prase comments on Virtue Ethics for Consequentialists - Less Wrong

33 Post author: Will_Newsome 04 June 2010 04:08PM

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Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 04 June 2010 06:40:06PM *  12 points [-]

A quick thought that may not stand up to reflection:

Consequentialists should think of virtue ethics as a human-implementable Updateless Decision Theory. Under UDT, your focus is on being an agent whose actions maximize utility over all possibilities, even those that you know now not to be the case, as long as they were considered possible when your source code was written. Hence, in the Counterfactual Mugging, you make a choice that you know will make things worse in the actual world.

Similarly, virtue ethics requires that you focus on making yourself into the kind of agent who would make the right choices in general, even if that means making a choice that you know will make things worse in the actual world.

Edited to reorder clauses for clarity.

Comment author: prase 04 June 2010 07:25:19PM *  0 points [-]

This is the way I thought about it after reading the OP - virtue ethics as time-consistent consequentialism. But maybe I don't understand correctly what means to be a virtue ethicist. If it is "try to modify your source code¹ to consistently perform the best actions on average", it does oppose neither consequentialism nor deontology: "best" may be evaluated using whatever standard.

¹) I dislike the epression but couldn't find a better formulation