Importance Of Virtue Ethics

Introduction Working as an officer or a soldier, can put you in some extreme situations. You are getting shot at, you are shooting at others, you give orders for attacks with the purpose of destruction of enemy forces, you see people get hurt, people starve and much more. Sometimes these situations leave you with very little guidance and the decisions you make will have a great impact on other people’s life. This is a great responsibility and, therefore we need to have a thorough ethic that guides you through those decisions. In this essay, I will describe the three big ethical concepts, duty, outcome and virtue and how the virtue ethics tie into my own moral philosophy and why I think that is important for me as an organizational leader. …show more content…
The situations that I have been exposed to through my military career have had a variety of challenges. Some moral decisions are really easy, but some of them has been really hard. The ones that I think have been the hardest, is the ones where I have to ask myself, that if someone dies during this mission, was it then worth it? Can I live the rest of my life with this decision? In those cases, I have had to consider both rules and consequences and based on my character and core values make the decision that I think is right. Virtue ethics relays on role models and that is why it’s crucial for me as a leader to be the character that always do the right thing. As an officer and an organizational leader I have the ability and responsibility to conduct training with my officers and soldiers, this is a big part of building character, as well as I have to be the moral role model. The strengths about my moral philosophy are that it’s based on the foundation of Swedish society, I have been exposed to them during my entire life and had plenty of time to reflect over them. The Swedish Army’s values; transparency, results, and responsibility are not described in depth but they are very easy to understand and they are also aligned with the rest of the society. The weakness of my moral philosophy is one of the critics against virtue ethics, is it enough to give me guidance in all the situations? What will my answer be when I get the question after something went terribly wrong, will I be able to defend my moral philosophy then.