The Varieties of Moral Vice: An Aristotelian Approach

It’s a Three-Ring Circus: How Morally Educative Practices Are Undermined by Institutions

“…As Sinnicks (2019) argues, the case for an activity to be considered a practice is more easily made where participants engage regardless of financial compensation, than when considerations of profitability are to the fore. Nevertheless, MacIntyrean research continues to demonstrate that in a range of professional and commercial contexts, some practitioners have defended the integrity of their practices against a variety of perceived threats (Robson 2014;Krogh et al 2012;Wilcox 2012). In line with MacIntyre's argument that practices may be undermined by commercial expansion and not only by decline (MacIntyre 2008, 7), these empirical studies highlight threats including commercialisation (Krogh et al 2012), exploitation of customers (Robson 2015), and not only resistance by practitioners but also by organizational principals (Beadle 2013).…”

“…The priority that practitioners afford to the goods of their practice and the relationships these require have led to different types of resistance. These include providing false information to managers in order to protect fellow employees (a type of sabotage reported in Wilcox 2012), careerlimiting resignations (Robson 2014;Robson and Beadle 2019), and the creation of new organizational forms (Krogh et al 2012) when practitioners have felt that the goods of the practice are threatened by the institutions that house them. The deployment of a MacIntyrean conceptual framework of virtues, goods, practices, and institutions appears particularly important when organizational agents act to promote or defend the goods of practices.…”