Collective Virtues: A Response to Mandevillian Morality

Virtue ethics has been guiding moral practice since ancient times. Even today, virtue ethics continues to give helpful answers to many moral questions in contemporary life. Various scholars have applied virtue ethics to contemporary challenges like questions around emerging technologies or environmental degradation. The work of such scholars goes to show that many of the challenges in our lives today can be fruitfully conceptualized with traditional virtue ethics.
Virtue ethics is a future-looking and development-focused moral theory. For these reasons it is seen as a very practical theory which excels at giving people concrete guidance in life. The guidance of virtue ethics also focuses on long-term character development, rather than individual actions. Since many of the problems humanity now faces, like climate change, require long-term change rather than one-off decisions, one could argue that virtue ethics is particularly suitable as a guiding moral theory for our times.
However, the strength of virtue ethics, that it focuses on character development, may also be its caveat. The focus on character makes it difficult to apply the theory to collective behavior. Virtue ethics seems to struggle with prescribing conduct for collectives of people. Therefore, virtue ethics falls short in analyzing collective action cases.
One way in which virtue ethics might be able to give guidance for collective behavior is if it could make judgements about collective agents. This dissertation is an exploration into that possibility. I propose, based on earlier work, that collective agents can, much like individuals, have character traits, which can be inherently good or bad. This dissertation justifies and refines a theory of collective virtues and vices.
Chapter 2 begins by arguing that collective phenomena can create problems for virtue theory. An example of this is that sometimes vicious traits of individuals can be a systematic part of something inherently valuable on the group-level. A bigot in a group can cause a lot of discussion and make the group more reflective overall. I call this the challenge of mandevillian morality for pure virtue theory.
Is this challenge detrimental to pure virtue theory? This depends on whether pure virtue theory can formulate a response to it. I formulate a possible pure virtue theoretical response in the latter part of chapter 2. I put forward a type of virtue theory with three features that allow it do account for the value of mandevillian morality. This theory has three distinctive features: a distinction between individual and group virtues, a distinction between motivational and teleological virtues, and an acknowledgement of the normativity of “vicious” roles in groups.
Having established collective virtue theory as one of the possible responses of pure virtue theory to mandevillian morality, the subsequent chapters focus on showing that collective virtue theory can yield valuable insights when applied to real life cases. I do this for two collective action cases.
Chapter 3 focuses on the collective action context of innovating organizations and the virtue of collective creativity. I explore how the virtue of creativity often takes collective forms and show that all elements of a broadly Aristotelian definition of creativity as a virtue can be found on a supervening level in creative collectives (Astola et al. 2021).
Creativity only produces morally justifiable behavior if it is coupled with responsibility. In chapter 4, I show that responsibility can also be a collective virtue. Furthermore, seeing collective responsibility as a virtue solves problems in the notion of collective responsibility. This is because seeing collective responsibility as a virtue can deal better with attributing responsibility in cases of “problems of many hands,” which are morally problematic situations where a collective can be held responsible for something but no individual in the group can.
Having illustrated how collective virtues can make sense of collective action cases, I then turn to some limitations of collective virtue theory in this area. Chapter 5 explains how collective virtue functions as an ideal, but how some minimal conditions often need to be met in order to make group membership just for the members of the group. I use the example of volunteer run energy communities to show that in order for a group to function justly, all members must experience a balance of effort, risk and power. Collective virtue theory therefore can provide useful insight in many contexts, but we need more individual-focused reflection aside it, as is clear from the case of community energy projects.
After presenting a possible response for pure virtue theory, to the challenge of group-level phenomena, I reflect on whether there are more ways to argue for the response I have presented. Chapter 6 is a reflection on the current literature on collective virtues, including the claims presented in this dissertation, which tends to see collective virtues as entities that resemble individual virtues. It is often assumed that collective virtues require collective mental states, like individual virtues. I call this assumption into question and propose that with an exemplarist grounding, collective virtues need not rely on the existence of collective mental states.
In chapter 7, the concluding chapter, I summarize my findings and how they answer the research questions. I also present two directions for future research that are worth investigating: the possibility of an exemplarist theory of collective virtues and the application of collective virtue ethics to various societal collective action problems.