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thomblake comments on Virtue Ethics for Consequentialists - Less Wrong
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Comments (178)
I think Vladimir Nesov's response and khafra's response are correct, but there's more to be said.
Even granting for the moment that 'ability to steal without getting caught' can be called a trait of character, there are empirical claims that the virtue ethicist would make against this.
First, no one actually has that skill - if you steal, eventually you will be caught.
Second, the sort of person who goes around stealing is not the sort of person who can cultivate the social virtues and develop deep, lasting interpersonal relationships, which is an integral component of the good life for humans.
Not a valid argument against a hypothetical.
Smoking lesion problem? If developing the skill doesn't actually cause other problems, and instead the predisposition to develop the skill is correlated to those problems, you should still develop the skill.
It's not a valid argument against its truth, but it's a valid argument against its relevance. A hypothetical is useless if its antecedent never obtains.
Like I said, it's an empirical question. For philosophers, that's usually the end of the inquiry, though it's very nice when someone goes out and does some experiments to figure out which way causality goes.
How is it possible to know that with certainty?
Should I understand this question as "What experimental result would cause you to update the probability of that belief to above a particular threshold"? Because my prior for it is pretty high at this point. Or are you looking for the opposite / falsification criteria?
If you're a good enough driver, there's a decent chance you'll never get in a car crash. If you study stealing and security systems enough, and carefully plan, I don't see why you would be likely to be caught eventually. Why is your prior high?
Agreed, with the addition that car crashes are public while stealing is covert, so it's harder to know how much stealing is going on.