Perspective Matters: In Art and Ethics

2 days ago3 min read

What do you notice most about the flowers in this painting? Was it their beautiful appearance? If you had knowledge of poisonous plants, you might have thought, “That looks like a bouquet of death!” So much in life boils down to perspective, and that includes ethics. This artwork is a metaphor for the extensive range of perspectives that can influence the framework of determining what "living well" (eu zên) entails. (Kraut, 2001)

Beautiful Poison is the title. Vibrant watercolor bouquet featuring purple, pink, and yellow flowers with green leaves. Soft background and flowing paint drips. — Beautiful Poison

Ethics can be examined in a variety of ways because perspective can act as a framework that prioritizes certain virtues over others. Virtues such as honesty, compassion, equity, and many others are influential in determining one's motivation behind living to their self-determined moral standard. (Kraut, 2001) The importance of one virtue over another, perspective, comes from the lot you receive in life, your experiences, your role models, and your values. Virtues are interpretations of what you notice, expect, value, feel, desire, choose, act, and react to. Since perspective is constantly changing as you learn and experience life, you can expect your ethics and virtues to change as well. These different perspectives on ethics have resulted in diverse frameworks that provide clarity.

Eudaimonist Virtue Ethics

This ethics framework focuses on living a character life and cultivating virtues. (Hursthouse & Pettigrove, 2023) This is also described as “well-being” or “flourishing” in an evaluative way. (Kraut, Richard, 2022) Since “flourishing” can have different standards for different people, this ethics model is dictated by perspective.

Agent-Based Ethics

Agent-Based Ethics focuses on one's moral character in creating motivation instead of on the action itself in determining an activity's ethical value. (Hursthouse & Pettigrove, 2023)In this case, intent is valued over the action. As one goes through life, they grow in their moral understanding, which leads to a perspective shift. This shift can change the motivation behind one's ethical thought process.

Exemplarist Virtue Ethics

When it comes to defining Exemplarist Virtue Ethics, the focus is placed on the moral character of a “guide” or role model. (Balthrop-Lewis, n.d.) The perspective of the “guide” and the “follower” interprets the importance of virtues differently. This “interpretation” and personal growth leads to a very fluent evaluation framework of what is ethical.

Deontology Ethics

Ethics that focus on duties and rules is known as Deontology. The duties and rules are considered more important than the outcome of the activity. Duties and rules are developed based on the perspective of the rule maker. (O’Neill, 2023)In this way, Deontology Ethics lends itself to being subjective in determining “right” or “wrong”.

Consequentialism

A final ethics theory that is mainly concerned with the outcome of a decision or action is Consequentialism. (Andric, 2021) A prominent subgroup of this theory is Utilitarianism, which aims to maximize happiness for the maximum number of people in an impartial way. (Scarre, 1996)Happiness is also subjective based on one's perspective. This provides an ever-changing view of outcome-focused ethics.

With such varying views on ethics, it is to be expected that multiple frameworks would result. Whether it is the intent of an action or the action itself, there is still the opportunity to have values change based on the perspective of all the individuals involved. Keeping this in mind it is important to understand that ethics are a personal concept with a huge amount of variables, making it difficult to assign a specific value to ethical considerations. Just as a bouquet may hold both beauty and danger, ethical frameworks include both strengths and weaknesses shaped by perspective.