B) Highlight the following expressions with the help of the episodes and situations based on your personal experience:
1) maintaining a set of personal standards of excellence;
2) delegating when necessary;
3) blending flexibility with reliable structure;
4) going off on others;
5) being a sleaze, a whiner, a slacker, a missing person;
6) giving recognition to others for their ideas, work.
c) Work in pairs. Decide what other business ethics you would include.
XII. Read the text and find the answers to the following questions in it:
1) Why do concepts of “virtue” and “character” become necessary?
2) What does a human being need that enables him to behave consistently in an appropriate manner?
3) What kinds of virtue are distinguished?
4) What do human beings need to guide their actions?
5) What does prudence mean?
6) How is the skill in thinking of the needs and rights of others interpreted?
7) What are pleasure drive and the power drive? What do these virtues control?
Text 3. Virtues and Character
The concepts of “virtue” and “character” become necessary when we observe that human behavior is modified by learning. Furthermore, this learning is not simply the acquisition of information but of skill in using that information in ways that are effective in satisfying human needs. Thus intellectual education is not just learning facts and explanatory theories, it is also acquiring skill in using this information for various freely chosen purposes, for example to be a lawyer or a doctor. Such skills are needed not only to solve the more difficult problems people meet in satisfying their needs, and especially the needs that are fixed in human nature but also to do so consistently and without undue stress and strain on the human organism.
Human beings are complex, bodily organisms that undergone constant change and variation. Consequently it is quite difficult for any of us who have made a choice of behavior to carry that through to the goal. We are easily distracted, discouraged, act impulsively, fail to adjust and adapt to change, etc., and consequently often end by frustrating ourselves. We need, therefore, a set of skills that enable us to behave consistently in an appropriate manner throughout the course of whole career, indeed of a whole life. It is too obvious that many people lack such skills and get in a life time get nowhere.
Since human beings have intelligence and free will they can use these to guide their actions to satisfy realistically and effectively not only to meet freely chosen goals, such as to make a million dollars, but also to satisfy those needs that are so much a part of our human nature that if they are not met we will be miserable and eventually will not survive. For example, our need to eat and drink is not something we choose, although we can choose within a certain range the kind of food and drink that we will use to meet this need and we can devise various technologies to produce these kinds. We must, however, eat and drink and we can do this in a way that truly satisfies our fixed need for proper nourishment and enables us not only to survive but be healthy. On the other hand, sadly enough, we can eat too little or too much or foods that do not make for health.
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Thus for all of us, whether we be thick or thin, what, how much, and when is one of the fundamental problems of human life that each of us has the ethical responsibility to solve and this solution is not always easy. To consistently make good decisions about our eating we need an intellectual virtue that helps us realistically and cautiously yet with ingenuity decide how, what and when to eat. This is in part a problem that a skilled dietician who has acquired the technology or practical science of dietetics can help us with. But even after we have the dietician’s advice we have to apply it intelligently to the concrete situations we meet in life; for example, to choose or not to choose to have some desert at a party. To do this consistently requires the intellectual skill or virtue of prudence, skill in practical thinking about satisfying our innate nutritional needs.
Prudence is a virtue that especially requires a great deal of experience beyond book learning or set of rules.
It can be assisted, however, by a systematization that resembles a scientific theory since it is based on the life sciences and this is called ethics from the Greek ethos, “character”. To have a fully developed virtue of prudence at least an intuitive kind of ethics is required and for difficult problems in life a systematic, scientific ethics itself or the advice of those who know such an ethics. Thus prudence is the guide of human life and in practical living serves the same governing role as wisdom does in the theoretical order. It is practical wisdom. Thus it is primarily an intellectual virtue and yet it governs the ethical or moral order. Aquinas argues that it is, therefore, the greatest of the four cardinal moral virtues.
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We cannot think realistically about our needs, however, if we do not take two other kinds of problems into consideration, namely, our relations with other people, and the control of our own emotions. Since human beings, as Aristotle said, are “political animals’, that is, social beings who cannot achieve their personal goals except in cooperation, communication and sharing with others in a common good, nothing could be more imprudent than to lack respect for the rights of others. Thus skill in thinking of the needs and rights of others is the second cardinal virtue, justice. It is difficult for us to be either prudent or just, however, if our emotions or rather the drives that produce these emotions prevent us from thinking clearly and objectively. Aristotle and Aquinas concluded from experience that we have two basic sets of such drives. One of these sets of drives are those that move us to seek what gives us physical pleasure, for example our pleasure in food; and another that moves us to seek power over our environment or other persons who raise difficulties for us in attaining our goals. The cardinal virtue that controls the pleasure drive is moderation (temperance) and the one that controls the power drive is courage (fortitude).
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