Virtue Ethics, Situationism, and the Filipino Business Leader’s Compassion for the Poor

In this paper I discuss the relevance of the debate between defenders of virtue and their situationist opponents for understanding and resolving the Filipino business leader’s difficulty on behaving compassionately towards the poor. Evidence gathered by researchers show that Filipino business leaders are not sympathetic towards the poor or inclined to give them substantial help. I argue that the foregoing problem stems from a kind of problematic emphasis on virtue that takes it to be the sole achievement of the individual who is impervious the negative effects of her situation. Unlike the situationist, I suggest that the solution is not to abandon virtue but to put an emphasis on virtue in a way that appreciates its dependence on complex and uniquely Filipino forms of interpersonal processes. Catholic social teaching prominently features virtue. For instance, the Vocation of the Business Leader tells us that the virtues of compassion and responsibility towards the poor are necessary for living out the Gospel. Consequently any challenge against virtue ethics has implications for Catholic social teaching. Recent debates among philosophers working in moral psychology features one such challenge from philosophical situationists. Situationists believe that evidence from social psychology demonstrates that virtue or character is neither robust nor reliable in producing morally desirable behavior. In this paper I discuss the situationist challenge against virtue vis-à-vis a difficulty among Filipino business leaders to behave compassionately towards the poor. I argue that this difficulty about compassion stems in part from a tendency to put primacy on character-based explanations for both poverty and prosperity. In his defense of virtue in business ethics against situationism, Robert C. Solomon makes a claim similar to mine. He says that a certain type of emphasis on virtue amounts to an overestimation of one’s own goodness and a condemnation of the poor and other sufferers of oppression. According to Solomon, Too often preachers of the virtues praise (in effect) their own sterling personalities without bothering to note how little there has been in their lives to challenge their high opinion of themselves. Too often, people are blamed for behaving in ways in which, given the situation and their personal backgrounds, it is hard to see how they could have acted or chosen to act otherwise. In contemporary politics, in particular, the renewed emphasis on character is prone to bullying and even cruelty ... a way of condemning the victims of poverty and racial oppression for their behavior and insisting that such people ‘boot-strap’ their way to respectability. 1 John M. Doris, Lack of Character (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Peter Vranas, “The Indeterminacy Paradox,” Noûs 39 (2005): 1-42. 2 Following De Swaan I take the poor to be those who possess neither economic means nor political resources compared to others who have access to both (Elite Perceptions of Poverty p. 184). Ricardo Abad and Elizabeth Eviota say that there is a consensus about the Philippine poor being “ill-fed, badly nourished, inadequately-housed, under-educated, and unorganized.” See the introduction to their Philippine Poverty: An Annotatated Bibliography 1970-1983 (Quezon City: Institute of Philippine Culture, 1985). 3 Robert C. Solomon, “Victims of Circumstances? A Defense of Virtue Ethics in Business,” Business Ethics Quarterly 13 (2003): 57.