HS 104_1_Virtue theory continued

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]okay so uh so i the reason why i did this quiz especially in this online learning scenario and i'm i'm pretty sure that most of you might have scored i mean i don't know whether you saw the mean the mean in the class was 17 so that's pretty high um so i i really don't want anyone to do badly in the overall when you consider the overall performance at least in first quiz you know if you have a proper cushion okay then the rest of things as to where you stand can be decided later on so i wanted to give you the the edge in the beginning and then you know decide later like where you proceed from here so uh yeah i'm not putting full screen for some technical reasons the computer that i'm using it crashes for some reason okay i'm not very sure why so i hope you can read from the non-slide show mode okay and uh so here is one here is one more clarification okay and this is in again in context of the quiz but also in context of um the previous debates about deontology that we had okay so someone someone uh was probing this uh um you might uh have familiar experiences say for example what about someone who is willing to be objectified for another okay so so in the uh campuses in indian camp indian campuses i mean i'm talking about physical campuses at least in some of those and i don't know how many of your representatives of uh bodies that stand for gender sensitivity but in some of the campuses where i visited and also some of the campuses abroad they have a you know rule that you shouldn't stare at someone okay you shouldn't stare at someone for more than seven seconds so if you stare at someone for more than seven or eight seconds and this varies in different campuses uh then it's considered as an offense okay of some sort the the culpability varies but it's an offense okay and i mean i'm not again giving you the gender sensitivity uh story but now imagine a scenario where the staring happens with the consent of the person who is stared at okay then it's a whole whole different ball game i mean it's it's not what we are talking about right now okay so if if the staring happens and there is objectification in that stairing okay without the other person's consent then that's not a morally good action according to khan but if the staring happens but at the same time the other person is willingly allowed to stare then then it's we are not in the in we are not in purview of deontology okay so that that uh issue about consensus is something that i missed when we discussed about objectification and you know treating as an instrument etc okay so if people are willingly allowing the other person to treat someone or you know as an object the subjectivity is retained but the subjectivity is retained in such a way that he or she is willingly allowing the other person to treat as an object okay there is a bit of history in here and uh i don't want to digress from our main discussion so the history goes back all the way to the ancient greeks okay you know there's this deity i'm not very sure about the the family tree of the deity but the deity that is known as narcissus okay narcissism is an example right now we use it fairly commonly uh you know to refer to people who objectify themselves okay so people who want other people to you know uh treat oneself as an object okay so that's that's the sort of you know the ancient connection that it has okay so here the ontology doesn't work clearly and you know there are other debates that are related to this but again i'm not digressing so let's move forward uh going back to virtue theory okay the i i don't know how many of you watched that clip um and even if you have not watched you can get a hang of it it's basically about how many properties as virtues person can inherit in a particular context okay so uh and i talked about in that clip that there will be conflicts of virtues okay conflicts of virtues and how do you go about when there is a moral dilemma and there are conflicts of virtues and here and from here we actually move to the profession of engineering and proper you know professional ethics about engineers i mean by next week at least so uh the professions in certain context okay but be it lawyers engineers doctors or soldiers and so on and so forth they have certain contextually uh available virtues and they prioritize it okay so forth for the engineering profession the priority that uh every society in engineering gives is the person's concern for safety okay safety of everyone okay and that's the priority so that's called a code but it's also a virtue that if you have a concern for safety uh of the public then that's a that's considered a virtue that you can inherit from the context okay and we will get into that but uh when there is a conflict between say a personal virtue something like loyalty to the firm or loyalty to your colleague or something of that sort who is a friend of yours and uh virtue about concern of safety the rule is that we always go with the professional virtues the virtues that you should have as an engineer so you prioritize that and you sort of set aside the personal virtues okay i gave you some examples in the last clip but um if you have not seen that it's very easy to imagine context whether personal or individual virtues are set aside or suspended in favor of professional virtues okay so uh you might remember i'm not very sure whether this happened in your uh you know uh consciousness but uh maybe there are memories so there is also a movie that was made about united airlines flight nine three you know they when the hijackers took the plane uh from new new jersey if i am not wrong and they wanted to land it on the capital u.s capital building okay or somewhere in washington uh you know the the virtues that the people have such as courage and uh kind of leading courage leading to self-sacrifice okay uh these are according to aries total uh not uh inherited okay inherited in the sense it's not they're always with you okay these are potential virtues so according to aristotle maybe a person is virtuous okay throughout his life or her life but it can go in this way that he or she may not get a chance to be virtuous throughout his or her life okay so just imagine the case of a soldier who is very brave and very courageous and very uh you know determined and has got a correct temperament in in times of crisis etc but just what if that soldier did not get any chance to be in a context where he or she can show this virtue okay so the potential virtues that is already there okay it's not inherited in the sense it's not inherited from culture but it's there inside of you uh may never get actualized okay so aristotle talks about potentiality and actuality and there may be many virtues that you have but you may not be in the right time and place so that you know you can become virtuous so according to aristotle then one of the most important existential act that you should do is to see am i in the right to see and ask this question am i in the right context okay so maybe there is a there is a soldier or maybe there is an engineer with certain virtues there inside you maybe there is a musician with certain virtues of measures of harmony and so on in your mind etc etc but these may not be actualized unless and until you are in that context so the united airlines incident is shown in certain you know scenarios where people become virtuous because they have no other option so those who had the potential virtues in them they sort of flourish and they saved a whole lot of population individuals on that day okay so uh keep this in mind that the virtues are not like uh properties in uh in physics like you know you have a negative charged electron which means that in all situations the electron will show a particular behavior because it has got an you know negative electric charge but it has to be a situation where the negative electric charge is you know potentially potentially activatable if i can use that word or if it's if it's a situation where the electron [Music] is you know forced to move in a certain way where it's a negative charge uh comes alive or something of that sort okay um not sure whether you got this but um it's it's again not a difficult thing to understand so uh aristotle aristotle's point is this that when you are in a professional situation okay at least this is what we can derive from aristotle when you are in a professional situation then if you don't have those virtues potentially then you can't actualize it okay so just imagine a soldier who is not courageous at all even if the situation arises the person won't be courageous this person won't be actualizing that potential okay so cultivation of these virtues that are relevant for a profession it's more important and you may not get a chance to show it or you know a chance to actualize it but still as a as a professional it's the responsibility of the individual to cultivate these virtues okay so that's one more clarification and uh here is a criticism of virtue theory and i am not very sure whether i added this in the clip um does having a virtue lead to being a morally good person or um i i think the question can be rephrased like is having a virtue such as courage being courageous mean that it's uh that individual is a morally good person answer is no uh you know being courageous can lead to morally uh bad actions okay immoral actions basically and being generous you know being compassionate being honest all these can lead to [Music] immoral actions so having a bucket full of virtues doesn't mean that he or she is a good person okay i mean morally good person because the bucket full of virtues may land uh the person in a particular context okay so the person with a bucket full of virtues may land in a particular context but then when he or she prioritizes these virtues uh one over the other etc then [Music] you know things can go haywire and you know if you prioritize personal virtues over professional ones etc then uh the moral goodness is taken away okay it happens so one of the major criticisms that come against aristotle is this that having virtues doesn't mean that the person is doing more morally good okay so that's the third clarification that i wanted to give you and the conflicts in professional roles um is always there and you might have seen this several times uh during your own student days at least to till whatever you know phase that you have stage that you have so you know maybe uh certain virtues like loyalty and you know trust etc may uh you know get prioritized over honesty courage and fairness you know remember the i again i'm sorry that i have this incident from cricket uh remember the stephen smith and david warner bold tampering issue and the ball it's a professional sports and therefore it's part of a second-order discourse so the the loyalty to the captain uh made the other person do it so you know the junior player who did this he was a i think he was a batsman i forgot again his name but because of the loyalty to the captain and the senior players the person executed certain things which was not in the spirit of the game and you know rather than showing honesty courage and fairness and speak out he didn't do it but then uh where do we really analyze this in the in in the larger context of different professions and i wrote the the question is winning all that important exactly uh by keeping that spirit in mind that you know maybe winning is not that important and when you prioritize that winning is important then certain virtues get prioritized along with that okay but if you establish in sports and professional sports that it's not winning that is important but it's just the game that's important and you play it then maybe honesty courage and fairness get prioritized okay so uh contextually the conflict of virtues keep changing and i'm going to give you some examples as we progress through the post meet some scenario okay [Music] so yeah so there can be many more examples and uh the the significant theme that you should have in your mind even when you are no more an engineering student or even when you are away from this campus or sometime maybe later on uh if some of these dilemmas appear [Music] utilitarianism should not be taken as an intention that is selfish along with an intention that is selfish okay in nature so it's not for our immediate good or the institute's immediate good that we undertake an action or our friend's immediate good but uh remember that phrase by bentham that it's a common good and its maximum happiness for maximum number okay so it's never an individualistic thing okay it has to be a common good uh and this is where i think some of the emails that i received i felt like i didn't convey the message properly that it it's it's not about the actor or the immediate surroundings but also about the larger group okay that are affected and deontology is straightforward and and i think there is no not much of a scope for you know difference in intention like you treat the other person as agents with autonomy there's no backing off from that claim okay and virtue theory uh what what is important is humans in possession of virtues for specific context so that that is very important that you know it has to be about a specific context and based on context the virtues will jumble up and rearrange okay so when you are in your home as a daughter or as a son the virtues the priorities as an individual might just rearrange itself okay but when you are in uh in a campus it again gets rearranged so humans have to have those virtues inside of them but it is not always guaranteed that human beings will get a chance to show that as aristotle says so maybe potentially they are virtuous but actual actualizing may not happen in their entire life okay so you know there are many counter factual situations like this that given a chance would that person become virtuous that is uh the need of the context that's what people ask for in virtue theory okay so uh so this is the indention that is there with each of these packages okay utilitarianism deontology and virtue theory and now we are going to uh ask a few questions such as you know these are examples again in certain moral situations we can notice that the three frameworks converge so as in the quiz you know we have seen that situations may get diverse sorry framework frameworks may diverge to different decisions but also they may converge okay so for example commodification of sex selling of organ selling of organs uh or you know surrogacy and so on and so forth uh there are things that are not always uh [Music] morally justifiable in any frameworks okay so you know you take any of these examples and you will see but somehow in some of these cases it gets into a divergence so say for example selling of organs utilitarian algorithms might just point to suffering due to exploitation and this is true that utilitarians reject the idea of selling organs selling of organs like or commodification of organs or commodification of sexual relationships etc okay because they believe that you know initially if we uh suspend the altruistic intention and it might just look like oh here is happiness for everyone you know for the seller as well as for the buyer but what happens afterwards is a lot of exploitation and so on this is shown by statistics and they quantify it and they go against it and the ontology i'm not um speaking again about it they don't buy this argument of treating human beings as objects okay and virtue theory will also converge because they claim that you know it's a disrespectful honor trust etc but having said that still there is uh a chance to argue even having established this and so here for example hiring mercenaries to fight our wars khan would obviously deny it uh you know if it is a universal if it is universalized as a universal law then the the meaning of fighting a war because the war is between two bodies two countries or two sections and then we are hiring someone else to do it then that loses the me the very meaning of what war is okay and what a conflict is then the might save or con vendor might just give consent for this if the overall happiness to everyone involved is increased and it's income inconclusive right now because we don't know what will happen if we hire mercenaries so in most of these dilemma scenarios you can see that utilitarianism is inconclusive okay because we don't have enough data to really analyze okay and in aristotle's case he might just say that okay if you have the right kind of mercenaries with the right virtues maybe employ them but what if we don't have that and what if we can't establish the context then aristotle may go against it okay so uh the point of coming up with this table was this that you know even within these dilemmas about larger ethical decisions and we have not reached professional situations but even in these larger you know issues of dilemmas we can diverge even by using the same uh framework okay so selling citizenship citizenship to immigrants willing to pay and i i can confess that one of my friends recently bought citizenship in australia okay paying investing some amount of um you know money there i think it was something like 20 20 crore or something as a base amount and then you can if you generate something that is useful for their citizens they go by jeremy bentham's idea of utilitarianism khan would deny that because you know the clear case of using um you know in a clear case of violating the means to end thing that he said it's a it's an objectification that's happening and the whole idea of citizenship is lost when we you know generalize it aristotle might deny this saying that citizenship at least from his point of view i can say that citizenship comes up with certain virtues and unless you have those virtues it's difficult to uh accommodate someone as a citizen and most of these virtues at least in the case of aristotle are ethnic okay so you have to be in that culture to really gain those virtues so i still would have denied i'm just speaking on behalf of him but maybe in the modern context aristotle would have said oh it's fine because and virtues are you know you can foster virtues and maybe you can rehabilitate people in such a way that they get these words chosen therefore they can become citizens okay so uh so on and so forth and in all these decisions like hiring individuals for friendship and sexual relationships khan would deny them them would agree and deny because in just before this slide you saw that bantam and utilitarians denied this but uh what if we have a scenario where everyone is benefited then them would agree there and i distorted might just deny it based on the fact that you know this whole idea of hiring requires certain other virtues and that sort of demeans the purpose because fronts need to have certain virtues and hiring might just demean those and so on and so forth so um the reason why i gave you this um [Music] sort of encyclopedic view about how people diverge and converge and how models of you know moral reasoning converge or diverse is because you know we shouldn't be really certain that here is the right thing to do okay and this is how we are taught in schools and in in you know in the society that um this is the only right way to go about this action okay but it's not really correct when you get into a second-order discourse okay and things become a bit open-ended okay so so to speak