According to virtue ethics, ethical thought must be appraised on the basis of the individual's character rather than their actions or effects. Every human being has a goal, which is known as eudemonia. This might be translated as happiness, a nice life, or joy. Living a virtuous life can help you achieve this aim. This means that all decisions should be taken to ensure that people achieve their life objectives and desires.
Employers are responsible for ensuring that they improve the lives of their employees. Policies made by employers are regarded as character because they eventually become encultured in the entity. There have been efforts to ensure that economic gaps between the population are bridged. Employers in Alaska have put up mechanisms to ensure that there is equity on the other hand. With these mechanisms in place, there are gaps between gender earnings where women earn 76 percent of what men earn. This parity has been attributed to the industries that individuals are employed and the positions that they occupy. Men dominate managerial ranks and some of the best paying industries on merit. There have been lobbies to have employers disregard merit and try to achieve equality by lowering the qualifications for women in male-dominated industries (Zak n.p). This means that they disregard the underlying principle and instead focus on the consequences to guide their decisions.
Zak (n.p) notes that one of the main factors behind the disparities is that men dominate the oil industry that is one of the most paying. The employers continue to insist that merit is key in determining who to employ resulting in the persistence of the gap. Using Aristotle’s virtue ethics, we can conclude that the actions of employers to use merit as the basis of determining who to hire are ethical because they are guided by fixed mechanisms meant to maximise the eudemonia of the stakeholders.
Works Cited
Zak, Annie. Alaska has one of nation's widest wage gaps between men and women. Alaska Dispatch News, February 28, 2017. Web: https://www.adn.com/business-economy/2017/02/27/alaska-has-one-of-nations-widest-wage-gaps-between-men-and-women/. March 1, 2017.
