Are Virtues Ethical by Themselves?
On the evening of 8 November 1939, a German carpenter named Georg Elser planted a bomb in a Munich beer hall. His aim was to assassinate Adolf Hitler and stop the war he believed would devastate Europe. Elser’s act required immense courage and authenticity: he followed his convictions against overwhelming odds, knowing he would almost certainly lose his life.
From our current ethical perspective, Elser is remembered as a hero – Germany even has a prize which bears his name. Yet in Nazi Germany, he was condemned as a criminal and a terrorist. This contrast is striking: the very same act can be judged either as an example of heroic courage or as despicable treachery. The difference therefore can not lie in the virtue itself, but in the ethical framework through which it is viewed.
The same is true for the 9/11 bombers decades later. Calling their actions “courageous” or “authentic” feels deeply uncomfortable to us, but is again shows that a virtue is in itself neither “good” or “bad”. This is determined by the ethical framework.
This becomes even clearer with the virtue of justice. In slaveholding societies, justice was often defined within an ethical framework that denied equality to people of different backgrounds or skin colours. Within that framework, enslaving others could be seen as “just.” Today, most of us in the Western world regard such practices as profoundly unethical. The virtue of justice itself did not change; what changed was the framework that gives it meaning.
These examples make one thing clear: virtues are not inherently ethical concepts. They are dispositions to act—courage, authenticity, integrity, justice—but whether they lead to good or evil (this term being its own can of worms) depends on the ethical framework in which they are embedded. Any framework of only virtues can be used to legitimise oppression, violence, or fanaticism.
For organisations, this has a powerful lesson. Promoting virtues like courage, authenticity, or integrity is essential, but it is not enough. They must be anchored in an ethical framework rooted in fundamental perspectives: whether all human beings are equal or not, whether the earth is a resource to be exhausted or a home to be cared for, whether events happen by chance or by the will of a higher power. These foundational beliefs shape the meaning of virtues, and determine whether they lead to trust and justice—or to harm and exclusion.
This is why, in my Organisational Integrity Framework, virtues are treated as qualities to strive for, while the ethical framework provides their moral direction. Together they ensure that integrity is not just consistency, but consistency in service of something worth believing in.
This also leads to the conclusion that most “code of conducts” are woefully inadequate as an ethical framework. Enron had a code of conduct. One of the first steps towards organizational integrity is therefore defining the ethical framework. How one should go about writing one, I will write about in another blog post.