Virtue ethics learning through movies – A pedagogical roadmap to MacIntyre's virtue approach using the Boiler Room movie

Virtue ethics is an agent-centred ethical approach that considers actions in the context of an individual's life as a whole. This addresses shortcomings of deontological approaches including competing norms, of utilitarian approaches including non-desirable outcomes. Nevertheless, virtue ethics is not easy to translate into a learning pedagogy. We address this challenge by outlining Alasdair MacIntyre's approach to virtue ethics and by offering a conceptual argument for the effectiveness of using movies to develop virtue competence. We construct a pedagogical roadmap for using a specific movie, Boiler Room , to nurture virtue competence at the intellectual, behavioural and personal layers. First, our argument contributes to the debate in this journal about movies in management and ethics education: We conceptualise movies as person-centred , context-embedded and life-narrating . As these are characteristics typical of virtue ethics, movies are particularly suitable to build virtue competence. Second, we construct a pedagogical roadmap for educators to develop students' virtue competence through a specific movie and contribute to the virtue ethics education debate and the challenge to make theoretical whole-person virtue conceptions operational in the classroom. Third, virtue ethics competence developed in our roadmap contributes to taking the debate about the need of non-utilitarian ethical approaches one step further. • We make Alasdair MacIntyre's virtue ethics accessible to management education. • We theoretically connect virtue ethics with movies as pedagogical tools. • We discuss the Boiler Room movie as a tool for teaching virtue ethics in business. • Teachers find a concrete pedagogical roadmap to teach virtue ethics with the movie.