Description
Choose one case study and respond to it. You should tell me what you think a virtue
theorist would say the right response is in each case and why virtue theory makes the
recommendation it does. Then tell me whether you agree or disagree with the way
virtue theory responds to the case. Why do you agree or disagree with virtue theory's
response to the case? Your response should be about 300 words
Case 1
While everyone realizes that jobs require workers to do certain things, the fact that
many jobs require workers to feel certain things has not been so widely noticed. For
instance, we typically expect waiters not just to bring us our food, but also to project a
friendly, happy and generally pleasant demeanor. This requires the waiter to either
pretend to be happy to serve her patrons or to actually make herself feel happy to do
so. In her book “The Managed Heart” sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild describes this
phenomenon as “emotional labor.” For her book, Hochschild followed debt collectors
and stewardesses and described the different sorts of emotional labor both professions
required. For instance, debt collectors thought that to be effective they needed to be
extremely aggressive towards those they dealt with and to play on their feelings of guilt
and inadequacy for not paying their debts. So debt collectors taught themselves to
regard those who owed money as deserving such harsh treatment. On the other hand,
stewardesses were required to be friendly even to passengers who were trying,
unreasonable, or even abusive. In response to this they generally tried to regard their
customers in a way that justified such emotions. They reported to Hochschild that they
often made excuses for the behavior of such passengers to themselves and some even
reported trying to think of passengers as children. That is as perhaps unreasonable and
demanding, but also helpless and dependent.
Critics of such emotional labor argue that it requires workers to in a way sell their
feelings, which they think crosses some sort of line that merely selling one’s labor does
not. On the other hand, one might ask why should selling one’s feelings should be any
different than selling one’s intellect or labor, which other jobs require.
What do you think a virtue theorist would say about emotional labor in say the case of a
flight attendant or waiter who is expected to be friendly with rude or even abusive
patrons or passengers? What about the debt collectors in Hochschild’s study? Do you
agree with the virtue theorist’s response?
Case 2
So-called captive or “canned hunts” are a booming business; there around 1,000
hunting clubs or ranches that conduct such hunts in the U.S. Such captive or canned
hunts release animals directly in front of their paying customers. These animals have
usually been raised and fed in captivity and so have lost much of their natural fear of
human beings. Some hunting ranches have even used entirely tame animals sold to
them by zoos and petting zoos.
Animal rights activists are predictably opposed to these hunting operations as they find
them cruel and find it perverse that anyone would take pleasure in killing animals.
However, many hunters also find such hunts to be contrary to the ethics of their sport
because the fair chase rules of nature are manipulated. The accepted rules of fair chase
do not include baiting waterfowl, spotlighting deer, shooting from car windows and
shooting from helicopters. Perhaps more importantly traditional hunters note that
canned hunts do not require the skill, patience, and discipline that traditional hunting
does.
Supporters of such operations argue that there is little difference between what they do
and the practice of eating meat. After all, if the fact we find eating meat pleasurable is
enough reason to kill an animal, is the fact that some people find shooting one
pleasurable not also a good reason to kill it? Further, they argue that the animals they
use for hunts are bred for this purpose, and so their hunts do not do any environmental
damage (which cannot be said of all forms of hunting). Finally, they note that zoo
animals are not suited for life in the wild and so would have starved or been euthanized
had they not bought them.
What do you think a virtue theorist would say about such canned hunts? According to
them would it be morally permissible to run such an operation or to go on such a hunt?
Why or why not?
