thomblake comments on Unspeakable Morality - Less Wrong

27 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 August 2009 05:57AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (116)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: thomblake 05 August 2009 06:29:51PM 1 point [-]

But I think that your position on vases and books is rare, at least away from virtue ethics.

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.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 05 August 2009 10:42:38PM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: thomblake 05 August 2009 11:28:25PM 0 points [-]

I didn't mean to imply that virtue ethicists care for things. Quite the opposite!

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.

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.

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.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 06 August 2009 05:06:47AM 0 points [-]

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.