Vladimir_M comments on Virtue Ethics for Consequentialists - Less Wrong

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

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Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 June 2010 07:34:38PM *  34 points [-]

Will_Newsome:

Consequentialists, deontologists, and virtue ethicists don't really disagree on any major points in day to day life, just in crazy situations like trolley problems.

More precisely, they do disagree about the same practically relevant ethical questions that provoke controversy among common folks too, especially the politically and ideologically charged ones -- but their positions are only loosely correlated with their ethical theories, and instead stem from the same gut feelings and signaling games as everybody else's. This seems to me like a pretty damning fact about the way this whole area of intellectual work is conducted in practice.

Comment author: Mass_Driver 05 June 2010 07:18:16PM 14 points [-]

Maybe, but be very careful not to jump from

a pretty damning fact about the way this whole area of intellectual work is conducted in practice.

to

therefore there is no sense in individual people whose rationality is above-average attempting, in good faith and by way of experiment, to apply some subset of this intellectual work to their actual lives,

which I think is a conclusion that some people might inadvertently draw from your comment.