Virtue Ethics and the Common Good in Sustainable Food Systems

Abstract This study examines how common good–oriented values are interpreted and enacted within sustainable food practices from both consumer and organizational perspectives. Drawing on virtue ethics and personalist business ethics, the study adopts the Personalist Principle and the Common Good Principle as its normative core and conceptualizes food systems as moral contexts in which human dignity, responsibility, and sustainability are mediated in everyday economic life. Adopting a qualitative and interpretive research design, the study combines focus group discussions with a semi-structured expert interview to integrate consumer and organizational perspectives. The data are analyzed to explore how ethical expectations, value orientations, and practical constraints shape the interpretation and enactment of common good–oriented practices across different actor perspectives. The Economy for the Common Good is employed as an interpretive framework through which these principles are examined in organizational practice. The findings show that common good–oriented practices are realized through solidarity-based relationships with suppliers, sufficiency-oriented assortment strategies, and value-aligned interactions with customers, while remaining embedded in competitive market conditions. They reveal both convergence and tension between ethical ideals and their realization in practice, as shared values such as human dignity, solidarity, and ecological responsibility are mediated by institutional constraints and differentiated understandings of responsibility. By integrating multiple actor perspectives, the study contributes to philosophy of management and business ethics by empirically grounding common good theory in concrete economic practice and highlighting the role of organizational mediation in the realization of ethical principles in practice.