Every organisation or institution you have ever been a part of has almost certainly collected a list of values they want everyone to abide by.

My first University claims collective ambition, purposeful collaboration, bold innovation, and genuine care. The British Army claims courage, discipline, respect for others, integrity, loyalty, and selfless commitment.¹ Tesco has no one tries harder for customers, we treat people how they want to be treated, and every little help makes a big difference.

You’ll find values in sports clubs, schools, local councils, professional bodies. Any place where people collect in a serious way to do things. Even, sometimes, in groups that are less serious—house rules in a D&D group can include stuff like don’t be a spotlight hog or don’t be a rules-lawyer.

People love values. It’s a shame they don’t work.

¶What are ‘virtue’ ethics and why should we care?

Obviously I’m being hyperbolic here, but not, like, heaps. To understand what I mean, though, we have to take a brief detour through a particular approach to ethics.²

Ethics is one of the main branches of philosophy. I have a sort of ethics primer that explains things more substantively, but essentially, it’s the philosophy of how to be good.

We all want to be good, but what is good? What does good mean? And, as such, how should we go about as a result, to achieve that goodness?

Sadly, as you might imagine, it’s a busy debate with few clear answers.

¶Other ethical models don’t work

You might think “well, just do the least harm and the most good”. That’s consequentialism, and I reckon most people are intuitively consequentialist. But consequences aren’t all commensurate—they don’t have the same cash value so to speak. If some surgeon killed one person, harvested all their organs, and used those organs to save five people, then we probably wouldn’t really be that interested in her consequential calculus. Or for a more realistic example, I say elsewhere:

There this way of thinking that says, if we just increase overall economic wealth, everyone will be better off … You know, bring the average up, and that’ll bring everyone up, sort of thing … [but] there seems something quite odd about preferring future, hypothetical people over the suffering of real, current people

So you might resort to principles instead. Killing people might save lives, but maybe you just think you shouldn’t kill because of the principle of the thing. You might sometimes feel it’s appropriate to cause harm, but you have a general duty to try not to harm people. Indeed, this is why we follow laws. Not because they’re always good, but because you believe in them on principle. This is deontology.

But obviously principles and rules and duties don’t always hold. Even as I described them, I hedged with the old “they’re not always good”. For example, if your grandma is sick, you’re not going to be focused on the speeding laws, or the consequences of missing your dinner date, you’re going to drive as fast as you can to help your grandma. That’s a care ethic—when we prioritise our loved ones over all else.³

¶Virtue ethics tries to fill the gap

Virtue ethics are an attempt to:

shift the question from “what should I do?” to “what kind of person should I be?” The idea here is that understanding what the right ‘principles’ might be, or the extent of the consequences of our actions, is hard. We’re not likely to get it right all the time. So perhaps it’s better to try to become good people instead. We like good people, and we don’t mind when they make ethical errors because we know “their hearts are in the right place”. We think they’re much more likely to do good than bad. So perhaps it’s better to try and be one of these good people, rather than try to figure out what each of our actions should be, because then we’re more likely to do good than bad.

¶Virtues are values

So, virtue ethicists focus on cultivating “virtues”—good character traits like courage, honesty, temperance, compassion—in the hope that this will facilitate good behaviour.

The idea is that by cultivating these qualities, we will achieve human flourishing within a community or practice.

And you’ve already made the connection I hope, to values. Like virtues, organisational values are often the desirable qualities of people. They’re aspirational about character development, just like virtues are. They assume these things can be cultivated in the organisational culture. They are explicitly about what “good” means. And they are presented in this manner because they are really difficult to codify—they aren’t meant to be rules or principles, it’s not a code of conduct—you’re meant to embody organisational values.⁴

Values are virtues. At least in this specific form.

¶Values don’t matter because virtues don’t matter

Virtue ethics suffer two rather troubling problems.

¶What’s virtuous depends on the context

The first goes all the way back to the origin of virtue ethics in the anglosphere (though, not to Buddhist or Confucian virtue ethics). In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle pointed out that virtues were found in a sort of golden mean between two extremes. He uses the example of courage to illustrate—it sits between cowardice and recklessness.

It sounds sensible, but what it means in practice is that virtues are sort of necessarily indeterminate. When does cowardice become courage become recklessness? Isn’t that sort of context dependent?

Alasdair MacIntye brings this home in his book After Virtue. He points out that virtues aren’t just different in degree—e.g. how much courage is too much courage—they’re actually different in kind. Virtues have to be embedded in practices—the things you’re actually doing—to make any sense, and this means that the virtue often changes in its manifestation. What courage means for a doctor has almost nothing to do with what courage means for a soldier or a teacher.

Organisations contain many different ways of doing things, with different traditions and narratives around what’s virtuous in those traditions. Take my current context. I teach British Army Officers ethics. I teach them their own Virtue Ethics. Let me ask you, when the British Army says it wants them to be courageous, does it mean the courage of a frontline soldier? A logistics officer? The recruitment team? These are all practices within the British Army, and they are fundamentally different, with completely different standards of excellence.

Virtues are hugely context dependent. And that’s only the first problem. The next one is worse. You see, even if we address this kind of contextual vagueness, you then have to contend with the fact that:

¶Virtues might not exist at all

The second problem is comes in the form of the Situationist critique of virtue ethics.

These are a collection of people who pay particular attention to the fact that virtue ethics are all about character. That what we want to do is embody these virtues or values as traits of ourselves.

Then they notice the very troubling lack of evidence that traits are a thing. That the vast majority of empirical evidence points to the fact that there is very little, if anything, that is stable in the human, and rather, the situation seems to overwhelmingly drive behaviour.

Personality is kind-of stable, as is IQ, so we aren’t out of options for stable human behavioural attributes. But little else provides much traction, and it’s not particularly easy to see exactly how “character” might be found within the ones we do have on hand.

On the other hand, there are these handful of experiments from the 60’s and 70’s that demonstrate that the situation seems to annihilate the individual capacity for virtue. I’m thinking of Milgram’s electro-shock experiments or the Stanford Prison Experiment: examples of catastrophic ethical leadership failure. Where the situation led average people to shock someone ostensibly to death, in the name of science; or led undergraduate students to brutalise each other while simulating a prison. And while most people get the basic facts of these wrong, it’s because they are actually simplifying over detail that makes the grasp of the situation on the participants’ behaviour even stronger.

While everyone is asking “what virtues comprise the best moral character”, the Situationists are asking “is there even such a thing as moral character?”

¶Context is all there is

Now, I said up top that I was being hyperbolic, but you see what I mean, right? We haven’t painted a very flattering picture of this particular project.

We’ve known from the start that virtues themselves are a little vague. Somewhere between two extremes. But they are also located differently on that spectrum depending on what practice you’re engaging in. It’s not a moral continuum, it’s a moral landscape with many peaks and valleys. Very easy to get lost.

But it’s worse than that, because, even if you manage to locate the peaks you care about, people won’t reliably display it. The situation overwhelmingly drives their behaviour, no matter how committed they are to embodying the virtues you want them to embody.

Now, this entire article was prompted by an old colleague. He called wanting my advice on how to help his executive team with their new ‘values initiative’. A start-up, large enough to start looking to embed values into things, as all organisations eventually do.

I spent about seven minutes describing all this before realising that he probably didn’t really care about the background. No one ever does. It’s leadership consulting after all, not brain science. They want sexy-sounding solutions.

¶Context ethics?

So I did come up with a solution. I’m pretty good like that. You’ve probably come up with the solution yourself, because you did care about the background.

If context is all there is, then what we need to do is design the context.

This isn’t a new idea. Since MacIntyre, the idea that virtues are practice-dependent, and only intelligible within social and institutional contexts, has taken deep root. The implications, of course, are for institutions to cultivate goods that are internal to practices, and create structural opportunities for virtuous action.

Similarly, plenty of people take the Situationist critique seriously. John Doris talks about the ecological approach to ethics, in which we must take an empirically-informed, context sensitive approach to moral psychology and character-based ethics. Maria Merrit poses what we might call “humility ethics“ which again emphasises a context-aware approach to virtue-ethical behaviour.

So I lied before. Virtues, or values, are something we can aspire to cultivate. We just need to be cautious about how we implement them. We need to structure the context, not so much the values themselves.

And this is what I told my worried colleague. You can come up with the values, but you also need to articulate what that means across different practices. Better yet, hijack the human tendency toward conformity under uncertainty, and model those virtues.

Then, take some time to identify what situational factors motivate people, and use those to design the environment—create a choice architecture. A template like expectancy theory, or any process model of motivation, might be helpful. Equally, you could ignore their motivations and concentrate on their beliefs. People only pay attention to what they believe is important, so emphasise those things.

Choose your virtues if you want, sure. But don’t spend too long waiting for people to adopt them. Design the context to help people along. Otherwise, the virtues will hardly matter.