Are you a virtue ethicist at heart?

Shmi

Disclaimer: I am not a philosopher, so this post will likely seem amateurish to the subject matter experts.

LW is big on consequentialism, utilitarianism and other quantifiable ethics one can potentially program into a computer to make it provably friendly. However, I posit that most of us intuitively use virtue ethics, and not deontology or consequentialism. In other words, when judging one's actions we intuitively value the person's motivations over the rules they follow or the consequences of said actions. We may reevaluate our judgment later, based on laws and/or actual or expected usefulness, but the initial impulse still remains, even if overridden. To quote Casimir de Montrond, "Mistrust first impulses; they are nearly always good" (the quote is usually misattributed to Talleyrand).

Some examples:

Eliezer in a facebook post linked the article When Doing Good Means You’re Bad, which points out that people taking commission to raise a lot of money for charity are commonly considered less moral than those who raise much less but are not paid to do so ("tainted altruism").
This was brought up at a meetup: a pregnant woman in a dire financial situation who decides to have an abortion because she does not want a burden of raising a baby is judged harsher than a woman in a similar situation whose motivation is to avoid inflicting harsh life on the prospective child.
In real-life trolley problems even the committed utilitarians (like commanders during war time) are likely to hesitate before sacrificing lives to save more.

I am not sure how to classify religious fanaticism (or other bigotry), but it seems to require a heavy dose of virtue ethics (feeling righteous), in addition to following the (deontological) tenets of whichever belief, with some consequentialism (for the greater good) mixed in.

When I try to introspect my own moral decisions (like whether to tell the truth, or to cheat on a test, or to drive over the speed limit), I can usually find a grain of virtue ethics inside. It might be followed or overridden, sometimes habitually, but it is always there. Can you?

Disclaimer: I am not a philosopher, so this post will likely seem amateurish to the subject matter experts.

Some examples:

Eliezer in a facebook post linked the article When Doing Good Means You’re Bad, which points out that people taking commission to raise a lot of money for charity are commonly considered less moral than those who raise much less but are not paid to do so ("tainted altruism").
This was brought up at a meetup: a pregnant woman in a dire financial situation who decides to have an abortion because she does not want a burden of raising a baby is judged harsher than a woman in a similar situation whose motivation is to avoid inflicting harsh life on the prospective child.
In real-life trolley problems even the committed utilitarians (like commanders during war time) are likely to hesitate before sacrificing lives to save more.

What sort of moral system to use should depend on what you're using it for. I find virtue ethics the most useful way to view the world, generally.

My sense is that we mostly can't evaluate things from a consequentialist perspective. We're not very good at predicting consequences, and we're even worse at evaluating whether somebody else is behaving in a proper consequentialist way, given the information at their disposal.

Moreover, consequentialism requires us to pin down what we mean by "consequence" and "cause", and those are hard. If a bad thing happens because of the joint decisions of two people, and could have been avoided by either, how is the blame to be divided?

Virtue ethics asks about states of mind and habits, and I think those are easier to judge in others, and easier to improve in ourselves. When you're trying to decide whether to give money to a hobo, you have no real way to evaluate consequences. You do have the ability to evaluate the balance you want to strike between generosity and gullibility.

The downside is that virtue ethics doesn't help you make decisions -- in any particular situation, it tells you "to do what a virtuous person would do, striking the appropriate balance between competing claims." And this is true, but mostly not very helpful. I'm prepared to pay that price in my personal life. Mostly when I have a real moral dilemma, I don't reason it out from first principles, I ask my friends and people I respect what they would do.

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Are you a virtue ethicist at heart?

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Are you a virtue ethicist at heart?

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