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Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Aristotle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aristotle. Show all posts

Thursday, November 2, 2017

Culture and Business Ethics

Marshall Schminke
www.ethicalsystems.com
Originally published October 3, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

What do most companies overlook when it comes to organizational design?

Supervisors. Despite some high profile missteps, organizations generally do a pretty good job of making ethics a front-and-center issue at the upper levels.  Likewise, they invest heavily in education and training at the level of the rank-and-file worker.  But as with so many strategically important issues, low-to-mid-level supervisors are often ignored.  This is troublesome, because research shows the single most important factor in driving employees’ ethical actions is not what top managers or coworkers say or do.  Rather, it is the immediate supervisor—and whether he or she is capable of creating an ethically supportive work culture that employees experience every day—that matters most.  Yet in most cases, these “sergeants and lieutenants” of the workplace receive relatively little attention when it comes to ethics and ethics training.

How can E&C teams better emphasize ethics vs. compliance?

Culture. It’s not that rules aren’t important.  They are.  And they must be understood and followed.  But complex business environments—and complex ethical rules and standards—cannot address every situation employees might encounter.  Therefore, the only real insurance organizations have for getting the best ethical effort possible from their employees is to bake it into the culture and climate, where it becomes second nature to employees trying to do their best in a tough business world.

What have you learned as a part of the ES culture measurement working group?

As a culture and climate researcher for years, this experience has been truly eye-opening for me.  It has introduced me to different perspectives on culture and, in turn, exposed me to completely different ways of thinking about how to create and maintain effective ethical cultures.  For example, of the eight components of ethical culture identified by the Ethical Systems culture measurement working group, I had only a passing familiarity with the ethical awareness and ethical leadership components.  This experience has not only improved my understanding of those components, but has also heightened my awareness of how they fit and interact with the other six components.

The information is here.

Saturday, August 27, 2016

Empirical Approaches to Moral Character

Miller, Christian B.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2016 Edition),
Edward N. Zalta (ed.), forthcoming

The turn of the century saw a significant increase in the amount of attention being paid by philosophers to empirical issues about moral character. Dating back at least to Plato and Aristotle in the West, and Confucius in the East, philosophers have traditionally drawn on empirical data to some extent in their theorizing about character. One of the main differences in recent years has been the source of this empirical data, namely the work of social and personality psychologists on morally relevant thought and action.

This entry briefly examines four recent empirical approaches to moral character. It will draw on the psychology literature where appropriate, but the main focus will be on the significance of that work for philosophers interested in better understanding moral character. The four areas are situationism, the CAPS model, the Big Five model, and the VIA. The remainder of this entry devotes a section to each of them.

The entry is here.

Monday, February 22, 2016

Morality is a muscle. Get to the gym.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
The Week
Originally published January 18, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

Take the furor over "trigger warnings" in college classes and textbooks. One side believes that in order to protect the sensitivities of some students, professors or writers should warn readers or students about some at the beginning of an article or course about controversial topics. Another side says that if someone can't handle rough material, then he can stop reading or step out of the room, and that trigger warnings are an unconscionable affront to freedom of thought. Interestingly, both schools clearly believe that there is one moral stance which takes the form of a rule that should be obeyed always and everywhere. Always and everywhere we should have trigger warnings to protect people's sensibilities, or always and everywhere we should not.

Both sides need a lecture in virtue ethics.

If I try to stretch my virtue of empathy, it doesn't seem at all absurd to me to imagine that, say, a young woman who has been raped might be made quite uncomfortable by a class discussion of rape in literature, and that this is something to which we should be sensitive. But the trigger warning people maybe should think more about the moral imperative to develop the virtue of courage, including intellectual courage. Then it seems to me that if you just put aside grand moral questions about freedom of inquiry, simple basic human courtesy would mean a professor would try to take account a trauma victim's sensibilities while teaching sensitive material, and students would understand that part of the goal of a college class is to challenge them. We don't need to debate universal moral values, we just need to be reminded to exercise virtue more.

The article is here.

Thursday, May 14, 2015

Why Aristole Wants You to Be Good

By Kristjan Kristjansson
Big Ideas at Slate.com

Here is an excerpt:

Many social scientists consider this philosophical question quirky at best. The reason? An abundance of psychological evidence demonstrates the extrinsic benefits of moral choices over immoral ones, even for psychology’s Eldorado: subjective well-being. Of course, even though social scientists pride themselves on their value-neutrality, they are rarely neutral with regard to what they consider the “ungrounded grounder” of all human strivings, namely happiness, and they typically understand happiness as subjective well-being.

A case in point here is the copious literature on the benefits of the moral emotion of gratitude for subjective well-being. We now know with certainty—at least the sort of certainty to which any social scientific inquiry can aspire—that grateful people are in general happy people. Over and above that, meticulous empirical research on gratitude has shown all sorts of instrumental benefits for what social scientists call “pro-social ends.” Thus, as a moral barometer, gratitude attends affirmatively to a positive moral change in our environment; as a moral motivator, gratitude urges us to contribute to the welfare of our benefactor (or even third parties) in the future; as a moral reinforcer, gratitude makes benefactors more likely to replicate their benevolent acts at later junctures and in different contexts.

The entire article is here.


Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Aristotle on 'Flourishing'

How to live a good life? Aristotle’s answer was live virtuously: do what a virtuous person would do.

Learn more about Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics explained how to flourish.

Narrated by Stephen Fry. Scripted by Nigel Warburton. Originally published 30 March 2015.


Thursday, November 20, 2014

Teaching Moral Values

Panellists: Michael Portillo, Anne McElvoy, Claire Fox and Giles Fraser

Witnesses: Adrian Bishop, Dr. Sandra Cooke, Professor Jesse Prinz and Dr. Ralph Levinson

Teaching your children a set of moral values to live their lives by is arguably one of the most important aspects of being a parent - and for some, one of the most neglected. In Japan that job could soon be handed to teachers and become part of the school curriculum. The Central Council for Education is making preparations to introduce moral education as an official school subject, on a par with traditional subjects like Japanese, mathematics and science. In a report the council says that since moral education plays an important role not only in helping children realise a better life for themselves but also in ensuring sustainable development of the Japanese state and society, so it should to taught more formally and the subject codified. The prospect of the state defining a set of approved values to be taught raises some obvious questions, but is it very far away from what we already accept? School websites often talk of their "moral ethos". The much quoted aphorism "give me the child until he is seven and I'll give you the man" is attributed to the Jesuits and why are church schools so popular if it's not for their faith based ethos? Moral philosophy is an enormously diverse subject, but why not use it to give children a broad set of tools and questions to ask, to help them make sense of a complex and contradictory world? If we try and make classrooms morally neutral zones are we just encouraging moral relativism? Our society is becoming increasingly secular and finding it hard to define a set of common values. As another disputed epigram puts it "When men stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing. They believe in anything."

Could moral education fill the moral vacuum?

Moral Maze - Presented by Michael Buerk

The audio file can be accessed here.

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Ancient Ethical Theory

By Richard Parry
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Substantial Revision August 13, 2014

While moral theory does not invent morality, or even reflection on it, it does try to bring systematic thinking to bear on the phenomenon. Ancient moral theory, however, does not attempt to be a comprehensive account of all the phenomena that fall under the heading of morality. Rather, assuming piecemeal opinions and practices, it tries to capture its underlying essence. It is the nature of such an enterprise to evaluate and criticize some of these opinions and practices but that is not its primary goal. Ancient moral theory tries to provide a reflective account of an essential human activity so one can grasp what is of fundamental importance in pursuing it. In historical order, the theories to be considered in this article are those of Socrates as presented in certain dialogues of Plato; Plato in the Republic; Aristotle; the Cynics; Cyrenaic hedonism; Epicurus; the Stoics; and Pyrrhonian skepticism.

The entire post is here.

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Moral Responsibility

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
First published Sat Jan 6, 2001; substantive revision Wed Mar 26, 2014

When a person performs or fails to perform a morally significant action, we sometimes think that a particular kind of response is warranted. Praise and blame are perhaps the most obvious forms this reaction might take. For example, one who encounters a car accident may be regarded as worthy of praise for having saved a child from inside the burning car, or alternatively, one may be regarded as worthy of blame for not having used one's mobile phone to call for help. To regard such agents as worthy of one of these reactions is to regard them as responsible for what they have done or left undone. (These are examples of other-directed ascriptions of responsibility. The reaction might also be self-directed, e.g., one can recognize oneself to be blameworthy). Thus, to be morally responsible for something, say an action, is to be worthy of a particular kind of reaction—praise, blame, or something akin to these—for having performed it.

The entire article is here.

Sunday, December 15, 2013

Whose Character?

Why Character Education is Inherently Flawed

Lelac Almagor
Boston Review
November 26, 2013

Here is an excerpt:

In pursuit of character education, our schools have convened research groups to identify the most important character strengths, taught special courses on character alongside electives such as music and art, and assembled “character report cards” with separate ratings from each teacher for each trait. The favored buzzwords are “dual-purpose instruction,” infusing ordinary lessons about fractions or paying attention with the language of character. “Make it the air we breathe,” one administrator told us. “Put it into everything.” When kids misbehave, we urge them to show more character; students who do well win character awards at special assemblies; we start giving points for integrity, and then integrity starts to mean following directions, and then we start taking integrity points away. Instead of teaching these strong and simple values, we muddy and diminish them until they are just another set of arbitrary rules, or new names for the same old rules we’ve always had. Character starts to look a little more like compliance. The lapse in integrity is our own.

For my part, I’ve given up on character education as such, on pre-planned lessons pushing abstract nouns. I won’t set out to repair some deficit in my kids that can be blamed for the trouble they encounter. Nor do I favor reframing our everyday conversations to match the jargon of the day.

The entire article is here.

Monday, September 23, 2013

The Partially Examined Life Podcast: Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics

Discussing Books 1 and 2.

What is virtue, and how can I eat it? Do not enjoy this episode too much, or too little, but just the right amount. Apparently, if you haven’t already have been brought up with the right habits, you may as well give up. Plus, is Michael Jackson the Aristotelian ideal?

The podcast can be heard here.

All ethics and morality audio resources as they apply to psychology can be found here.

Thursday, September 19, 2013

To Bee or not To Bee: Punishment, bee keeping, and the virtue of making choices

By Katrina Siefferd
Psychiatric Ethics Blog - Kerry Gutridge
Originally posted August 28, 2013

Here is an excerpt:

Recently I’ve been thinking about the importance of rehabilitative programs and alternative sentencing from the perspective of Aristotelian virtue theory. Virtue theory supports such programs as an important way to recognize offenders’ moral agency. Moral agency involves the ability of a person to act such that their actions deserve praise or blame. Virtue theory sees choice-making as the primary means for a moral agent to develop and exercise character traits: by choosing generous actions one becomes more generous, and in turn, being generous allows one to choose generous actions more easily. The theory provides a means for critiquing punishments that unfairly impose upon this process of moral development.

The Aristotelian label for this process – where character traits like honesty, kindness and courage become stable – is “habituation.” Habituation involves practicing the trait via the use of practical reason, which allows a person to determine which actions are appropriate in any given situation. A stable disposition to act in accordance with a trait, such as honesty, is established as a result of making appropriately honest choices over time and in a variety of circumstances. However, even stable traits do not dictate automatic behavioral responses: if they were, changes in character would be impossible. Instead, traits should be seen as flexible reasons-responsive dispositions to behave that are in constant development or decline, depending on the choices that one makes (see Annas 2011; Webber 2006).

The entire blog post is here.

Sunday, August 25, 2013

What Spinoza Knew and Neuroscience Is Discovering: ‘Free Will’ Doesn’t Exist

Vox Tablet
Published July 1, 2013

Questions of character shape public discourse. From Paula Deen to Edward Snowden—the choices people make and actions people take raise questions about free will, personal responsibility, and morality. And yet, researchers in sociology, psychology, and neuroscience are increasingly asserting that the independent self that we are all so attached to doesn’t really exist. What’s more, there are philosophical traditions dating back to Aristotle, Maimonides, and Spinoza that may offer more useful ways of thinking about how to foster ethical behavior and moral societies.

In The Self Beyond Itself: An Alternative History of Ethics, the New Brain Sciences, and the Myth of Free Will, Heidi Ravven, a professor of religious studies at Hamilton College, examines these questions. She joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry on the podcast to discuss how the myth of free will took hold, what Spinoza had to say about it, and why if you want to be a moral person, the last thing you should do is surround yourself with like-minded people.

The audio file is here [Running time: 24:52.]