PHILOS 2N03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Business Ethics, Habituation, Me Too Movement
30 Oct 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Week 6 Lecture - October 17, 2018
Jiro’s Dream Sushi
- concept of pride in one’s work, artisan
- What types of work make a good life, what types of relationships are fully fledged to a
Kantian business ethics
Good or Bad/right or Wrong
- Market transactions might provide incentive for the character virtues
Defining: Virtue - Gonzales
- Virtues for Aristotle include prudence, temperance, courage, justice and friendship
- Extent to which all of these can be interpreted as relevant to business ethics
- For Aristotle, [acquiring] virtue requires a combination of nature: nature, habituation,
and teaching:
- Nature virtue: disposition to perform certain good acts, or to easily perceive the
common good
- Giving everyone what they’re due and not depriving them of that (justice)
- Late level of virtue that people may have more than another, natural disposition
that we all have
- Habituation: principles of moral reason or moral perception are developed over
time
- Jiro Dreams Sushi: Katian to Aristotelian: learning to do the right thing by doing
the right thing, seeing his pride in work, not only getting better at work can make
it more efficient but more virtuous at that task
- Teaching: But for Aristotle, teaching virtue layers on top of natural virtue and
habituation to fine tune moral perception
- Teaching cannot undo bad nature or virtue (ex. Workplace: hiring a bad person,
you cannot teach them to build a good virtue, you can only work with what is
there)
The Challenge
1. Good business requires unrestrained self-interest
2. Self-interest action conflicts with building virtuous character
3. Good business will be in conflict with the virtues
- Self-destruction thesis: unrestrained self-interest pursuit of any goal will undermine
social virtues over time
