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.

For the record, I too can find a a grain of virtue ethics in my own moral decisions.

First, I do not think that there is anything wrong with virtue ethics as long as we recognize that it is one of several robust computational shortcuts, and not the one true normative ethics. It is quite rational to use all the tools in your disposal. It is irrational for a human to proclaim oneself to be a consequentialist, because no one is. A form of consequentialism is essential for FAI, since virtue- or rule-based shortcuts are bound to fail on the edge cases, and an AI is very good at finding edge cases. Humans, on the other hand, extremely rarely run into these edge cases, such as the trolley problem or specks vs torture. More common are paradigm shifts, such as universal suffrage, gay rights, abortion, euthanasia, ethical treatment of animals, where some deontological rules have to be carefully recalculated, then followed again. Some day it might be sims, uploads, cloning, designer babies, and so on.

I wouldn't be surprised either if humans who self-identify as consequentialists also go with their intuitions about what actions will increase, or decrease, whatever they call 'utility', rather than going through an explicit and rigorous cost-benefit calculation.

I would estimate this to be much likelier than them being honest-to-goodness consequentialists.

In this sense, I don't perceive people who self-identify as utilitarian, or consequentialist, as more significant, or worthy of our attention

If someone says "I don't just follow my intuition but also attempt to calculate utilities the best I can before making a decision", then it is worthy of respect. If someone says "I base my actions solely on their evaluated consequences", I would lower my opinion of them because of this self-delusion.

Thanks for replying You made more points which dovetail with my own observations. I'd qualify (again) my previous comment as not an endorsement of virtue ethics generally, but an acknowledgement that it can be valuable. I might consider a form of consequentialism to be better than any other system we have right now for an ideal rational agent, but I don't believe that humans in their current state will reach the best results they could achieve by pretending to be consequentialists. I don't know how humans will fare in their ethical behavior in a future where our mind-brains are modified.

-3Eugine_Nier12y

I don't believe anything resembling careful recalculation occurred with any of these shifts.

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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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