Virtue and Character

By Stephen Downes
Nov 09, 2021
Transcript of Virtue and Character

Unedited audio transcript from Google Recorder

Hi everyone. I'm Stephen Dowens. Welcome to another episode and ethics analytics, and the duty of care. We're in module five, We're talking about, approaches to ethics. And in the previous video, I talked about approaches to ethics in overview. Now, in these next few videos, I'm going to talk about a number of ethics, number of ethical theories in more detail.

And the first one will be our look at virtue and character. Now I'm sensitive to the fact that this could be an entire course and instead it's a short, maybe one hour segment of this course, I'm also sensitive to the idea that listening to me talk about virtual character for an hour might not be the greatest way of going to spend your afternoon even if that's.

So that's fair enough. Wait for the transcript. It will be available in the course. The reason why I'm going at this way is because I want to combine a bit of the background research a bit of the preparation for these things but also a bit of the genocore that comes from talking about these things off the top of my head.

Because what I'm doing is, I assemble this course, there's I'm not simply pulling together research on various topics, I mean, I am doing that. But I've been working on philosophy and ethics for the last 40 years. So, yeah. There's a sense in which I'm going together research but there's a more important sense.

I think in which I'm drawing on my own depth of experience and knowledge, not only of ethics but of technology and of learning and even of journalism and other aspects of my life to bring together an overarching view, and that's going to be characteristic of this presentation as well.

Now, I mean I could just read an encyclopedia article and I consulted a number along with primary sources in preparation for this this video. But it wouldn't be very useful because it wouldn't really have any contacts. And I want to take this idea. I'm placing it into a contemporary context and also a context based in this course.

So that's why I'm doing it this way. And I think he should take these videos not so much as me offering a lecture on a subject. I think that would be the wrong way to think of them. I want you to think of them as me, sending myself up with a set of resources including a set of slides.

But I'm also working from some text here as well. And some background information sending myself up and then working my way through these ideas as a first draft, excellent, more like to second her third draft of what will eventually become a more comprehensive work. If you view it that way, if you view this really as me thinking about these subjects for myself rather than me telling you about the subjects so that you can remember them.

I think that might be a more productive way of looking at these videos. Okay, I've probably said things. So, I know I've said things sort of like this already in the past and I made come back to this message in the future but I think it's a helpful way of understanding.

What I'm up to here. So but I'm also trying to make kind of a neat resource too. So yeah, I'm gonna try to do the the video production values and all of that. But, you know, I'm not national geographic. I can't pull off that this sound in the moving images and and I'm working on zero budget.

So, yeah, what do you expect? Okay.

Virtue and character. So ethics, as they say, in this perspective, is in the first instance, this study of virtue in a person as perhaps real, but revealed by a person's actions or perhaps, as revealed by how they conduct themselves in society. But what is virtue? That's kind of that's one of those horrible questions.

It's a bit like asking you but what is good or what is ethically, right? Well, the Stanford Encyclopedia Philosophy, says, and I quote, a virtue is an excellent trait of character. It is a disposition. Well, in entrenched, in its possessor, something that as we say, goes all the way down.

Unlike habits such as being a tea drinker, to notice expect value feel desire to choose act and react in certain characteristic ways. Now it we could pull a lot out of that definition. When we say, for example, it's a disposition, you know, that that brings to mind Gilbert Riles behaviorist theory of mind in which, you know, people's character amounts to nothing more.

He says than dispositions. When we say it's well and transcendence possessor which sort of wonder whether there's an appeal here being made to the essence of a person or perhaps we're talking about a person as something that has deep kinds of formations. Maybe deep neural patterns or something like that.

When we drive distinction between a mirror habit and the virtue again, we're sort of trying to distinguish that which is shall we say in accidental property of a person and not, which is an essential property of person, but we need to be careful of this because the core attribute of the essential is that it's unchangeable.

And that creates intractable problems for virtue as a theory of ethics. The nature of virtue is usually characterized by describing the different traits of virtue and and we will do that in a little bit. Things like honesty, fugility piety, humility, caring, courage, etc, right. But the the way virtue theory works is that it's not defined by these traits.

It's it's the old Gods. Socrates used to use a lot. Somebody would say to him, well, what is the nature of justice? And and somebody would answer. Well, it's giving people, what is there? Do it is being fair and adjudication and Socrates will say, well no. These are just examples of justice, but they're not.

What justice is and so the same with virtue, right? These are examples of virtue but they're not what virtuous and again. So we have this sort of idea that there's a thing at the core which is virtue and then these these characteristics spring off of that, you know, almost as though they are aspects of some sort of sense of perfection.

So there's the idea of what the perfect person might be. And then these character traits, which are representative of a perfect person but aren't what define a perfect person.

The achievement of virtue is represented as the highest ethical principle, and it's essentially tied up with the development of character. And that's why I've put virtue and character together. In this section Aristotle, might say that the achievement of virtue is a lifetime, task, you spend a lifetime building your character.

There's an old Dallas trope that goes or an old Dallas meme, which is probably not even accurate, right? Watch? What would you say? Because then it's what you believe, what you, what you believe, because then it's your character watch what your character, because then it's your destiny. I don't think about Sue ever sent any such thing.

I could be wrong but I don't think so. But that gets a kind of the idea, right? That we can by saying the right thing, going, the right thing, develop these virtues in ourselves and it's an act of will have we'll come back to that. It's the opposite of what might be called.

The weakness of will, it's the opposite of our succumbing to the temptation to endulge to be in temperate dishonest violence, capricious. All of these things that I guess are not virtues the achievement of virtue can be thought of as something like self formation. And here we see this reflected in modern writers such as Michael from coke who talks about and they quote self-formation as an ethical subject, a process in which the individual dilimates that part of himself that will form the object of this.

Moral practice defines his position, relative to the precept, he will follow and decides on a certain motive being that will serve as his moral goal. There's a fancy way quoted from the internet and cyclopedia of philosophy of saying, you know, what kind of person do I want to be?

And and how do I go about developing that in myself? I might say, for example, I want to be the kind of people that person that people trust and then as a results, I undertake the sorts of actions and cultivate that aspect of my personality that in genders trust.

But it can be a lot more basic than that. I remember, once way back when I was working with the graduate students association, somebody once said of me within my hearing, oh yes, Steven is always on time which was a bit surprising to me because I had never really thought of that but then I realized, yeah I want to be thought of as the sort of person who's always on time and then I began to cultivate that aspect of my character to be the sort of person who is there in his chair, ready to start when the meeting starts or the event starts or whatever, there's not an accidental thing and it's not even something that's in itself, inherently a virtue.

I mean nobody nobody lists always being on time as one of the lists of virtues, but it's this aspect of character that reveals the deeper character that I was trying to cultivate. I don't know if I was successful, but, you know, I went through that process in my life and it's something that isn't obviously limited to me.

And it is something that we think about or have thought about more perhaps in recent years there's a phenomenon of the idea of someone quote working on my self and you know in popular culture we generally think of this as applying to women but it certainly does not apply exclusively to women and we can ask things.

Like if you are working on yourself, are you considering these points when you say I am working on me, are you working on yourself or or are you maintaining your happiness, are you somewhere in the middle? Or you just do not know? It doesn't matter where you are in your journey and that's part of it.

The idea that we're going from where we were to where we're going to be, excuse me, the idea of an older less good version of myself to more ideal version of myself. It partly has to do with virtue and apparently has to do with our relations with each other's and whether we're ready to interact with others.

And it had partly has to do with our broader standing in society. What kind of person do I want to be in society? So the virtues the virtues in the context of excuse me, general theories of ethics aren't not so much that sort of thing but more enormative sort of thing.

And by normative what I mean here, is that the idea of the virtue tells you how to behave, or what to do from a BBC documentary. I pulled this virtue ethics teachers, the following an action is only right. If it is an action, not a virtuous person would carry out in the same circumstance.

A virtuous person is a person who acts virtuously person acts virtuously. If they possess and live, the virtues a virtue was a moral, characteristic that a person needs to live. Well and you can sort of see here that it's telling you what you should do but not specifically what you should do, how you should live but not specifically how you should live, you know, even what kind of person you should be but not specifically, what kind of person you should be?

So it's normative in the sex that it's telling us, you know, what, constitutes a right action. But it's vague and the description of what a right action is and and that's also listed as one of the criticisms of virtue ethics so that it's not prescriptive in that way. There's a couple of things here worth noting.

And first of all is the characterization of a right action as something that somebody would do in the same circumstances. And so there's an element of counterfactual reasoning here. There's an element of asking yourself, what would be the state in the closest possible world where I am. In fact to virtuous person or where a virtual or a virtuous person is standing in my place instead of me.

And so that is going to create difficulties, certainly it creates a need for something like a possible world semantics. So we can understand what's happening in possible worlds and then apply it to this world, but we can do that, we have evidence of being able to do that. And there's also this sense in which, you know, being a virtuous person isn't like laying down a set of rules or principles but rather it's more like recognizing what the right sort of thing is to do.

And I have a lot to say about knowledge as recognition in other forms another formats and I think that kind of reasoning applies here as well. A virtual person wouldn't follow a principle. They would just recognize or just know what the correct action is here. I've brought me in on the other side of this slide, a discussion of virtue ethics as it applies to research and research ethics.

Again applying virtue ethics as a normative approach. Telling people what to do without being a prescriptive approach. So we have basically a collection of factors. Science is a social practice and ethical principles research, empirical studies on researchers, and their assessments of virtues other virtues evidence, ethics studies and one's personal values bringing this all together to create something like virtual virtuous research.

And then these are applied against the values of norms of the institute of science and the external or externalized, ethical guidelines and principles and research. And so it's almost like we have this. I don't want to say us versus them because that's not how it's supposed to wear a coat.

But this internal sense of what a virtuous researcher would do measured up against the framework to find by society and ethics boards as to what costs to suits ethical research. And so, the ethical, the definitions of what costs you to ethical research by say research ethics boards aren't taken as definitive, but rather are taking as a standard of measuring against one's own.

Virtuous sense. At least I'd like to take that and I think there's something to it. I don't think we've got the whole story here, but I think we've got perhaps part of the story and I'll refer back to some of this discussion as we get to the later points.

Later modules of the course. So let's think for a moment then what are the virtues? Because this is where almost all discussion of virtue, ethics and ends up. And just to introduce that I've brought forward here. This is a representation of Saint Thomas Aquinas on virtues Thomas. Aquinas is a very well-known philosopher from the Catholic tradition, but this is his position on virtues represented as a UML document, which is a type of diagram that computer scientists use in order to display the flow of data on information across the system.

And so, we have, first principles, practical reason, characters feeding in to the concept of virtue and human good and choice mediating. And so we have the core value of virtue. Whatever, that is. And then we have the sub kinds prudence, justice courage temperance. And then the characterization of virtue.

And okay, I think kind of get that, but it seems odd for me to think that we can represent Thomas with a UML document with the UML diagram. And there does seem to be something missing in that something to think about. So what are the virtues? Well, we'll begin with what are called the cardinal virtues?

We just read them that are the four virtues of mind and character in both tough classical philosophy and Christian theology. They are prudent. Switching includes wisdom justice, which could be thought of as fairness, or righteousness fortitude, which could be thought of as courage, or maybe resilience and temperance, which could be thought of as restraints or the practice of self-control.

And we can ask are these all and only the virtues and the answers going to be pretty, obviously, no, these were taken this core, but in the 2500 years, since these were originally devised, there have been numerous variations on methane.

Probably the most well known, our aristotles 12 virtues. And here we have the list. Bravery temperance. Generosity truthfulness wittiness, friendlyness being spirited, conscientious indignant benevolent and industrious. And what I find interesting about this list, not to mention some of the characteristics like wittiness. Again, you wouldn't think being witty as an ethical principle, but there it is.

And you know, when you think about it, you know, it's it's like you know, it's like the theory of being successful as being, you know the sort of person you want to sit down and have a beer with or something like that. Maybe having a beer with is the wrong example but I think you get the idea right somebody who's friendly you know going is somehow ethically better.

So we think and maybe how the way aerosol sets us up at least in this depiction is that there's a range, these are characteristics on the one hand, they might be completely absent. And that's a vice. And on the other hand we can take them to excess and that's a vice and being virtuous here.

Really means finding that happy medium or the happy mean, you know, somewhere in the middle. So being brave as opposed to being cowardly, which is the absence for the deficiency. But as also, as opposed to being stupid or rash, you know, what's one thing to be brave? It's another thing to jump off a cliff without a parachute.

That's rash a temperance. Similarly, you know, being addicted to alcohol, or being addicted to food is too much. It's, you know, it's a deficiency of temperance temperance if you will. But on the other hand, giving up food, giving up, alcohol taking these things to extreme could also be seen as a vice.

This is kind of interesting in the Greek content contacts because there was no shortage of aesthetics in the great context. People experimenting with different ways of living noble lives. Virtuous lives or just philosophically consistent lights, another way of looking at all of this is through the lens of stoicism and I don't like using the, the expression through the lens of.

But, I'll use it here. It's good enough. And stoicism again, we could be an entire course, right? But basically can be characterized by the triangle where on the one corner or on the one hand, we expressed the highest version of one self from moments to moments. It's, that's the principle of irritate be all that you can be and on the other hand, focusing on what we control and accepting the rest as it happens.

And that reminds us of that old phrase, right? Give me the knowledge to. How does that come? I'm trying to remember it. Give me the courage to change. What I can change the knowledge to for the acceptance to not change when I can't change and the wisdom to know the difference, something like that, you know, the phrase.

And so the third part of stoicism, the part that everybody kind of keys in on is the idea of taking responsibility and recognizing that it's not an experimental situation that makes us happier miserable. But rather our interpretation of that situation, which is fine for the most part. But if you're external situation is one in which there is utterly no food to be had, it takes quite a bit of strength of character to be a poppy.

Nonetheless, you know? So, I mean, from the concept of virtue is sometimes to be contrasted with the concept of having ordinary emotions in an ordinary life. These virtues aren't just limited to the Greek and Christian tradition. We find them in other traditions as well and all sample. A few here and again and a whole entire course in one slide, right?

So, for example, within confusionism, we could identify the following virtues benevolence righteousness propriety wisdom and fidelity, and that last one probably is what's most characteristic of confusionism. Because fidelity, means honoring your, your parents, honoring your forefathers, and to a degree, honoring those who you serve, or, you know, who are in authority over you.

And again, that's a very hand. Wavy representation of confusionism wasm has a similar perspective. And you know, as you read the daily gene, you read constant references to depending on how it's translated. Exactly. But the sage is this, or this sage is that egg by the sage we can mean?

Perhaps the philosopher or perhaps the enlightened ruler depends on your perspective, right? And so here, I'm quoting from Britannica Taoist. Sagehood is internal, although it can be manifest in an external royalty. That brings the world back to the way by means of quietism, variously called non-intervention way, inner cultivation.

Yeah. Or art of the heart and mind is in June.

And that was a misinteresting because the virtue that it describes is in a sense of virtue of selflessness, so that you're not striving for wealth, you're not striving for power but it's also a virtue of effectiveness in that. If you live this way, you roll acquire wealth, you will acquire power, and it's this, this sense of self abnegation, you know, it's not simply doing nothing but rather doing something so perfectly that there is no trace of your yourself in the finished work.

So like it Jade carving, you don't want to see the marks made by the carver, there's a lot more to develop them than that. But from the perspective of virtue, we can see that there are some principles that are sort of not principles or some characteristic virtues. There are not really characteristic virtues, but it's still very much a form at least to my interpretation of virtue ethics Bushido.

And here I can't make any claims that this is an accurate representation of Bushido because I simply don't have the background in that theory. But nonetheless, I can say because it's right here that these seven virtues can be described as a type of virtue ethics. So, they would include things like integrity, respect heroic courage, honor, compassion honesty, and sincerity, and duty, and loyalty.

Now, I wanted to things, we should notice here, isn't it? You know, although it almost feels like there's a core, there isn't a core and almost feels like they're the same thing. They aren't the same thing. And there are certainly differences of emphasis in the different approaches to virtue.

And I think that's an important aspect of this approach and that that aspect is just what are those virtues? And Keenan offers a more contemporary list justice, which is not simply fairness, but a requirement to treat everybody equally and impartially reference possible fidelity, which seems to contrast not well with with justice.

And that we should treat people closer to us with special care self-care or unique responsibility to care for ourselves, which speaks again to this achievement of virtue. And then prudence, we must always consider these things. And the way he derives these, he says, as persons, we are relational in three ways, generally, specifically and uniquely.

And each of these relational ways being demands a cardinal virtue, which are justice fidelity and self-care. And then the fourth cardinal virtue, which is prudence, which determines what constitutes the just faithful and self-careing way of life for an individual. It's, it's the moderator between those three if you will And that's an interesting characterization of virtue because again none of justice fidelity or self-care is always going to carry the day and we need this prudence this idea.

Perhaps of wisdom knowledge attentiveness to actually decide how to weigh one of these or the other. So that's one way of looking at the virtues from a contemporary perspective. Here's another way moolah roof. And we don't normally think of a movie starring people, like Nicole Kidman to be an example of virtue ethics, but nonetheless, there it is.

Promoting the virtues of truth, beauty freedom, and love, and just to, so, just to show how those roles up into virtue ethics, this is something that I created called Ching. And it's the idea of creating a sense of virtue reflective of day to day life, using the same methodology as the eaching with coins.

I've never really mastered the method with yero sticks. And so the idea is that he tossed the coins that gives you a position on the grid and so what it is, is a combination of two of these for virtues. So for example, if you the raw 1 0 and then 0 1, you get freedom against beauty and what is that?

That's beautiful. Freedom beauty on freedom. Sweet, liberty. No responsibilities for any and that's an interesting way of looking at virtue as well, but the idea here is that we're seeing how the virtues are instantiated not just in ourselves, but how we see ourselves living from day to day and meant kind of, what is, what the doubt aging does as well.

It's sometimes represented as, you know, a fortune telling process, but I don't think it is. I think it's a way of seeing understanding how the different virtues, how the different elements of the world come together to form, different ways of seeing the world and your life and other people in ways that might be important to you.

So in contemporary times, and by contemporary times, I mean, anytime in the last 50 years, I suppose, The concept of virtue ethics has blossomed into a way of looking at how to do well and be well and live. Well, generally, and I've grouped these under the heading of character in mindset and I think of these as modern adaptations of virtue theory and and it's not hard to see the connection.

Look at this diagram from George. Koros his book, the innovators mindset and look at the values that we see being described here. Empathetic problem, finders risk, takers network, observant creators, resilient and reflective. Now, let's true that this isn't exactly the same as prudence justice. Fortitude and temperance, nonetheless, there's certainly, the sort of argument that could be made that these are modern virtues for a modern time.

Although cynic might say they're capitalist virtues for a capitalist time. So how do we get to these modern virtues? Let's go to pre-driven. Nietzsche Friedrich Nietzsche, looks the concept of virtue and he comes up with a number of really important ideas. And again this is a full course and just a couple of minutes of explanation but there are a few of the things that he does.

He looks at the concept of the uberaments, which we know now is Superman and asks, basically, what would the ethics of a Superman be if you had no constraints? What would your ethics be? And I think that's a good question of the answer that we got at least in the mid 30s and North America is that if you had superpowers what you would do is fight crime which seems like an odd thing to do.

But I think that tells us a lot about the state of American society at the time and rather last about the nature of Superman. But beyond that Nietzsche has this idea of what is called the transvaluation of value. What if you took a value? Such as say honesty and you reverse it.

So that being dishonest is considered to be the ethical thing. And being honest is maybe say a weakness or a lack of virtue somehow. And this is a bit of a caricature of Nietzsche's view, but it's close enough. For our purposes here, you still have a system of morality out of certainly not the one that we have but one that could be defended pretty much on the same sort of grounds as the one's that we do actually have.

And some others just sense in which we need to understand. Morality is beyond basic definitions of good and evil beyond this 2500 year old philosophy of Zara which depicted the world in these terms of good and evil, right? And wrong and, and depicted the world as this endless battle between the two and perhaps see virtue as something else.

Now, we, we can depict it as what the uberament would do. Or we can say that it has to do with what your values are, what your character is, and what your nature is. Now, you can see how this could lead to some fairly bad results. If put into the wrong hands you can see how for example, people might say that, say a certain class of people that has a certain nature, are more ethical than others and and you know, or you know, as a type of nationalism say and I think that would be a misinterpretation of what Nietzsche has in life.

I certainly do think it would be a misinterpretation nonetheless. That's what people have done and you can also take this transvaluation of value and just say you know whatever the Superman does is good and apply to contemporary politics and the world of Donald Trump in which lying is a virtue.

Stealing is a virtue murder. If you could get away with it would be a virtue because the idea in a world like a Donald Trump world, is you take what you can and that politics isn't, the art of negotiation and compromise. Politics is the art of leverage and viewed from a certain perspective that can be seen as good.

And these can be seen as virtuous characters. Well there's a danger in that kind of thinking obviously but it's not clear where the source of the danger is and and how you address or resolve that danger, but I think it's reflective that the Superman's new motto. His old model used to be truth, justice.

And the American way. But now it's been depicted as truth justice and a better tomorrow. And we're told it's meant to inspire people from around the world. But I think that, maybe it's because the American way found itself, unable to distinguish between the ethics of a Donald Trump. And the ethics of say, I don't know who maybe last part of the problem.

Another aspect of character and mindset is the idea of role models. So, on wiki Wikipedia. And I admit, I edited this sentence so that would read properly. That's what you can do with Wikipedia. A role model is a person who's behavior example or success can be emulated by others, especially by younger people.

The term role models credited to sociologist, Robert K Martin, who hypothesized that individuals compare themselves. With reference groups of people who occupy the social role to, which the individual aspires an example of which is the way young fans, may idolize and imitate. Professional athletes are entertainment artists and I think there's something to that.

And I've talked about a theory or maybe a way of looking at the world that I've had over the years where the role models from say the 1940s were well even we can go back even before that before the war. Before the war, the role models were GMA and FBI agents.

And we had dramas like dragnet or even our anti-hero characters were where people like Philip Marlo.

And then during and after the war the role models were, you know soldier GIs and that held on for a while. And then there was Sputnik and all of a sudden all of society did a 180 and role models were people like scientists and we had science fiction, depictings.

Wash buckling, young heroes with slide rolls on their bells of they stole that quote from somewhere. I don't know where it was from and there was a time maybe in the 1950s, maybe the 1960s, where the role model was the film star. And everybody wanted to be famous or in the 60s, in the 70s where the raw model was a rockstar and everybody wanted to start a band.

I'm in the 90s and into the 2000s, perhaps a more cynical age, the role models were well they've always been athletes but since the war perhaps before the war as well. But also people like businessmen or tycoons, and so you see people like Bill Gates or the founders of Google, or Mark Zuckerberg held up as role models.

And we, we concerned to see the problem with that as well. And here, the idea of a role model isn't copying exactly what they are. But it's also it's kind of a symbiotic relationship between the person who's in the role model role and the person who's using them as a role model.

And, you know, it brings to mind the plaintiff of cry of the kid who says say. It ain't so Joe when she was Joe Jackson is bound to be part of the cheating, Chicago Black Sox or even in more contemporary times we have Aaron Rodgers who just a couple of days ago was found to be just oh you know lying about whether or not he was vaccinated.

I make him, you know, he's the fall of the role model. So, but it's a thing and it very much has to do with virtue ethics and element. It's not about whether a person can throw a touchdown or whether a person can found a company or whether a person can land on the moon or whether a person can capture Berlin, it's about the properties, whatever they may be in, they're not always listed that enable people to accomplish these great things.

You know I have a picture of I'll show it to you because it's worth showing because it's on my wall right there. That's Jose Bautista. Now we'll leave us aside the fact that these 35 30 or 35 years younger than me. But I have this picture there because it's a good role model.

I look and it's not because I want to be able to hit a baseball into other space. It's because he emulates virtues that I think are worth following in hockey. Doug Gilmore is an example of a role model for me. Somebody who shows the heart and grit and willingness to play through pain in order to help the team and achieve success.

Now, that doesn't mean, I think I should be, you know, show the same sort of heart and written willingness to play through pain. I am not going to do anything on a broken leg, It's not going to happen, You know. I don't want to emulate those virtues identically, but the model is something to work from, not as an ideal, but as something to shape, the way I see the world, and I think that's how role models kind of work.

Here, can take that to extremes, you know. There are ways of describing different personalities of people, and there have been no angs to the personality personality type quizzes. And you know in education we have the ongoing discussion of learning styles and that's neither here. Nor there. What we do have though is this identification of a set of qualities of a person sometimes thought of as innate or unchangeable essential in other words or sometimes thought of as something that you can acquire or develop or even sometimes just describe just preferences just sort of accidental the way we ended up in life but these can be depicted has valuable or not valuable.

These can be depicted of virtues. Here we have the the DICS personality types and you can see basically, what we've got here are four types of person who have four sets of virtues that they value. So the one is results oriented firm forceful. The other one is outgoing enthusiastic optimistic.

Another one is and this is more like me and analytical reserved systematical and precise, but if you want systematical, look at this course. And another one is even tempered. Accommodating patient tactful that's not me, right? So you can see how these are lists of virtues, but it's almost like a menu that you can choose from over on the right hand side.

We've got the the traditional Myers, big personalities types and we can talk about whether those are real or not real, and it doesn't matter. But it's interesting because somebody has taken them and given them virtues and vice that are particular to the personality type. So, for my personality type, which is I in TP, a virtue would be attentiveness.

And yes, I can be really attentive but the vice is apathy. And yes, if I'm ignoring something or if I don't care about something, I really don't care about it and that can be seen as advice. And this sometimes is talked about explicitly in terms of virtue or vice, Here's an article that showed up in future.

Today reporting on a study published in the journal of experimental psychology for, which said, and quoting from future here. It's shows that it showed participants, with liberal and conservative political beliefs, both shared erroneous news stories to a certain degree, but conservatives, who also scored low unconsciousness engaged in such behavior to a greater extent.

They were more likely than liberals or more conscientious. Conservatives to share misleading information. So here what we have is the attribution of advice or the absence of advice to a certain group of people or attribution of a virtue or non-attribution of a virtue, to a certain group of people and then associating it with, in this case, a non-virtuous type of act.

So again we this shows how something like virtue ethics can be a bit misleading and and that takes us to the final slide. And I've or yeah, the final slide, which is the discussion of mindsets and a mindset, is kind of like a character trait in this kind of, not like a character trait.

It's a set of beliefs that shape, how you make sense of the world and yourself, George Lekoff might think of mindsets in terms of frames, right? A frame again, is how you see the world? What categories, there are in the world, how cause and effects work in the world?

What is your own personal nature? What are wrong capabilities? And so, we have things like the growth mindset, which sees our own abilities. Something that can change rather than being fixed the innovators mindset which we discussed earlier design mindset, which is represented here in a diagram where your virtues are that you're built.

Built to think the center your work, run your users, you selectively, pause feasibility, whatever that means you take on a beginners mindset, which is a mindset within a mindset, you embrace constraints, which is not what I do. I don't work within the box. I smash the box. I did.

I the existence of the box working with interdisciplinary teams. You see hat talked about a lot in other kinds of mindsets and thinking of everything as a prototype. Well, you know, that's kind of like the, the founders are the startup mindset. And so there are all these mindsets all these accounts of what count as virtuous and we can think of the literature out there and that talks about grit as virtue resilience, as virtue entrepreneurship is virtue, etc.

And I don't have a slide here talking about how how virtue ethics can fail, but we can talk about that. And there are a number of ways. First of all, if we think of virtue ethics as a normative theory, that tells us what's right? And what's wrong? Then it needs to take a stance on the deontic status of anything.

In other words, it needs to take a stance on whether something is right or wrong. And then identify a certain of right making features in other words what makes something right? What makes something wrong, right? You can't just list the whole things that are right in the world and all the things that are wrong.

The idea is if it's going to be a normative theory, they have some sort of characteristics. And it's these characteristics. I tell us what virtue is. Well, the problem is either. It can't actually make this determination, or it will be thought of as impossible, because whatever it brings forward as defining a brightness and wrongness would be less obviously, right or wrong than the things.

It's defining right or wrong? Let's take honesty, right? All honesty is thought of as a virtue. And so a dialectic theory would say you should act honestly? Or it might say something like you should be honest, right? A virtue. Say, it theory would say you should be honest, but you don't come as you should act, honestly?

Okay? So there should be a reason for making honesty. A virtue. But what is more? Obviously a virtue than honesty that honesty would depend on that as a virtue. You know anything that we could bring to mind as an argument in, favor of honesty is less likely to be thought of as virtue than honesty is.

So calling honesty. A virtue hasn't really told us anything and that's a problem. The one of the other problems and I'm sure you've already seen this, just in the way of presented the subject is that any number of different things can be listed as virtues. And there's no way to tell them apart and it's kind of a variation of the first problem, but but it's variation because, you know, in the first problem.

Okay. Nothing tells us that honesty is virtually, you know, honesty is just a virtues not in virtual something that it's a virtue, okay? And that's fine. But now I have my, my alternative list. How do we determine? Which one is the correct list? Or maybe there are multiple lists.

As in the case of the multiple personality styles, or maybe something that is obviously a virtue to. Someone is obviously not a virtue to someone else. I think of an example spirituality is spirituality of virtue or not a virtue or is it even possibly a vice Ask different people and you will get different results.

And so that's an issue and then finally maybe I could go on with criticisms criticism but I'll lie this one. And what will end it? There, it doesn't really guide us in anything. Okay, I have my setup, virtues. I'm honest. Let's say I'm charitable. I'm prudent. I watch out for my own interests.

When I watch out for other people's interests, you know, this set of values and let's say I'm confronted with some issue, let's take Philip a fix. Trolley problem. Philip a foot describes. It. As you know you've got a trolley it's going down a track. If you pull the handle, you save the five people.

It was gonna run over but by putting it on a track, you're gonna hit someone else. So what do you do? Who only answers you do. Whatever a virtuous person would do. Well what would a virtuous person do? I don't know and therein lies the problem, right? The only way to know whether or not you would call that handle is to put a virtuous person in the position of having to pull that handle the counterfactual impossible to decide.

But if you put a virtuous person in that position doing that in itself is a very unethical act because you're gonna kill someone. Hey, it's kind of like the squid games of philosophical problems. Someone's gonna die. And is it ethical to be one of those people who's gonna die or to not be one of those people who is going to die or to decide which person's going to die and which person thought going to die all of these come up in the squid game.

And all of these come up in life and therein lies the problem with virtue ethics the most virtuous person in the world still is laughed without a solution of how to answer the world's ethical problems. And that's why virtue as a methical principle kind of receded after the renaissance and the enlightenment.

As alternatives came along, that would allow us to use our capacities or faculties of knowledge and reason and experience to make these determinations. And it's interesting that we see a revival in virtue ethics today in the form of mindsets, in in the form of personality types, in the form of raw models.

It's cetera and it's almost like it's a symptom of a society that's losing faith in the capacity of reason and wisdom and experience to tell us what's right and wrong. Now we have to go back to what we were doing before. We decided that recent in science would describe the way forward for us.

So that's the first of these ethical principles. And I probably should have mentioned in my preliminary to this particular video. But I might actually be talking about these longer than I really should give in the overall context of the course, but they're endlessly. Interesting to me. And I'm going to be constantly going off on diet tries and it might put me behind in presenting the video material for the course, but I'm not going to worry about that because I'm going to take the effort that it takes in order to talk about each of these ethical issues appropriately.

And if I fall behind that fall behind, I mean the only person setting the schedule here is me so and you know, and it's not like I have a million people following the course, I know that's terrible. Right, but again, it's it's me thinking and trying to decide between different alternatives, happily.

Nobody lives for depending on my decisions on this. But I hope you enjoyed this discussion and I hope you found things to agree with in it and disagree with it and perhaps challenge my interpretations of different approaches and different theories, all of us, fine. It doesn't matter whether the presentation is the most expert, precise, presentation in the world.

What matters is that I have got enough of it in there so that I've given you something to think about, and, and, and consider alternative possibilities alternative ways of approaching ethical issues in learning analytics, and AI in teaching and learning. So, that's it for this video. Thanks a lot.

I'm Stephen Downes and I'll see you next time.

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