270 PROGRESSING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
it will maximize the development of a person’s endowments into talents or
lead to greater depth in their personal relationships. Some acts with these good
consequences may actually be immoral because they breach important moral
norms.
Nor does Heller adopt a utilitarian orientation towards the grounding of
morals. Indeed, inA Philosophy of Morals(1990: 144–5) she explicitly rejects a
utilitarian moral philosophy:
...a utilitarian moral philosophy is singularly unfit to provide generalguidelines for
decent persons who pose the question ‘What is the right thing for me to do?’. And it
is on the basis of my conviction that I state that the safest way to resist temptation is
to figure out whether or not participation in an action or institution will allow you to
live, think and behave in accordance with the principles, norms and maxims to which
you otherwise subscribe.
However, in avoiding teleological approaches to grounding ethics, Heller does
not ignore some of the insights that can be derived from classical approaches
such as Aristotelian virtues ethics. Thus for example, Heller (1990: 64–5)
speaks of the importance of virtues, which she roughly defines as ‘character
traits that predispose persons to promote and support as well as maintain
certain values (common goods)’, and as the ‘backbone of a decent course of
conduct’ (1990: 70). With respect to morality or decency, virtues predispose
us to do the right things. That is, they help us to be decent people. However,
Heller departs from Aristotle (1941, 1984) in that she does not equate virtues
with ‘pre-established behavioural patterns,...“forms” into which the raw
material of a person may be moulded’ (1990: 70). That is, virtues and vices are
not to be linked with one particular depiction of what amounts to a good life.
Different people can have very different views about what constitutes a good
life while simultaneously holding very similar views about what constitutes
virtuous behaviour.
Heller also does not seek to develop a view that tries to quarantine com-
munity values or build an objective moral theory standing outside history. In
this respect, she does not follow Kant by trying to transcendentally deduce
moral maxims or Rawls (1971) by hypothetical deliberations behind a veil of
ignorance. She does though discuss and advocate, akin to Habermas (1984),
a principle of universalization for generating norms of social and political
justice (see Heller 1987b). However, she does not use this principle as a base
for grounding morality, nor as a mechanism for generating moral maxims.
For Heller, moral maxims and norms are generated historically and dialecti-
cally. Thus, Heller’s approach tends towards communitarianism: morality is
embedded in historical and communally shared meanings.
However, Heller does not ignore the insights that can be provided by the
classic works of writers such as Kant. In this respect, for example, she gives
particular prominence to Kant’s means–ends formula: