Reimagining the application of sustainability to the hospitality industry through a virtue ethics framework

摘要

There is growing recognition that achieving sustainability through current means is not making progress. This awareness has led to the development of a wide range of alternative ways of viewing and approaching sustainability. In these attempts to reconfigure how to achieve sustainability, the potential contribution of virtue ethics is not explored fully. This conceptual paper addresses the ethical dilemma of whether keeping the hospitality industry sustainable is necessarily in conflict with the world's sustainable development agenda. This dilemma arises from the perceived tension in balancing the "good of the hospitality industry" with the "greater good of the world". This paper discusses the tensions of the hospitality industry's domestic "virtue" tradition and commercial "vice" tradition, and addresses how the hospitality industry can be virtuous in a capitalist market ideology of vice that "greed is good". The anti-capitalist and contemporary philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre's virtue theory is employed here to argue that commercialism is not necessarily a vice when exercised in congruence with the virtues. Macintyre's "virtues-goods-practice-institution" framework provides a way of re-imaging sustainability and reconciling the competing demands of sustainability. The paper explores how to achieve virtue in organisations and concludes by drawing out implications for further research.