Chief Daniels is new to the police department. A long-standing general order in this department is that police officials may not sleep while on duty. The mandatory penalty for a first offense is a week’s suspension without pay. Penalties increase with the number of infractions, up to termination. Chief Daniels has no quarrel with this general order, and when two officers are found sleeping while on duty, these apparently being their first infractions, the chief applies the penalty, convinced that she has correctly treated the officers equally.
But has she treated them virtuously? Officer Smith had regularly been driving his cruiser to an underpass, where he would take long naps while keeping his radio on, responding to calls just enough to look busy. The local television news station, acting on a tip, caught him sleeping in his cruiser and made it the lead story one night last week. Since this was the first time he was caught, and thus, technically, his first infraction of this sort, Chief Daniels gave him the one-week suspension.
A couple of nights later, Officer Jones was halfway through the second part of a double shift. He was in the police station, having just processed an arrest, and was taking a 15-minute break, to which he was entitled. As he sat reading a newspaper, he dozed off. Chief Daniels caught him, learned that Officer Jones had not been caught sleeping before, and gave him the one-week penalty per the general order. When challenged by some about the harshness of Officer Jones’s penalty, Chief Daniels proudly defended her leadership, noting her equal treatment of the officers and her commitment to following the rules. Some might consider this good management, since she obeyed the rules, but good leadership? Among other skills, a leader knows when to break a rule.
It’s one thing to be a leader in name and another in fact. In the absence of virtue, a putative leader is, at best, a mere manager—as in Chief Daniels’ case—and, at worst, a bully or tyrant. The phrase “virtuous leader” is redundant; there is no leadership without virtue.
A leader’s task is to move his or her stakeholders to a better place or condition than they were before he or she acted. A leader can accomplish this task intentionally only if he or she knows what is good and does it. Moreover, this is not a one-time deal, but a matter of habit—the ability habitually to know the good and do the good. This, according to Aristotle, is the very definition of virtue, vice being the inability habitually to know the good and to do the good.1
A leader’s task is to move his or her stakeholders to a better place or condition than they were before he or she acted.
To make practical use of the foregoing, one needs to first unpack it. The word “habit” in Greek, is ethos, from which English gets the words “ethics” and “ethical.”2 The Latin word for “custom” or “habit” is mos, from which English gets the words “moral,” “morals,” and “morality.”3 Thus, a virtuous person is at once ethical and moral, and there is no ethics or morals without virtue. For the purpose of this leadership discussion, therefore, the terms “virtuous,” “ethical,” and “moral” may be used interchangeably.
Note the similarity between virtue and marksmanship. An excellent marksman, when shooting, routinely finds the bull’s-eye and hits it repeatedly. A good, but not excellent marksman usually knows how to aim but misses the bull’s-eye more often. A poor marksman either does not know how to aim or often misses the bull’s-eye in any event.
Similarly a person of high virtue routinely knows the good and does it; a person of more modest virtue may be able to determine the good, but will fail to do it on occasion; and a person of low virtue, or high vice, will either habitually fail to know the good or will know it, but habitually fail to do it.
Note too that virtue, like marksmanship, is a matter of degree: while one might aspire to perfection, one can achieve excellence and still be less than perfect.
So far, so abstract. But what is the good at which the virtuous leader aims? Different theories offer different accounts of the moral good. Consequentialism claims that an act is morally good if it has good consequences and morally bad if it has bad consequences, in other words, the end justifies the means.4 While Chief Daniels’ may have achieved the consequence of not being chastised for disobeying a general order, one wonders about the effect this act had on department morale and whether there might be other ill consequences of her managerial rigidity. There are times when consequences are a significant consideration in a moral judgment, and there are times when the consequences may be good for some and bad for others. Or the means may be so awful that no end would justify them. Or the consequences might not give enough information to render a fair moral judgment. For example, knowing someone killed another person is not enough to render a moral judgement of the act—there is significant moral difference among premeditated murder, accidental homicide, and self-defense.
A second moral theory, regularianism, holds that an act is morally good if it obeys a rule and morally bad if it violates a rule.5 The opening scenario presented herein seems to be all about rules. And often rules are key to a proper moral judgment. But, what if the rule commands an immoral act, such as Hitler’s laws against Jews or the Jim Crow laws of the southeastern United States until the 1960s? Or a rule may be good in general, e.g., “Return what you’ve borrowed!” but bad in a particular case: “Return the gun that you borrowed from me, so I can shoot my wayward wife Additionally, there are many moral problems for which there is no corresponding rule. One can imagine that Chief Daniels’ department had trouble with police officials sleeping on duty and that this prompted the general order—that is, the problem existed before there was a rule to address it.
A third theory, deontology, holds that an act is morally good if and only if it is done from duty. To a deontologist, duty is always good, since it is that which one ought to do, and one determines a duty by arguing logically that it holds for everyone.6 Must everyone always follow the no-sleeping rule of Chief Daniels’ department? What if a 10-minute nap in the station will refresh an officer who has been on a tough two-day schedule and the absence of such a nap will put him unnecessarily at risk when he goes back to the street? Thus, one problem with deontology is the difficulty of determining one’s duty. Another problem is the possibility of conflict of duty: Chief Daniels has a duty to the common good of the department and to the individual good of each officer. What if the common good, e.g., maintaining order, conflicts with the individual good, e.g., letting an overworked officer nap for a few minutes?
Virtue theory recognizes the importance to moral reasoning of consequences, rules, and duties, but also notes that a morally bad person can achieve a good consequence, obey a rule, or act from duty. Thus, says the virtue theorist, one must look elsewhere for the basic nature of the good—what constitutes good moral character? That is, what constitutes virtue?
While Aristotle did not invent virtue theory, he is history’s primary defender of it. He noted that the good at its best is perfect and something is perfect if there is neither too much of it nor too little of it. Thus, virtue is the “golden mean”—the moral bull’s-eye—between deficiency and excess.7 Had Chief Daniels failed to punish Officer Smith, one might accuse her of responding to Officer Smith deficiently. Since she gave him a one-week suspension, per the general order, most would be inclined to say she did the right thing. But in Officer Jones’s case, the same penalty seems excessive. He dozed off on his break while sitting in the station; hardly the same infraction as Officer Smith’s intentionally sleeping in his cruiser under the bridge.
It might be easier to see the value of virtue theory if one starts at the extremes. It clearly would be deficient to ignore Officer Smith’s infraction altogether and it clearly would be excessive to fire Officer Jones for his infraction. Generally, people engaged in moral argument can agree on the extremes, but disagreements heat up as people move toward the middle. Is a one-week suspension too lenient in Officer Smith’s case? Too excessive in Officer Jones’s case?
This suggests two things. First, that moral judgment based on virtue theory comes naturally to people, and, second, that even if people can agree on the value of the mean, they may not agree on what constitutes the mean in a particular case. For example, it might be generally agreed that a one-week suspension is morally appropriate only when it is neither excessive nor deficient, but it might be more difficult to agree on what constitutes too little or too much in a specific situation.
The next step in virtue-based moral analysis, then, is to get more specific by invoking the cardinal virtues. “Cardina,” means “hinge” in this context, and in virtue theory, there are four virtues on which all other virtues hinge: courage (or fortitude), justice, temperance, and prudence.8 Courage is the mean between cowardice and foolhardiness. If Chief Daniels chose to follow the general order in Officer Jones’s case merely because she was afraid of being punished herself, then she acted from cowardice. On the other hand, Officer Smith was foolhardy in risking punishment by intentionally napping while on the job.
Justice, the virtue of giving someone exactly what is due, is the mean between giving less than one is due and giving more than one is due. Note that each of these extremes is a sort of injustice. Not to punish Officer Smith at all would have been to give him less than he is due for his infraction. On the other hand, one might argue that a one-week suspension was more than Jones was due—letting him sleep a few more minutes and then waking him as his break ended might have been more just.
Justice, the virtue of giving someone exactly what is due, is the mean between giving less than one is due and giving more than one is due.
Temperance is the mean between deficient use of an available resource and excessive use of an available resource. For Chief Daniels not to use her authority to punish Officer Smith appropriately would have been for her to use her authority deficiently. On the other hand, her use of her authority to punish Jones so harshly might constitute excessive use of her authority.
Prudence, or practical wisdom, is the mean between acting on insufficient knowledge—“leaping before one looks”—and having all the knowledge necessary to act, but failing to act anyway. If we are correct in calling Officer Jones’s punishment too harsh, then Chief Daniels would have acted imprudently if she punished him before she had all the facts of why he dozed off. If Chief Daniels refused to punish Officer Smith in spite of the newscast, she also would have been acting imprudently.
There are other virtues than these four, but other candidates are not always virtuous. Honesty? If an angry Officer Smith were to remark nastily about Chief Daniels’ looks, even if Officer Smith were saying precisely what he felt, this would be a vicious, not a virtuous act. Patience? If Chief Daniels had decided not to respond quickly to the newscast about Officer Smith’s napping, deciding instead to give the matter a year or two while she contemplated the possibilities, this would have been viciously problematically patient.
Note, too, that the collection of the four cardinal virtues makes up integrity. That is, a person has integrity to the extent that he or she is habitually courageous, just, temperate, and prudent. If Chief Daniels treated Officer Jones unjustly, intemperately, imprudently, and with less than the courage required to break a rule, then Chief Daniels acted without integrity and, thus, without virtue.
Thus far, this discussion has been comparing leadership to mere management. Leadership requires the habits of courage, justice, temperance, and prudence, and the more one is in the habit of knowing and doing the good, the better one is as leader. Many a person in a putative position of leadership engages in mere management instead, avoiding the complex work of leadership in favor of an easier route.
The same characteristics that distinguish a leader from a mere manager distinguish him or her from a bully or a tyrant. If the leader’s task is to move his or her stakeholders to a better place or condition than they were before he or she acted, then causing them to suffer needlessly on the way there or to suffer once they have arrived is not an act of leadership. Bullying and tyranny display lack of courage to do what’s right; lack of justice in failing to treat people with dignity, which is their due; lack of temperance in abusing one’s authority; and lack of prudence in failing to know what is best for the stakeholders one is supposed to be leading.
Virtue is a basic characteristic of all morally good people, not just leaders. And, more often than not, the moral agent will know the good and will have the wherewithal to do the good, whether or not he or she decides to do it. But when the right moral decision is not obvious or is a matter of controversy, virtue theory is especially useful in making the right decision and in explaining that decision. Leaders are in an especially important position to help that along.
If the solution to a moral problem is not obvious, one should begin by identifying all of the possible options and then eliminating the obviously deficient options and the obviously excessive options. How should Chief Daniels have responded to Officer Jones for dozing off while on duty, albeit on a break in the station? Given the general order, Chief Daniels probably should have said something: doing nothing would have been a deficient response. On the other hand, firing Officer Jones would have been an excessive response.
Having eliminated the obviously deficient and excessive responses, one would hope for one remaining option, which one could then defend as the mean between extremes. Often, though, one is left with two or more options that are viable candidates for the mean. Chief Daniels could have let Officer Jones sleep for the full 15 minutes of his break and then awoken him. Upon waking him, Chief Daniels could have reminded Officer Jones of the general order and recommend that he be more careful in the future. Chief Daniels might also have used this occasion to issue a new general order that allowed for the sort of exception that Officer Jones’s situation calls for. Either of these is closer to the mean than giving Officer Jones a one-week suspension just because a general order lacking sufficient nuance calls for the suspension.
Whatever options present themselves as the possible mean between extremes, the virtuous moral agent will be able to choose the option that is the most courageous, just, temperate, and prudent and will be able to explain this reasoning to supporters and critics alike.
A closing word of caution: sometimes even the most virtuous leader faces only bad options. In such a case, he or she must settle for the lesser of two evils and take responsibility for his or her choice. Perhaps that is Chief Daniels’ situation in which she must choose between obeying a general order and giving a break to a hard-working officer who may have violated the letter of the law, but not its spirit. In other words, sometimes when hoping to hit the moral bull’s-eye of the golden mean, the leader and his or her stakeholders, no matter how virtuous, might have to settle for close enough.d
Notes:
1 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 2, Chapters 5 and 6; Christopher Dreisbach, Ethics in Criminal Justice (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009), 84.
2 Dreisbach, Ethics in Criminal Justice, 85.
3 Latadict, s.v. “mos, moris.”
4 “Consequentialism,” Glossary, Ethics Unwrapped.
5 Christopher Dreisbach, “Leisure,” The Sage Encyclopedia of Business Ethics and Society, ed. Robert W. Kolb, vol. 4, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2018), 2070.
6 Encyclopaedia Brittanica¸s.v. “deontological ethics.”
7 New World Encyclopedia s.v. “golden mean (philosophy).”
8 Scott P. Richert, “What Are the 4 Cardinal Virtues?” ThoughtCo, March 30, 2018.
Please cite as
Christopher Dreisbach, “The Virtuous Leader,” Police Chief online, January 2, 2019.
