After encountering a number of different frustrations with the Tumblr format for the kind of blog I’d like Virtue Ethics Digest to be, and after a lot of reflection on the matter, I’ve decided to bite the bullet and move it wholesale over to a more flexible and easier to work with — at least for a less than entirely tech-savy guy like me — blogging platform.

I won’t rehearse the complaints I’ve made to friends or grumbled about to myself, other than to say, while there’s some great things about Tumblr, there’s two really decisive flaws in my book.  It’s not easy, unless you know CSS, to develop the look and functionality of the blog to what one would want — and it is easy to do that in Blogger.  Likewise, there’s no native analytic for Tumblr, but Blogger has one that is decent enough built right in.

I’ve migrated all the posts from this blog over to the new one, and have already posted the first new VED piece there: Neophilia: Curiosity by Another Name?

I’m not jumping the Tumblr ship entirely, and I’ll leave VED as it developed on this site still up.  But, I have to think a bit about precisely what I’d use Tumblr for myself in the future.

This week, in two face-to-face installments, supplemented and supported by a variety of handouts, summaries located in our Course Management System, and even two lecture videos from previous Ethics classes (#1 and #2), I’ve been leading my students through the dully dry, compendiously ennumerational, Victorian-tinged prose of Jeremy Bentham’s Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation — an exercise in demonstrating to them that a book ought not be judged by its cover, nor even by the style of its author — that the merit of ideas remains to some degree independent of, unindexed by wordcraft, mode of arrangement, ease enabled or rather interest sustained in the reading.

Bentham is well worth wading through his preferred means of presentation:  seemingly interminable enumerations and exhaustive examples aiming at every step at making the same point — Utilitarianism has covered every bet, examined every possible case, encompassed every exception or objection (suggestive of a dialogical panopticon).  Why?  Because the ideas conveyed are sound — at least if not pushed too far — and eminently worth thinking through, wrestling with, wrapping one’s head around.  And today, they were Bentham’s notions of intention, motive, and disposition.

Last week, I led my Ethics students about as far as they are likely to go this semester — at least accompanied by myself — into the heart of Plato’s Republic, that dense and lengthy tome often assigned and maligned for a whole host of classes in various disciplines.  It is, in point of fact, one of the great early works of western literature — imaginative, motley as democracy with perspectives, crammed with ideas whose entire importance one cannot realize upon first or even perhaps on tenth read, offering so many lenses and mirrors for regarding the world, the soul, society, the self.

It’s a seminal work for Virtue Ethics, one whose articulation of virtues and vices any other moral theory that wants to claim real membership in that tradition mu8st measure itself against.  After the initial sparring of the first several books, Socrates —or perhaps Socrates as Plato thought he ought to be — shows his hand plain.  Gone are the aporetic and ironic meanderings of earlier dialogues like the Euthyphro, the Laches, the Lysias or the Charmides.  It’s as if Socrates takes heart from the city, the guardians, the education he envisions in discourse and imagination, from their certitude and intellectual familiarity with the virtues — now they can be told… and even to some extent taught.

I’ve let Virtue Ethics Digest sit fallow over more than one winter month, while I finished out my first semester teaching Ethics and Intro to Philosophy at a new (and better) institution, then journeyed out to the Midwest to vacation with my wife, my children, my family and hers — all currently in the process of blending — and afterwards threw myself into preparation for several sections of Ethics this semester, rethinking and reworking material, using the course management system to begin building an extensive online environment for our little community of moral enquiry.

The semester now in full swing, and my vacation from blogging stretched out about a few as is feasible, not to say reasonable or responsible, it’s now time to simply carve out the time I’ve been meaning, planning, desiring — but not actually choosing or following through on — to start writing new entries for Virtue Ethics Digest and my other main blog Orexis Dianoētikē.

I’ve been rather lax in posting on Virtue Ethics Digest of late, a factor principally of slogging through the end of semester and the holiday break, continuing to produce online and handout content for my classes this semester, and following up on contacts made after a set of three conference presentations all within a month of each other.  I’ve yet to follow-up my post on Madoff and Happiness, and there’s plenty other posts on the docket, some of them half-written or -developed, others only so far in nuce.

So, for faithful or even occasional Virtue Ethics Digest readers, I proffer a tidbit from the last of those conferences, a short presentation available both as Powerpoint slides (well, actually as a pdf of them) and in video format, a prefiguration of what I intend eventually to turn into a a short volume — one has to devote to topics the lengths of prose they demand, as as I’ve discovered, in order to say anything both meaningful and in adequate depth about George R.R. Martin’s epic (and still unfinished) fantasy series, much more than a conference presentation would be required.

All I’ll say about this here at present is that the gritty, morally complex world Martin develops — as a “gardener”, in his own word, as opposed to the sort of “architect” he credits Tolkien with being — is one which to me seems almost uniquely well-suited to be understood in terms of Aristotelian moral theory — read not only through his two Ethics, but also across the Politics, the Rhetoric, and the Poetics.

It has been several years since the Bernie Madoff story first broke, gradually  exposing more and more portions of a financial investing scam perpetrated for years, a genuine Ponzi scheme, whereby investors were bilked put of quite literally billions of dollars, which were then used to maintain the appearance of high financial yields for investors earlier in, higher up in the pyramid.   It became a more and more desperate juggling act, bound to bust eventually, but only after the sheer number of accounts in the air became unmanageable. 

Much has already been written about the elaborate structure, scope, and details of the scam itself, and the lengthy lists of those individuals and institutions which lost money — often money they could ill-afford  — has long been worked out.  In fact, one might think there is little left to say about the whole Madoff affair, if it were not for the recent publication of truth and Consequences: Life Inside the Madoff Family, penned by Laurie Sandel, who interviewed in depth the surviving members of Bernie Madoff’s family — his son, Mark, killed himself after the revelation of the scam, in which he appears to have been unwittingly involved.

In the piece I started yesterday, I promised to talk about how and why a contemporary virtue ethicist and a classic virtue ethicist distinguish different types of moral failure from each other.  Discussing the contemporary, Alasdair MacIntyre, I placed more focus on the why — the reasons we ought to be concerned not only whether we’ve done wrong, but to what degree, for what reasons — and what we learn about ourselves in the process, including how — like a bus that has left the road for short-cut dirt paths and is now bouncing over unfamiliar, dusty, and trackless terrain — we might discern not only the overall direction we need to steer back towards, but how we might discern where trails run, which grooves and ruts we need to avoid and which might lead us back onto the straighter, more reliable roads towards the good.

As the post got longer and longer, I had to defer my promise to discuss Aristotle — one of the worthies among the Virtue Ethics’s classic thinkers — since the whole goal of Virtue Ethics Digest was to have shorter pieces than those you might find on my other blog, Orexis Dianoētikē.  So, here it is, with more attention tonight to the how and less to the why in Aristotle’s works — though I don’t want to give that short shrift, and will accordingly discuss that first.

One of the important aspects of a genuine Virtue Ethics approach that does not get as much discussion or examination — and often isn’t taught in Ethics courses — is determining what ways, to what degrees, and for what reasons one has gone wrong, done wrong, morally failed.  All too often, we confine ourselves to thinking in terms of the virtues and the vices — which, to be sure, is good, a better approach, one more adequate to the complexities of human beings and moral life than those oriented by other moral theories — tending to confine evaluation to motives, actions, consequences, or social arrangements. 

But, whether our goal is to fully understand the rich intellectual resources contained in the classic texts of Virtue Ethics, or to progressively develop and employ a coherent practical approach adequate to the complexities and demands of concrete moral life as we actually live it out, what is required is a well-differentiated grasp of how we go wrong, how we get things wrong, the range, differing seriousness, and types of moral failures.

The news earlier this month about Terry Thompson’s ill-fated decision to release the exotic, wild, and in many cases dangerous animals he had acquired — and then to kill himself — crossed my path in the same way as it did for so many others:  brief reports without much detail, announcing that among others, Lions and Bengal Tigers had been released near, and were now roaming into, an Ohio town.  Then more substantive follow-up reports and opinion pieces began to pop up, as the media swung to focus on the owner, the sheriff and deputies, the town’s residents, and the animals themselves.  One of the more interesting, and well-balanced pieces is by Susan Orlean.  She asks about the tragic situation the key question:

A small, drowsy town in Ohio, a pile of dead Bengal tigers. How did it come to this? The blame should be doled out carefully. Very little of it should fall on the sheriff of Zanesville, who did what was probably the only thing he could do: give a kill order when darkness fell and Terry Thompson’s wild carnivores were still prowling around town

I’m reminded — if you don’t mind me momentarily jarring though not jamming the discoursal gears  — of a set of key distinctions and correlations Aristotle makes early into the Rhetoric. 

He divides rhetoric into three main types — deliberative (or in this translation, “political”), legal (or “forensic”) and epideictic (or “ceremonial — translations vary because these are not easy terms to render perfectly)

cmrubinworld asked: I love your blog. I am now following you. Would you take a look at my blog about global education and consider following me?

I like it, and have started following it — been so busy lately that I haven’t had much time to read more than a little, but I am looking forward to roaming through it later this semester

A few weeks back, I had the opportunity to carry out what I sometimes jokingly refer to as “Virtue Ethics evangelism.”  I’d been invited to submit a workshop proposal for a one-day conference held down at City University of New York (CUNY)-Lehman, focused specifically on Supplemental Instruction, bringing together educators from many different disciplines and schools, mainly from across the CUNY system schools but including a scattering of others from upstate schools — and me, a philosopher, virtue ethicist, representing my fledgling consulting company, ReasonIO.

At my last academic position, at Fayetteville State University, where I’d focused heavily on teaching and improving the core Critical Thinking classes, I recruited — or at least attempted to, since the better candidates were nearly always courted by other programs — and worked with, student Supplemental Instruction leaders.  I’d given some thought to the successes and failures we’d encountered in semester after semester of classes assisted by SI, and now provided with an opportunity to reflect on those matters in the somewhat more sustained, systematic, and rigorous ways that producing a conference presentation requires, I proposed a session linking Virtue Ethics with Supplemental Instruction, arguing the need or at least usefulness of the former in thinking about and doing the latter well.

I ended up writing the draft of a paper (which I’ll be fleshing out later), putting together a set of powerpoint slides, and recording video of the workshop session.

What is Supplemental Instruction, though? The International Center for Supplemental Instruction (based at University of Missouri-Kansas City) defines it as

an academic assistance program that utilizes peer-assisted study sessions. SI sessions are regularly-scheduled, informal review sessions in which students compare notes, discuss readings, develop organizational tools, and predict test items. Students learn how to integrate course content and study skills while working together. The sessions are facilitated by “SI leaders”, students who have previously done well in the course and who attend all class lectures, take notes, and act as model students.

That’s a characterization that adequately expresses SI’s key and distinctive features.  It introduces and initiates undergraduates into the processes of classroom teaching and course design, setting up students as tutors, assigned not only to a disciplinary subject, not only a particular course, but to one specific instructor — a teacher with whom the student has previously taken that class, in which they excelled and impressed the professor enough to be recommended for an SI position.

What particularly interested me was the question: What sorts of skills and dispositions do we need to attend to or cultivate in order to render Supplemental Instruction a highly effective pedagogical resource?  It’s easy — I know from my own experience — to treat SI as just another resource for our students, just one that happens to employ one more student whose participation we previously valued.  It’s tempting to simply get on with all the business involved — more and more every year it seems — in being a college or university professor, let the SI leader set up his or her sessions aligned with and hopefully reinforcing one’s own class sessions, and not give these matters more than a second thought.

We thereby end up passing up some excellent opportunities to make some additional differences in students’ outcomes, careers, characters — not least our own SI leaders — essentially ceding the development, workings, and outcomes of SI over to the staff who manage these matters — a position that in my three years at FSU changed hands (and directions) multiple times. 

As educators, we know that teaching and learning is not — as many of our students and external stakeholders mistakenly imagine — merely a matter of acquiring information.  That is not all that knowledge consists in — knowledge that is deep, integrated, lasting, transferable involves entire associated sets of skills — and going beyond even these, even deeper, more integrative, a dimension of acquired, affective and practical dispositions.

Within classical Aristotelian philosophy of education, such an assemblage of interlocking and scaffolded knowledge, skills, and dispositions well-established in the mind of the learner is termed a hexis or habitus. It becomes as it were a possession rooted in the being of the knower (and doer, actor, producer, communicator) and is, when developed, one type of intellectual virtue, a state of excellence of the human mind.

So, again, what sorts of skills and dispositions should we be aiming to cultivate in SI leaders?  The sets — the habituses — that readily come to mind are three: disciplinary knowledge, pedagogical expertise, and the broad category of “people skills”.  What would not typically come to mind for most people are those other sets of skills and dispositions which are thematized mainly in the humanities, most often in moral philosophy or theology — the virtues, both moral and intellectual, but particularly moral virtues.

The case I made during my workshop (and through my paper and slides) was that rethinking SI in terms of the family of approaches in moral theory called Virtue Ethics can make a solid contribution to developing a yet more adequate understanding of what more effective use of SI would look like, providing a needed complement to other more explicitly pedagogical-theoretical and less explicitly moral-theoretical approaches.

I am not suggesting, of course, that Virtue Ethics is a substitute for other approaches.   I am suggesting that some of the typical components of a Virtue Ethics approach are susceptible of being adopted and appropriated in one’s own approach to effective employment of SI leaders — in two ways.

First, there are some ideas or considerations, which a Virtue Ethics approach provides, that remain unlikely to be provided or even realized as needed in its absence. Second, there are other ideas or considerations already in place, on the table, which while making good sense in themselves, can be further illuminated by a Virtue Ethics approach, one example of this being practical wisdom’s (phronesis) important role in pedagogical expertise and that catch-all category of “people skills”.

In my workshop session — which went surprisingly well and sparked interesting discussion — I gave a necessarily very brief overview of Virtue Ethics as a type of moral theory. Then, I reframed the purposes or ends of SI within that framework.  Then — starting to run short on time, and having to cut that section a bit short — I discussed seven moral virtues and one moral state (self-control) particularly germane to Supplemental Instruction.  I ended by outlining conditions necessary for developing virtues and integrating them with the three other sets of skills and dispositions.

Much more could and should be said about these matters, but I’m going to leave those for later writing projects.  What was particularly striking, and what I’d like to end upon was a very positive impression — in our culture, even our educational culture, we don’t talk often enough in rigorous ways well-informed by classic moral theory outside of the classroom — and at the same time, there seems to be a genuine and great desire, a longing, almost a hunger, to consider, to discuss, to puzzle out moral matters in serious and systematic ways.  Of all the varieties of moral theory, Virtue Ethics seems best equipped and poised to respond to that need.

A lot has been written and said recently comparing the two mass political movements essentially based in the politics of anger — Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party.  In fact, so much is currently out there that practically any site I could arbitrarily select to link to here would fit the bill — so long as it mentions the two movements in some comparative manner.

James Sinclair, in Occupy Wall Street vs The Tea Party (where he also sets out one of the more interesting Venn diagrams overlapping the two groups) sets out, summarizes, and links up an excellently balanced set of comparisons.

over the last week or so each side has generated mountains of commentary saying, essentially, this: You know the one-sidedly [negative/positive] portrayal of the Tea Party we’ve been pushing for two and a half years now? Well Occupy Wall Street is totally the opposite!

• Paul Krugman describes OWS as “a popular movement that, unlike the Tea Party, is angry at the right people.” Meanwhile, Ann Coulter says the OWS protesters are angry at the wrong people (and also have poor hygiene, because why not?).
• Keith Olbermann says OWS is legitimately a grassroots movement that, at least at first, was ignored by the media. Rush Limbaugh says the Tea Party is the “organic” one, while OWS was “manufactured” by the media.
• ThinkProgess claims the OWS protests “better embody the values of the original Boston Tea Party.” BigGovernment insists the protesters are “more aligned with Marxism; with Democratic Socialism; with Soviet Era Collectivism; with the very dangerous and elitist Progressive Movement” than with anything even remotely “American”.

Of course, there are key differences between the two movements, but I need not dwell on those here — some of them are real, substantive differences, some merely products of ideological fun-house lenses coupled with distortive mirrors. What interests me particularly are in fact the similarities, their implications, the core causes, and the unintended but unfortunate likely effects in our politics and our culture. 

And, while everyone has the right to develop and express their opinions on these matters (and practically every other), to my mind, it would be otiose to add any new reflections unless they contribute some additional perspective. Actually, that which I’ve found myself taking is in many respects quite old, so ancient as to antedate the divide between liberal and conservative — both eminently modern notions in the forms we ascribe those terms to these days in our polarized politics, our still increasingly factionalizing society.

In the Politics (as well as in his two Ethics, the Rhetoric, and in fragmentary ways elsewhere), Aristotle examined, analyzed, strove to understand, and evaluated nearly-perennial patterns of emotion and outlook, demands and desires, action and advocacy that — if one looks closely, but resists the urge to just shoehorn the events and movements of the present moment into simplified Aristotelian categories — assist one is seeing hidden, overlooked, forgotten sides to matters.

Here, I’m not going to elaborate arguments, systematically study, tease out implications to their termini — this isn’t that sort of forum (for that I have Orexis Dianoētikē or Dr. Sadler’s Chalk and Talk), but just raise a few issues and worries, cite some textual passages that seem relevant to me, and suggest that from a Virtue Ethics perspective nearly all of the parties concerned would come up short in measure, even when they wrap themselves in the mantle of virtue and tar their opponents with the malignity of vice.

So, what does Aristotle have to say that retains or even regains relevance today?  I have in mind some of his remarks about stasis in Politics book 5, which we can translate as “faction” or “revolution,” but still better as civil discord, polarization veining through the bedrock of society, breakdown of the community to such a point that seemingly no one actually works for the common good (while many claim to do so, ideologically).  Anger plays a particularly central role in this common phenomenon, as I showed several years ago in a paper, The Passional Substratum of Political Faction In Aristotle.

There is a keen and unmistakable sense of anger as both a source of motivation and commonality in both Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party — anger that is understandable, if all too often indulged more than it ought to by some, almost obtusely ignored or misunderstood by others.  Three things are worth pointing out about anger, two things that are commonplaces in those intellectual and moral traditions comprising Virtue Ethics.

First, for those proponents, representatives, and interpreters of Virtue Ethics who do not regard anger as almost always vicious, extremely dangerous, destructive — John Cassian, St. Anselm, and in a mitigated manner, St. Augustine articulated such prohibitory stances — it’s still a seductive passion, one which needs but all too often rejects regulation by reason.

Second, Aristotle provided the conceptual resources to distinguish anger from hatred (as well as from righteous indignation), but didn’t follow these out. Later Virtue Ethicists — Augustine for example — explicitly drew out and taught the needed lesson:  anger nursed long enough develops into the much more deeply rooted, less passional, more calculating state of hatred — which does not merely want to see the other punished, but to see them eradicated.

Third, as rational creatures, we are social creatures, and w do not become vicious only by doing vicious actions ourselves, but by the models we pick, applaud, follow, by the people who we surround ourselves with and measure ourselves against, and eventually  in mindset and mores inevitably begin to echo not only verbally but emotionally, affectively, attitudinally.

There is nothing inherent to belonging to Right or Left that enables one to escape these dynamics, that raises one to an angelic status unaffected by the muddying and murky play of human emotions.

The anger, and the hatred, that is out there — on both Left and Right — and,  with a few brief reprieves, has played a dominant key, at the very least a constant counterpoint, a dissonance never dissolving since the 2000 election — that anger is comprehensible, particularly as things have gotten worse, as times have gotten tighter, as fewer prosper and can be bought off by purchasing votes or cultural allegiance as the pie shrinks and specters of famine start to fade into view, at least in outline.

There is a dissatisfaction, a distrust, a dislike of the professional political class who collaborated with the many different great and more or less irresponsible and unaccountable financial interests.  I’ll just pair that characterization with one seemingly commonsensical but provocative passage:

When the magistrates are insolent and grasping they conspire against one another and also against the constitution from which they derive their power, making their gains either at the expense of individuals or of the public.

Aristotle pointed that out over two millennia ago, as well as how class plays into politics in ways going beyond merely trying to get a greater piece at the expense of the other.

… .in the many forms of government which have sprung up there has always been an acknowledgment of justice and proportionate equality, although mankind fail attaining them, as I have already explained. Democracy, for example, arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal. Oligarchy is based on the notion that those who are unequal in one respect are in all respects unequal; being unequal, that is, in property, they suppose themselves to be unequal absolutely. The democrats think that as they are equal they ought to be equal in all things; while the oligarchs, under the idea that they are unequal, claim too much, which is one form of inequality.

I think it’s worth pointing out that while it is likely that powerful, essentially oligarchical interests do funnel resources to movements like OWS and the Tea Party, neither one of them is “astroturf”. Whether the hyperbolic and offensively unbelievable claims are that one speaks for the 99% or the 53%, there is a truth residing in them, which is that one is at least speaking for some less powerful many against a powerful few.  The situation gets confusing because, from an Aristotelian perspective there are not only multiple oligarchs, multiple elites who contend with each other — that Aristotle actually wrote about and understood perfectly well — but there are multiple, only partly representative, mutually hostile but equally bonafide democratic movements in play.

From a Virtue Ethics perspective, simply being able to call oneself democratic does not actually raise one’s moral status.  The passage from Aristotle just cited continues:

All these forms of government have a kind of justice, but, tried by an absolute standard, they are faulty; and, therefore, both parties, whenever their share in the government does not accord with their preconceived ideas, stir up revolution. Those who excel in virtue have the best right of all to rebel (for they alone can with reason be deemed absolutely unequal), but then they are of all men the least inclined to do so.

A paradox in those lines — those who have the most reason to stir up civil discord are precisely the people least likely to do so.  So, what then, for the friends — not of Liberty, not of The People — but of Virtue?  Quietism?  Cultivating one’s own garden?  Focusing on local politics? Cultural Criticism?  The question remains open.

Tony Schwartz, among other things a blogger on Harvard Business Review, recently offered advice about a common issue both in the workplace and in one’s non-work life: the need to deal with difficult people, those who fit this description:

Do you have someone at work who consistently triggers you? Doesn’t listen? Takes credit for work you’ve done? Wastes your time with trivial issues? Acts like a know-it-all? Can only talk about himself? Constantly criticizes?

Such people, of course, are not a new or unique feature of modern society. Aristotle discussed such people, as did Plato, Epictetus, Augustine and a number of others.  Aristotle is particularly interesting to point to, though, because analyses the emotional response of — and virtues and vices associated with — anger. 

There are a variety of causes for the feeling or emotion of anger, many of which have to do with being “slighted”, “looked down upon”, “disvalued” — all of the behaviors just mentioned can trigger anger, since all of them involve or at least imply the angering person valuing him or herself above the person affected and angered by the behavior.

Some of these also correspond in with one recognizable type or style of vicious — habitually bad, based in bad choices and wrongheaded evaluations — behavior, what Aristotle in Greek called khalepos, and what we might translate as “difficult,” “troublesome,” “rancorous,” or even colloquially as “pain in the ass.”  Finding fault, criticizing, acting like a know-it-all — these fit that bill.

Schwartz analyses the dynamic occurring when we are forced to deal with such people day in and day out — even worse, as he points out, when the person is in a position of authority.

Our core emotional need is to feel valued and valuable. When we don’t, it’s deeply unsettling, a challenge to our sense of equilibrium, security, and well-being.

The easy default when we feel devalued is to the role of victim, and it’s a seductive pull. Blaming others for how we’re feeling is a form of self-protection. Whatever is going wrong isn’t our fault. By off loading responsibility, we feel better in the short-term.

Accordingly, beginning from this starting point, these principles, the advice that he will give is that we shift the focus and blame entirely away from the other, offending, person, and onto ourselves.

The problem with being a victim is that you cede the power to influence your circumstances. The painful truth when it comes to the people who trigger you is this: You’re not going to change them. The only person you have the possibility of changing is yourself.

Each of us has a default lens through which we see the world. We call it reality, but in fact it’s a selective filter. We have the power, to view the world through other lenses.

This is a common strategy and standpoint to adopt, not only in moral theory but also in psychology.  

The Stoic ethics of an Epictetus and the Cognitive-Behavior Therapy of many a practitioner and theorist provide similar analyses, point out similar insights, and one might point our many other perspectives, some of them possessed of long and illustrious pedigrees, that similarly advise abandoning hope of changing others, ceasing blame of others, and focusing on one’s own reactions, examining one’s presuppositions, then changing one’s outlook in order to become progressively less and less negatively affected by the continued poor behavior of others.

The three alternate lenses Schwartz advocates looking at matters through do represent some good advice.  It is often useful, even prudent to complement our desire- and emotion-infused views on things by taking a view of “realistic optimism,” trying to see things from the other person’s perspective, and looking at things through “a long lens” — useful and prudent when done right, though, when such views are adopted at the right time, for the right reason, with the right people, and so on — when they’re adopted and relied upon in the ways a virtuous person does, not wholesale, not without qualification.

The comments were particularly interesting to read.  Some were supportive, and a few interesting conversations take place in the comment section.  But there were also a number of negative responses of varying merit.  Here’s a selection of critical  reactions:

What a cowardly way to deal with adversity!  If you are an adult and you know you are being treated badly, or accused of something that you did , or did badly this is a poor method to assuage your anger. I say assert yourself if you know you are right.  If you start using filters the bad treatment will not stop and probably get worse.

Enough is enough in the office nowadays.  How long will bullying go on in the workplace?  People need to be more assertive in dealing with these situations and put the bad leaders/bullies in their place, or just get them the heck out of there!  There is nothing else to analyze or even speak about, it is as simple as that.

It takes courage to speak up. It can be done firmly without resulting in distancing oneself from others. In the long run you are respected for keeping to your convictions.

Honestly, this is a bunch of EST-sounding thumb-sucking that restates well-known bromides  without giving any new information or skills about how actually, in practicality to deal with difficult people.

It’s interesting that in some respect the conversation shifts from issues of anger to those of courage — though not surprising, given the significant connections highlighted by Plato and Aristotle between both the emotions, situations, and characteristic actions involved and the virtues and vices themselves.

Turning focus back to the emotion and the larger pattern of response of anger, and looking at the issue of dealing with difficult, irritating, dysfunctional people from a Virtue Ethics perspective, what comes immediately to mind are two main doctrines.

First, good, right, virtuous actions and responses are those which the person who actually possesses the appropriate virtue for the matter in question would do.  One doing them of course might not be virtuous — one might be in the process of becoming virtuous by choosing to behave in the right ways even though it runs counter to one’s desires or inclinations, for example.  But the virtuous person is the norm, the paradigm, the model.

And what is that paradigm like?  How does a virtuous person act?  When it comes to anger, Aristotle — and a number of other virtue ethicists throughout the long history of the tradition — maintain that there are definitely some cases in which anger, and expression of anger, behavior following from anger, is the right response.  When?

Answering that, as Aristotle points out, is not something which one can actually reduce to and resolve by hard-and-fast, cover-every-case rules — certainly not by treating anger itself as basically bad, as a problem which is one’s own problem, to be resolved by altering, even widening, enhancing — but still altering one’s perspective, “changing oneself” in the sense that Schwartz seems to have in mind.

Virtue Ethics does certainly emphasize “changing oneself”, but in such ways as to develop habitual structures, and practical wisdom, which gradually and progressively integrate those changes and the additional distinctions and resources acquired into coherent and adaptable patterns of behavior, outlook, and desire.

It’s a matter of moving towards doing or feeling the right things, at the right time, for the right reason, with the right people, with the right degree of intensity, and so on — whether for the response of anger itself… or even for how one incorporates, employs, and relies upon and those three perspectival “lenses” Schwartz advocates.

Teach an Ethics class, and ask students early on what they consider to be major goods in their present or anticipated future life — what will make them happy, what they deeply desire and value —and in addition to family and friends, money, and occasionally education, they will often tell you: career, work, the job for which they are training.  And yet, what makes for the likelihood that one’s profession will realistically render one happy? Jobs are incredibly diverse, and in our present environment, culture, and economy, subject to change.

Steve Denning, author of The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management, recently published and discussed lists — emerging from a recent surveys by CarreerBliss and the National Oganization for Research — of the Ten Happiest Jobs and the Ten Most Hated Jobs, pointing out important features common in each list.  First, the jobs perceived as worst:

For all the talk about teachers and nurses and the long hours, low pay and thankless tasks that they put up with, it may be surprising that they didn’t even make the list of the ten worst jobs.

What’s also striking is that these jobs are not low level jobs. The pain is psychological. We are in the world of Dilbert. It’s  the pointlessness and lack of meaning in what they doing that is the problem. These people know that they are capable of contributing more but the hierarchical bureaucracy prevents from doing it.

In Denning’s view — and on this, I think he’s dead-on — the most fundamental issue is not remuneration, nor physically demanding work conditions, nor lack of resources and support while fulfilling socially necessary work, but a lack of meaningfulness, possibility for growth, initiative, making decisions, finding solutions. 

It’s not that low pay, long hours, grueling worksites, or lack of support don’t matter — they do.  But one can find meaning — not just static meaning but dynamic meaning — in fairly poorly compensated professions where one is expected to do something traditionally recognized as valuable with inadequate resources.  Teachers, Clergy, Artists and Authors — who one might expect to rank lower — are actually in the top ten.

Denning cites a relevant passage from Todd May’s The Meaningfulness of Lives:

A meaningful life must, in some sense then, feel worthwhile.  The person living the life must be engaged by it.  A life of commitment to causes that are generally defined as worthy — like feeding and clothing the poor or ministering to the ill — but that do not move the person participating in them will lack meaningfulness in this sense. However, for a life to be meaningful, it must also beworthwhile. Engagement in a life of tiddlywinks does not rise to the level of a meaningful life, no matter how gripped one might be by the game.

Denning’s own sum-up?

This is what underlies the difference between the happiest jobs and the most hated jobs. One set of jobs feels worthwhile, while in the other jobs, people can’t see the point.

He proposes a solution, and not surprisingly, it echoes talking points from his book, his approach.  No problem with that in my view — we look at things from a Virtue Ethics perspective here, which inevitably colors our picture, even lends us the language by which we make sense of the matters blogged about here.  He looks at and writes about these matters from a management- and innovation-focused perspective.  The key issue is what light, what useful illumination, what accurate insight gets provided.

Why, in Denning’s view, can’t people who are actually for the most part making good money, who have management or technically skilled positions — which you think would earn them some respect and provide them engaging problems to work upon — why aren’t they happy?  Why do they report being the most unhappy? 

It’s an issue of an outdated, once useful, but now stifling style of management, quite literally from the top on down.

Are the people who lead these 20th Century bureaucracies incompetent? When it comes to C-suite teams who don’t perceive that the world has changed and who try to cope with the new demands of the marketplace by pressing the bureaucracy to run harder, the answer is yes… . And through their incompetence, pursuing bureaucratic management instead of radical management, these leaders are causing massive damage to the economy on a daily basis and to the lives of people who depend on them… . The sooner these leaders can acquire the requisite competence in radical management or be replaced by people who have it, the better. (The fact that these corporate leaders reward themselves so lavishly—despite their incompetence—is another bitter irony in this sad saga.)

I see the middle managers and first-line supervisors rather differently. These are people “imprisoned in hierarchical bureaucracies”. They are in a squeeze between the real requirements of the work and the inappropriate organizational arrangements to achieve those requirements… .These people are not for the most part incompetent. They are simply caught in an impossible situation which they usually lack the power to change.

The grounds on which Denning criticizes bureaucratic structuring, work environment, values, and management style — and contrasts it with his model of “radical management” (which like many purportedly “radical” things that have their goods sides turn out, at least in many of their components and their perspective, to reinvent what has been for the most part overlooked and lost) — are basically grounds of effectiveness.  A new business environment has developed, in which bureaucratically structured and run organizations are increasingly ill-equipped, even to identify their own causes for failure.  It requires a new approach.

What particularly requires this new approach is a change on the side of the consumer, the buyer, who desires along with, or as a constituent part of his or her purchase, to have a good experience of some sort, to be “delighted” by the company providing him or her with goods and services. In order to make this happen, consistently, a more fluid, flexible style of management is required.  There’s a whole system to this, as it turns out, with five interconnected principles, of which delighting the customer is one.  Without going into details of Denning’s radical management concept system, suffice it to say that it requires teams of workers allowed much greater initiative, communication as conversation across organizations and stakeholders, and casts managers in an enabling rather than controlling and enforcing position.

Back to the best and worst jobs now, and then on to implications for and from Virtue Ethics.  If job satisfaction depends in part on perception of meaningfulness, what will allow this meaningfulness, what is cut off at the knees — and every other joint — within a bureaucratic organization, is the capacity to exercise some initiative, some scope of autonomy, to have a say in what counts as accomplishing the tasks well, to engage with the “clients,” the “customers” — all features of the radical management business model, as well as of pre- and other non-bureaucratic organizations and workplaces.

In order to develop virtues, human beings need to develop habits of doing the right things, feeling the right ways, making use of goods properly, assessing situations correctly.  To some degree, this can be accomplished by requiring them to act in certain manners — to some degree, for there are several other things required in order for genuine virtue to be fully cultivated. 

A person has to have some degree of choice. On the path to becoming virtuous, it is enough at the start to do the right things because one is compelled, to receive a reward in compensation, to gain approval and praise, but this does not suffice for long.  At some point, a shift has to take place, a shift partly in object and partly in ownership.  The person has to come to recognize, to will, then to desire the good for its own sake, virtuous action and character for the sake of the goodnesses of virtue. The person also has to take on responsibility, to make this good of becoming virtuous no longer someone else’s but their own

Bureaucratic organization interferes with development of and enquiry into virtue, substituting prescriptive standardized procedures and performance measures, setting buzzword facsimiles which earn no lasting employee loyalty in place of actual virtues.  There is no or not enough opening for the development of, for conversations about, the moral virtues — and even more for phronesis, practical wisdom, which can only be exercised in clandestine, subversive manners in middle and low level positions

Delighting the customer consistently, as well as the other key components of Denning’s radical management approach, not only afford space where virtue and practical wisdom might again be cultivated in the workplace — so important in the meaningfulness of lives, the significance of work.  Even more, however, they will require the virtues and practical wisdom. And there, I think, nothing short of actually studying and practicing a real, explicit, coherent Virtue Ethics approach is going to do.

In a recent interview with the Big Think, chess-player Maurice Ashley, celebrated as the first African-American grandmaster, briefly narrates his development in the game of chess, from novice to master.  His recollections and reflections are interesting from a Virtue Ethics perspective for several reasons.

The game of Chess is in fact one the very practices examined by contemporary virtue ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre in his seminal book After Virtue.  He didn’t pick chess by chance or whim — chess does in certain ways exemplify the sort of practices that bear important and educative analogies to traditions of moral inquiry, like those of Virtue Ethics.   A practice, in the way MacIntyre famously reconfigures the term, denotes:

any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative activity through which goods internal to that type of activity in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to and partly definitive of that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.

One might, MacIntyre suggests, start playing chess with a bright child, offering the child the reward of candy if the child should win, but warning him or her that he will have to play well — that it will be difficult, though not impossible  — to win the game and the candy.  Over time, as the child plays, wins, loses, learns, a shift in motivation becomes possible — one which both transfers allegiance from one good to another and alters the attitude towards the game itself.

so long as it is the candy alone which provides the child a good reason for playing chess, the child has no reason not to cheat… But, so we may hope, there will come a time when the child will find in those good specific to chess, in the achievement of a highly particular kind of analytic skill, strategic imagination, and competitive intensity, a new set of reasons … for trying to excel in whatever way the game of chess demands.

Anything that genuinely is a practice — and not all forms of human activity are practices in MacIntyre’s sense — contains this potential for opening up to the novice new horizons which are not simply matters of skills but of nascent morality, thereby in return opening up the potentials within the novice to excel not solely within that practice but more generally, to find what is required to flourish as a human being — the whole point of Virtue Ethics.

One last feature of MacIntyrian practices need mention here:

A practice involves standards of excellence and obedience to rules as well as the achievement of goods. To enter into a practice is to accept the authority of those standards and the inadequacy of my performance as judged by them.  It is to subject my own attitudes, choices, preferences and tastes …

Now to Ashley’s own story of his development.  It begins with what for many would be a late start:

I did it in high school.  A friend of mine was playing chess and I had already actually known the rules.  My brother played the game with his friends, so I thought I was a pretty smart kid and I played this friend of mine and he just crushed me …this guy beat me so bad it wasn’t even funny.  I couldn’t understand why he beat me.

An inauspicious start, one might think — aren’t masters supposed to just have some native, inborn talent?  It’s actually quite important that his story begins with a loss, a devastating loss, one which suddenly struck home to him his very resourcelessness — I couldn’t understand why he beat me.

But, Ashely wasn’t entirely resourceless.  His story continues:

I just so happened to bump into a chess book in the library at school and I didn’t know that there were books on chess and so I take this book out and I’m like this is going to be cool, I’m going to whoop on this guy now, so I studied the book and I go back and the guy crushes me again and it turns out he had read that book and about nine other books… 

Good practical reasoning on the young Ashely’s part, but then another loss — but also another instance of reflection, widening of horizons, continuing inquiry, learning, testing himself against tough opposition.  Two important things happened — or rather, were chosen and kept to perseveringly:

that is the first time I really understood that there were books in chess and that studying mattered and it would be effective and I just played.  His name is Clotaire Colas.  I played Clotaire just about every day after school after that and I was just obsessed like most people get obsessed when they play chess.

Study and practice, hand in hand, reinforcing and bit by bit illuminating each other, aiming obsessively at the end of beating Colas at his own game — and in the process, Ashely does precisely what MacIntyre rightly noted — he subjects himself to the gradually more and more clear requirements of the practice, choosing to be schooled by better practitioners so as to become himself better.  Loss is an irreplacable component of this, realization of one’s relative resourcelessness, even the failure of first quick fixes (Ashley reads a book, then finds out Colas has assimilated it and others too) — all of these are needed in order to make progress, whether in chess or in the moral life.

Eventually in the course of his apprenticeship, Ashely undergoes a transformation of motives:

… well first of all, I wanted to beat him, so the competition was a big side.  I love to win.  I’m very competitive in most games, but I think also the beauty of the game.  There was something about it, the pieces, the shapes, something about them coordinating together and trying to get the other guy

Does anything like this take place, or have to take place in moral development, in an awakening to the need to engage in moral inquiry?  Does it take being “bested” by a “better”? 

Often we’re reminded of the need to be careful in assigning blame, in bringing harsh criticism to bear on moral failings — for good reason in many cases — such admonitions to careful chastising  have been articulated by many moral examplars and theorists going all the way back to Plato and past the Gospel even into portions of the Jewish scriptures. 

And yet, equally necessary is actually calling things what they are, rightly, accurately — so the other can actually see matters more like what they are.  If a person has moral failings, and if they are to make any progress towards remedying those, replacing vices with virtues, its necessary that the person come to know those failings as such — and in these sorts of cases, the emotional, attitudinal, and volitional responses to getting beaten — to acknowledged failure — are often indispensable stepping stones towards striving and eventually success.