This module has been designed to build the foundation for a practical approach to virtue ethics. Student are provided with the names of several moral exemplars in business and professional ethics. They are then asked to identify the traits, attitudes, emotions, and skills that make these individuals moral exemplars. Textboxes acquaint students with moral exemplar studies that have been carried out. The links included in this module help students identify online and offline sources that describe moral exemplars and outline moral exemplar studies. This module is being developed as a part of an NSF-funded project, "Collaborative Development of Ethics Across the Curriculum Resources and Sharing of Best Practices," NSF SES 0551779.
Module introduction
Through the activities of this module you will learn to balance cautionary tales in business and professional ethics with new stories about those who consistently act in a morally exemplary way. While cautionary tales teach us what to avoid, narratives from the lives of moral exemplars show us how to be good. A study of moral best practices in business and professional ethics shows that moral exemplars exhibit positive and learnable skills. This module, then, looks at moral exemplars in business and the professions, outlines their outstanding accomplishments, and helps you to unpack the strategies they use to overcome obstacles to doing good.
You will begin by identifying outstanding individuals in business and associated practices who have developed moral "best practices." Your task is look at these individuals, retell their stories, identify the skills that help them do good, and build a foundation for a more comprehensive study of virtue in occupational and professional ethics.
Moral exemplar terms
Moral exemplar
- An individual who demonstrates outstanding moral conduct often in the face of difficult or demanding circumstances.
(Beyond the “call of duty”Your first item here
- Often moral exemplars perform actions that go beyond what is minimal, required, ordinary, or even extra-ordinary.
- Moral exemplars perform actions that are "above and beyond the call of duty."
- Most important, they perform these actions repeatedly across a career or even a lifetime. In some way, their exemplary conduct has become "second nature."
Supererogatory
-
"A supererogatory act is an act that is beyond the call of duty. It is something that is morally good to do but not obligatory. Examples of supererogatory acts are donating blood, volunteering on a rape crisis hotline, babysitting (without accepting recompense) a friend’s two-year old triplets for the afternoon, or throwing oneself on a live hand grenade in order to save one’s buddies’ lives." (Baron, 1997: 614)
- Baron's definition (found in the Encyclopedia of Business Ethics) captures how the supererogatory occupies a moral space well above that of the minimally decent or even the ordinary.Your second item here. Supererogatory actions are outstanding, extra-ordinary, and exemplary in both moral and practical senses.
- Urmsom, a moral philosopher, remarks how the supererogatory has been neglected (up to the mid-twentieth century) by moral philosophy, dominated as it was in the previous century by the debate between Utilitarianism and Deontology.
- Two quotations from Urmson show this clearly: (1)
“But it does seem that these facts have been neglected in their general, systematic accounts of morality. It is indeed easy to see that on some of the best-known theories there is no room for such facts” (Urmson, 1958, p. 206). (2)
“[s]imple utilitarianism, Kantianism, and intuitionism, then, have no obvious theoretical niche for the saint and the hero” (Urmson, 1958: 207).
- Baron, M. (1997). “Supererogation”, Blackwell Encyclopedic Dictionary of Business Ethics, Patricia H. Werhane and R. Edward Freeman, eds., New York: Blackwell: 614-7.
- Urmson, J.O. (1958). “Saints and Heroes.” Essays in Moral Philosophy, A.I. Melden, ed., Seattle: University of Washington Press: 198-216.
