This paper urges contemporary Business Ethicists to reconsider the relationship between habit and virtue in the light of recent debates between contemporary philosophers and scientists. Synthesizing insights from current Neuroscience, from twentieth century American Pragmatism and from nineteenth century French Aristotelianism, this emergent intellectual tradition proposes a dynamic account of habit’s embodiment which we will first describe and then advocate. Two recurring suggestions within this habit renaissance are of particular relevance to Business Ethicists: firstly, that there is a ‘plastic’ structure (...) pertaining to habit and, secondly, that there is a processual ‘double-law of habituation’. Taken together, these accounts of habit and habituation provide virtue ethicists with a basis for claiming analytic and pragmatic authority within applied ethics debates in general and within Business Ethics debates in particular. We develop this argument in three steps. Firstly, we elaborate upon why habits are said to be plastic and why the process of habituation is said to be characterised by a double-law. Secondly, we distinguish this account of habit’s relationship to virtue from, and where necessary defend it against, the influential articulations of the habit: virtue relationship provided by situationism, by deontology and by communitarianism, respectively. Finally, we draw practical lessons from the initial elaborations made in the argument’s first step, and the subsequent clarifications provided in its second step, by announcing seven characteristics of highly effective virtue habituation projects. (shrink)

Leadership research has grown into two opposing approaches, the scientific approach and the critical approach. The first is focused on leadership, the second on the leaders. For reasons of practicality, they will be described as the leadership-centric and the leader-centric approach, respectively. Each of the two approaches is characterised by two different perspectives: leadership-centric research highlights science and process; leader-centric research deals with the leader using cognitive faculties and drawing on cultural practices. This opposition has created an unproductive gap in (...) leadership scholarship. The present article focuses on how to reduce that gap by bridging some of the differences that currently undermine scholarship. The concept of habits is used to support an argument in favour of leadership as a social phenomenon. The main idea is that a social phenomenon involves both social interactions happening in everyday shared knowledge and intentionality that influences agents’ experiences. By borrowing from the pragmatist John Dewey, leadership is conceptualised as habits embedded in social life. Habits comprise the social sharing of experience and knowledge in a meaningful world. But it seems difficult, it is further argued, to elaborate on people’s intentionality through habits. To overcome this difficulty, Edmund Husserl’s notion of doxic-theoretical experience is used. Habits, it is concluded, help make leadership-centric research less anonymous, and doxic agency the leader’s intentionality more transparent. (shrink)

Samuel Butler is usually remembered for Erewhon, widely considered among the best English satires. He also contributed to philosophical biology in works that collectively compose the nineteenth century's finest statement of the evolutionary argument associated with the name of Lamarck. In writing on evolution, Butler was not presenting science for a popular audience but deliberately intervening in the scientific argument about Darwinism. Surprised by the success of his first venture in philosophical biology, Life and Habit, Butler committed himself to the (...) project of developing an alternative to Darwinism, which he did in three additional volumes, and these are the works canvassed in this “delayed book review.”. (shrink)