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Douglas_Knight comments on Unspeakable Morality - Less Wrong
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Were you aware of your unconventionality before this exchange? (I worry that I'm missing some of your tone in print.)
Is there some standard poll of philosophers' views on ethics? Could you poll your department on vases and books?
(I, unlike PG, think the conjunction of caring about antelope suffering with not subjecting lions to ethical judgement is common. But I think that your position on vases and books is rare, at least away from virtue ethics.)
I am quite aware of my unconventionality. As far as I know, I'm independent and very, very lonely in buying the above reasoning. Many ethicists try to make some vague nod in favor of preserving works of great art, but then pass off which works of art are great to the aestheticists and don't care about lesser works. I follow that intuition all the way down and think that stuff in general shouldn't be destroyed unnecessarily.
While it's apt to note that virtue ethicists care a great deal for things, there are others. There's a (small) movement towards some sort of 'information ethics', at the forefront of which are folks such as Terry Bynum and Luciano Floridi.
Floridi, when pressed, once admitted to being concerned for the integrity of a chair.
I didn't mean to imply that virtue ethicists care for things. Quite the opposite!
I haven't found anything interesting about Bynum or Floridi, but I imagine their information-flavor is orthogonal to the usual distinction between consequentialists, deontologists, and virtue ethicists.
Ah. Well that's strange - in my experience, virtue ethicists care for things quite a bit. I know one fellow who (it might be said) values his stringed instruments nearly as much as his children.
It's hard to say... we're dealing with a new ontology here, so the ethics looks strange.
Nominally, Bynum is some sort of eudaimonist consequentialist, but it would be doing his "flourishing ethics" a disservice to leave it at that. And Floridi's "information ethics" is at times consequentialist in tone and at times deontic, but it's hard to say exactly what he's getting at. At the moment, I don't even have anything to recommend, but hopefully there will be some worthwhile material in the next few years.
What I should have meant was that the value of the objects is irrelevant to whether a person displays virtue in handling them.
Also, the revealed values of particular virtue ethicists is not so relevant--that fellow is probably just not virtuous. After all, ethicists are the least ethical of philosphers.