Page 202 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

194 The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

rational arrangement for ethics in life. SCT has special implications for
social marketers’ relationships with other organizations—both collabora-
tors and competitors—and for relationships with less powerful parties,
especially those who are dependent on social marketers. For example, SCT
implies that international social marketers, such as Greenpeace or the Red
Cross, will use the same high ethical standards to govern marketing rela-
tionships and communications throughout the world.

Virtue Ethics

The fourth approach to analyzing ethical issues, virtue ethics, is a compre-
hensive theory that has a long tradition and is currently receiving renewed
emphasis. In part, virtue ethics is a contemporary reaction to the rampant
relativism wherein society seems to lack a way of reaching moral agree-
ment about ethical problems. Virtue ethics is different from the utilitarian
and duty-based theories in that the emphasis is on the “decider/person”
and not the decision.
While the essence of virtue ethics cannot easily be captured in a few
sentences, several key elements reflect this mode of thinking. Virtues are
essentially good habits. For an organization to flourish, these habits must
be practiced, and the uninitiated managers in the organization must learn
these virtues. This point has powerful implications for social marketers,
including the notions that (a) social marketers can only become virtuous
by actually engaging in ethical activities, and (b) organizations have to
teach social marketers precisely what the appropriate virtues are. In other
words, organizations that engage in social marketing—whether nonprofit
organizations, public agencies, or companies—have the responsibility to
help foster ethical behavior.
Another dimension of virtue ethics is that admirable characteristics are
most readily discovered by witnessing and imitating widely acclaimed be-
havior. Aristotle, while focusing on the individual rather than the organi-
zation, listed such virtues as truthfulness, justice, generosity, and
self-control as characteristics to which the noble person should aspire. In
the theory of virtue, much attention is placed on role models. It takes vir-
tuous people to make the right decisions, and virtue is learned by doing.
Many social marketers would probably judge themselves as following
the virtue approach, because it is consonant with the emphasis that the
public and nonprofit sectors place on helping people and bringing about
desirable outcomes for society. One of the shortcomings of virtue ethics is
that two important virtues can sometimes conflict. For example, imagine a
social marketer in a developing nation that is suffering from a famine. Food