Moral skills sets
- Moral expertise is not reducible to knowing what constitutes good conduct and doing your best to bring it about. Realizing good conduct, being an effective moral agent, bringing value into the work, all require skills in addition to a "good will." PRIMES studies have uncovered four skill sets that play a decisive role in the exercise of moral expertise.
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Moral Imagination : The ability to project into the standpoint of others and view the situation at hand through their lenses. Moral imagination achieves a balance between becoming lost in the perspectives of others and failing to leave one's own perspective. Adam Smith terms this balance "proportionality" which we can achieve in empathy when we feel with them but do not become lost in their feelings. Empathy consists of feeling with others but limiting the intensity of that feeling to what is proper and proportionate for moral judgment.
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Moral Creativity : Moral Creativity is close to moral imagination and, in fact, overlaps with it. But it centers in the ability to frame a situation in different ways. Patricia Werhane draws attention to a lack of moral creativity in the Ford Pinto case. Key Ford directors framed the problem with the gas tank from an economical perspective. Had they considered other framings they might have appreciated the callousness of refusing to recall Pintos because the costs of doing so (and retrofitting the gas tanks) were greater than the benefits (saving lives). They did not see the tragic implications of their comparison because they only looked at the economic aspects. Multiple framings open up new perspectives that make possible the design of non-obvious solutions.
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Reasonableness : Reasonableness balances openness to the views of others (one listens and impartially weighs their arguments and evidence) with commitment to moral values and other important goals. One is open but not to the extent of believing anything and failing to keep fundamental commitments. The Ethics of Team Work module (see link above) discusses strategies for reaching consensus that are employed by those with the skill set of reasonableness. These help avoid the pitfalls of group-based deliberation and action.
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Perseverance : Finally, perseverance is the "ability to plan moral action and continue on that course by responding to circumstances and obstacles while keeping ethical goals intact." Huff et. al.
Exercise: two portrayals of more and cromwell
Watch the movie,
A Man for All Seasons , which won the Oscar award for best picture in 1967. Robert Bolt, who wrote both the play the movie was based on and much of the screen play sets out to portray More as a "hero of selfhood" (Preface to A Man for All Seasons, Xii). As Bolt puts it: "
Thomas More, as I wrote about him, became for me a man with an adamantine sense of own self. He knew where he began and left off, what area of himself he could yield to the encroachments of his enemies, and what to the encroachments of those he loved. {B]ut at length he was asked to retreat from that final area where he located his self. And there this supple, humorous, unassuming and sophisticated person set like metal, was overtaken by an absolutely primitive rigor, and could no more be budged than a cliff. "
