  
Michael Slote ◽  
The One ◽  
The Right ◽  
Action Guidance

AbstractAgent-based accounts of virtue ethics, such as the one provided by Michael Slote, base the rightness of action in the motive from which it proceeds. A frequent objection to agent-basing is that it does not allow us to draw the commonsense distinction between doing the right thing and doing it for the right reasons, that is, between act-evaluation and agent-appraisal. I defend agent-basing against this objection, but argue that a more fundamental problem for this account is its apparent failure to provide adequate argue action guidance. I then show that this problem can be solved by supplementing an agent-based criterion of right action with a hypothetical-agent criterion of action guidance.

scholarly journals Eudaimonism about Virtue and Qualified Agent Right Action: Some Prospects for Environmental Virtue Ethics

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Duncan Christian Martin
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Environmental Ethics ◽  
Right Action ◽  
Environmental Virtue ◽  
Concrete Action ◽  
Environmental Virtue Ethics ◽  
The Right ◽  
Action Guidance

<p>In this thesis, I aim to show that virtue oriented approaches to environmental ethics are in a position to provide satisfying answers to two central ethical questions: “What kind of person should I be?”, and “What should I do?” I argue that two such approaches – Rosalind Hursthouse’s environmental virtue ethics and Philip Cafaro’s account of environmental vice – provide insights about how we ought to be with regard to the environment, in terms of character and attitudes. I then defend Hursthouse’s account of right action against several objections. First, I respond to the worry that a shortage of environmental exemplars might count against Hursthouse, by showing that non-virtuous agents can conceive of what to do by seeking to avoid acting from environmental vices. Second, I respond the worry that her account of right action fails to generate the right result for non-virtuous agents in some cases, by showing that such cases can be accounted for by appeal to the distinction between action guidance and action assessment. Third, I consider the worry that her theory will fail to provide concrete action guidance. Theories which seek to provide concrete action guidance in all contexts face serious problems of their own, I respond. Further, I maintain that Hursthouse is not ruled out from providing the sort of action guidance her critics are interested in.</p>

scholarly journals Moral exemplars for the virtuous machine: the clinician’s role in ethical artificial intelligence for healthcare

AI and Ethics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sumeet Hindocha ◽  
Cosmin Badea
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Ethical Framework ◽  
Moral Exemplars ◽  
Ethical Concerns ◽  
Moral Exemplar ◽  
Moral Theories ◽  
High Level

AbstractArtificial Intelligence (AI) continues to pervade several aspects of healthcare with pace and scale. The need for an ethical framework in AI to address this has long been recognized, but to date most efforts have delivered only high-level principles and value statements. Herein, we explain the need for an ethical framework in healthcare AI, the different moral theories that may serve as its basis, the rationale for why we believe this should be built around virtue ethics, and explore this in the context of five key ethical concerns for the introduction of AI in healthcare. Some existing work has suggested that AI may replace clinicians. We argue to the contrary, that the clinician will not be replaced, nor their role attenuated. Rather, they will be integral to the responsible design, deployment, and regulation of AI in healthcare, acting as the moral exemplar for the virtuous machine. We collate relevant points from the literature and formulate our own to present a coherent argument for the central role of clinicians in ethical AI and propose ideas to help advance efforts to employ ML-based solutions within healthcare. Finally, we highlight the responsibility of not only clinicians, but also data scientists, tech companies, ethicists, and regulators to act virtuously in realising the vision of ethical and accountable AI in healthcare.

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