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.

Reread that sentence. Notice how the second half seems to contradict the first.

Perhaps you could explain? Social Darwinism in Earth terms seems to be the idea of "survival of the fittest" individuals within a society, but here I'm referring to a Star Trek variant of social Darwinism that occurs at the level of the society (similar to some definitions of social Darwinism described on the Wikipedia page, e.g. under the first Nazism header). The reason I call it social Darwinism rather than merely evolution is because in-fiction it occurs due to advances in societal values rather than because of biological changes, but perhaps this isn't the clearest choice of terms. Societies which are able to develop advanced technology are given moral weight by the powers that be, but those who have not yet developed such technology are given no moral weight. This moral weight is demonstrated by the willingness to avert extinction when such actions carry apparently trivial cost for the Enterprise crew, which seems to leave little room for doubt. I am proposing that sentencing the individuals within these societies to death because of insufficient societal "advancement" (collective action) is the evil part here.

We do? This is not at all obvious. Consider the generic changes in domestic animals, for example.

I will grant that humans are still evolving, because obviously you can't turn it off in the broader sense. But I haven't found any suggestions that people are evolving in any ways that would change the moral weight we should assign individuals. Perhaps this is a weakness in our knowledge and in the Star Trek universe it's clear that biological evolution continues to proceed in such a way that is morally relevant (even though they never say anything like that), but it seems unlikely based on what we currently know that a smarter humanity is in the cards through evolutionary (vs. technological) means.

Note that the above sentence implicitly uses deontological reasoning.

I don't think so, but I'm not exactly sure why you say that. From a consequentialist perspective, if people have the cognitive ability to understand moral thought, then the outcome of trying to convince them that they should use it in a particular way can be a net benefit and thus morally correct.

This isn't a statement about their current ethics, but a statement about what is available to them given their current cognitive abilities. It's an empirical question whether a person has the ability to understand deontological, consequentialist, or virtue ethics.

I don't ascribe moral valence to societies, but to individuals, which is why I think this sort of social Darwinism is nothing short of barbaric.

Reread that sentence. Notice how the second half seems to contradict the first.

Perhaps you could explain?

You claim to not ascribe moral valence to societies, and then promptly proceed to declare a social system "barbaric".

But I haven't found any suggestions that people are evolving in any ways that would change the moral weight we should assign individuals.

I didn't say anything about moral we... (read more)

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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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