Giving Voice to Values

An Innovation and Impact Agenda

Jerry Goodstein, Mary Gentile

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000381917
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Giving Voice to Values, under the leadership of Mary Gentile, has fundamentally changed the way business ethics and values-driven leadership is taught and discussed in academic and corporate settings worldwide.

This book shifts attention to the future of Giving Voice to Values (GVV) and provides thought pieces from practitioners and leading experts in business ethics and the professions on the possibilities for sustaining its growth and success. These include the creation of new teaching materials, reaching different audiences, and expanding the ways in which GVV is making a difference in classrooms and the workplace and acting as a catalyst for organizational and societal change. The book closes with a reflective chapter by Mary Gentile, looking back at where GVV has been and looking ahead to where GVV might go.

Part I
STRENGTHENING THE IMPACT OF GVV WITHIN HIGHER EDUCATION

1
GIVING VOICE TO VALUES AS A WAY TO TEACH VIRTUE ETHICS

Ira Bedzow

The focus of this chapter will be to explore how two major premises of the Giving Voice to Values (GVV) methodology parallel those of the philosophical school of virtue ethics and how, therefore, GVV can serve as a programmatic and practical means to implement the process of moral growth that virtue ethics describes. Virtue ethics has been a moral philosophical framework since Plato and Aristotle, yet it has made a significant resurgence in moral philosophy since the 1980s. The uniqueness of virtue ethics over other moral frameworks is that it conceives of ethics as a form of personal character development rather than simply as a means to determine how to act in individual situations. It also explicitly recognizes the relationship between improving one’s process of making decisions and acting on them, and it conceives of moral excellence in terms of personal capabilities rather than adherence to universal or communal norms. GVV shares these conceptions of ethics. The importance, therefore, of showing how GVV can be grounded in virtue ethics is that virtue ethics as a moral philosophy gains a practical method of instruction and GVV gains a theoretical foundation, which bolsters its legitimacy as a philosophically grounded moral pedagogical framework.

Exploring two key premises for GVV and virtue ethics

While there are many intersections between GVV and descriptions of how to inculcate moral growth in the virtue ethics literature, two premises that this chapter will discuss are as follows: First, moral action should not be understood as an automatic consequence of moral deliberation. Ethical decision-making and moral action consist of different skills and face different challenges. For example, even when a person knows “what to do” in terms of what the moral decision might be, he or she may still not know “how to do it” in terms of what particular steps are required to act on that decision. Moreover, there is a moral gap between decision-making and acting that is closed (or narrowed) through the development of moral habits in conjunction with the development of practical reasoning. In other words, even if the person might know “what to do” and “how to do it,” knowledge does not always compel a person to be motivated to act on that knowledge. Only through creating a habit of acting a certain way does it become second nature to continue to act in that way.

Second, moral rules are not abstract universal codes of conduct that individuals should utilize to guide their moral actions. They are community-wide standards that apply to general situations and are embedded within a community ethos through its laws (or organizational policies, depending on to which community one refers). As such, one must understand moral norms to be approximate; they will cover the majority of typical cases, but they will not perfectly match the particularities of actual cases. There will be many times when simply following a rule will not be the best way to respond to a situation or when a rule will not state specifically how it should be enacted. Rather, in these cases, successful moral action will demand the use of practical wisdom, or the ability to think pragmatically to ensure that one can successfully implement his or her values-driven decision. Practical wisdom is developed through personal experience yet is grounded in the values which community standards attempt to impart on the community. Because of this shared foundation, there is a strong relationship between personal decision-making and recognizing community norms, both when considering what one should do as well as in determining how one can persuade others to act in kind.

The point here is not that through GVV people will find ways to rationalize action based on community norms; rather, a person must consider how to act on their own values in light of community norms. Those norms may either be levers of persuasion or potential obstacles if not confronted strategically. In either case, the person tries to answer the question of how he or she can act successfully on his or her personal values, given the community or organizational context in which he or she must act.

In summary, virtue ethics and the GVV methodology both offer a more complete understanding of how individuals can learn to give voice to what they believe in ways that they can achieve personal growth and even social or organizational change for two particular reasons. They both recognize that there is a difference between ethical decision-making and moral action, and they both appreciate that there is a relationship between an individual’s behavior and the ethos of his or her social or organizational community.

Outline for chapter

After introducing how virtue ethics conceives of moral development, the chapter will examine two premises that virtue ethics and GVV share. It will first discuss how virtue ethics conceives of how one can develop skills of moral action and how GVV provides educational opportunities for students to develop those skills on their own terms, and how the development of those skills gives rise to the virtue of practical wisdom. The chapter will then describe how virtue ethics explains the ways in which community norms serve to inculcate virtue and the skills of practical reasoning so that a person’s use of practical wisdom entails consideration for a community’s code of moral conduct. Building on this description, the chapter will also explain how GVV instruction provides ways for students to practice these skills of ethical deliberation and moral action in a community or organizational setting. By showing how GVV provides moral education, the chapter will show how GVV, like virtue ethics, is a practical education where students consider both their own choices as well as the environment in which they choose to act.

The chapter will contribute to the primary themes of the book in two ways. First, it will provide an overview of how moral philosophy and the GVV methodology complement each other. This recognition would allow moral philosophers to expand their ethical discourse to include suggesting ways to confront many of the practical and professional challenges that people face. It would also allow business and professional ethics educators to understand the benefit of the GVV methodology as ethics training. Second, once one appreciates the similarities between virtue ethics and the GVV methodology, educators and professionals who are already utilizing the GVV methodology can appreciate some of the philosophical social assumptions that it presupposes, making their ethical inquiry that much richer and deeper.

Short introduction to moral development in virtue ethics

Virtue ethics is a theory of moral growth and character development. With proper instruction, people can improve their ability to act on, and identify with, the moral values that they and the community in which they belong hold. Virtue ethics is different from other contemporary moral philosophies in that it does not possess a moral maxim, such as Kant’s categorical imperative, or a utilitarian formula through which moral questions are processed in order to reach a conclusion. Rather, one’s skills of moral deliberation and habit formation develop through a recursive process of continual decision-making and action, where previous experiences lend insight to future experiences, and current challenges compel one to reevaluate previous choices so that the moral actor learns how to incorporate effectively nuance and various factors into his or her decision. In this sense, virtue ethics appreciates that wisdom develops through experience rather than simply application of a universal moral law, and it seeks to explain how people’s choices and habits improve through mindful reflection and building one’s “moral muscles.”

The philosophy also recognizes that previous action facilitates both readiness and competence to be successful in acting on one’s moral values in the future. As such, virtue ethics is the ethics education equivalent to continuous quality improvement. Moreover, because, for the virtue ethicist, moral improvement occurs over time and incorporates both a person’s actions and how he or she identifies with the values those actions embody, the question of primary importance for the virtue ethicist is how one can improve his or her response to a moral challenge. This consideration includes the response’s efficacy, the individual’s disposition and personal capabilities, and the person’s identification with the values that the response embodies. This is in contradistinction to deontological and consequentialist ethical frameworks, which focus moral inquiry on the right or best choice for a given situation in the abstract, without considering the personal characteristics of the person making or enacting that choice.

In a virtue ethics framework, a person starts his or her ethics education under the assumption that he or she has the potential and the aspiration to act in ways that best exemplify the values that he or she has. Personal moral development stems from a combination of influences. For example, people initially learn what is right or good from community norms. They then learn how to apply general community norms and values to everyday decisions and habits. As they develop a moral sense, they learn how to interpret and respond to their personal experiences so that they can choose to act on values in ways that are effective in more challenging situations. Through practice in acting on values in more difficult situations, people not only improve in figuring out how to act more effectively, they also come to identify more closely with their moral purpose based on their own moral values. The culmination of moral development is when the person achieves moral integrity, which is defined as having consistency within one’s set of principles or commitments and having coherence between one’s principles, actions, and the motivations behind them. ¹

Ethical decision and moral action

When confronted with moral challenges, the virtuous individual will not only be able to make the appropriate decision, but he or she will be able and motivated to carry out that decision so that it achieves the desired result. The virtuous person is able to do this through the exercise of practical wisdom. According to Aristotle, practical wisdom is a combination of practical reason, i.e., the intellectual skill of knowing what one wants to achieve in a given situation as well as knowing the means through which one can achieve it, and the possession of moral virtues, i.e., as one’s identification with certain values through their embodiment as regular habits. ² To make a proper moral choice, therefore, necessitates that a person has the knowledge required to make that choice; he or she must choose the desired option voluntarily, and the choice must reflect the person’s moral values. ³ Values are the priorities that a community imparts on its members and that members hold as personally significant. Virtues are the capabilities that adherents develop so that the person who acquires virtues is motivated and able to express the corresponding values in his or her behavior. However, practical wisdom and choosing the best course of moral action is not simply a matter of knowledge and desire. One gains practical wisdom through experience, which implies that one hones both the skills of practical reasoning and the reinforcement of one’s identification with certain values over time and practice. ⁴

Aristotle thus calls the moral choice that a virtuous person makes a “deliberate desire,” ⁵ meaning that it is both intellectual, as it results from deliberation, and affective, since the person desires to act on that choice. ⁶ This does not mean that moral choice consists of two separate and distinct components, i.e., the goal one wants to achieve through acting and the means through which that goal can be achieved. ⁷ Rather, the two parts are connected in the same way as the concave side of a lens is connected to the convex side. They are two sides of the same lens. ⁸ For this reason, even if a person identifies with certain values and has cultivated a desire to act in a way that promotes those values, it is possible for the person nevertheless to fail to choose the proper way to carry out the decision. Furthermore, even if a person knows intellectually the proper response to a particular situation, he or she may still not be motivated to act upon that decision because of other personal or situational factors.

Given these dispositional and situational factors, it becomes readily understandable that not only do the intellectual and affective components of a person’s decision allow a person to want to make the moral choice, both components will also allow the person to make the proper moral choice for the person himself or herself. In other words, through the exercise of practical wisdom, the virtuous person will choose a particular moral response and choose to perform it in a particular way, both in terms of what the particularities of the situation demand for that choice to be effectuated and in terms of the choice taking into account the person’s abilities and disposition. Practical wisdom can thus be described as the combination of a ready disposition to respond to situations in a certain way and an intellectual ability to discern the best way to respond for that person. ⁹

Factors that influence how a virtuous person responds to a situation of moral difficulty include not only what one would want to do generally, but also the various stakeholders and what would be most persuasive to them in a given situation, what consequences the virtuous person foresees for himself or herself as well as the other stakeholders, the systemic or organizational limitations or opportunities the virtuous person might encounter when implementing his or her decision, and whether the interpersonal ethos in which the virtuous person acts seems to support or disallow the desired ethical choice. While important in many social and interpersonal contexts, the utilization of practical wisdom is even more important in giving voice to one’s values in a hierarchical or professional environment, which demands that one persuade other stakeholders who might have different goals or varying weights of authority and/or power to support or reject one’s desired choice. Therefore, knowledge and ability to be persuasive and to recognize the needs and goals of other stake-holders are critical. In other words, practical wisdom will provide more than simply general notions of what is right; it will give a person the skills to create scenario-specific plans for how to act in practice.

Virtue ethics, GVV, and personal values

Virtue ethicists, starting with Aristotle, ground their theory of moral development in the assumption that those who seek moral education already have a good idea as to the values with which they aspire to identify and the types of behaviors that will put those values into action. ¹⁰ Similarly, the GVV methodology starts with the assumption that a person should not consider the moral response to a situation abstractly or generally conceived. Rather, he or she should look at how one can act on one’s own values in response to a situation of moral tension. Therefore, for both approaches, moral pedagogy begins with the premise that each person must choose a path of action that fits with his or her own sense of self and his or her personally held values. At the same time, the person should recognize that moral challenges require people to grasp the nuances of the social environment in which a person must act, which includes appreciating social conventions that might help or hinder the success of one’s actions....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributing authors
• Introduction: Giving Voice to Values: an innovation and impact agenda
• Part I Strengthening the impact of GVV within higher education
• Part II Strengthening the impact of GVV beyond higher education
• Conclusion: looking back and looking ahead: Giving Voice to Values
• Index