Hariant comments on Are Deontological Moral Judgments Rationalizations? - Less Wrong
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I am torn on virtue ethics.
On one level it's almost akin to what a Bayesian calculation (taking "weird but harmless behaviour" as positive evidence of "weird and harmful") would feel like from the inside, and in that respect I can see the value in virtue ethics (even though it strikes me as a mind projection issue of creating a person's ethical 'character' when all you need is the likelihood of them performing this act or that).
But on another level, I can see it is as a description of a sort of hard-coded irrationality that we have evolution to thank for. All things being equal, we prefer to associate with people who will never murder us, rather than people who will only murder us when it would be good to do so - because we personally calculate good with a term for our existence. People with an irrational, compelling commitment are more trustworthy than people compelled by rational or utilitarian concerns (Schelling's Strategy of Conflict), because we are aware that there exists situations where the best outcome overall is not the best outcome personally.
So I am torn between lumping virtue ethics in with deontological ethics as "descriptions of human moral behaviour" and repairing it into a usable set of prescriptions for human moral behaviour.
This may be part of the reason many virtue ethical theories are prescriptions on what one should do themselves, and usually disapprove of trying to apply it to other human's.On this level, it's poor for predicting, but wonderful for meaningful signalling of cooperative intent. I tend to consider virtue ethics as my low-level compressed version of consequentialist morality; it gives me the ability to develop actions for snap situations that I'd want to take for consequentialist reasons.