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jphaas comments on On Terminal Goals and Virtue Ethics - Less Wrong
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"Good people are consequentialists, but virtue ethics is what works," is what I usually say when this topic comes up. That is, we all think that it is virtuous to be a consequentialist and that good, ideal rationalists would be consequentialists. However, when I evaluate different modes of thinking by the effect I expect them to have on my reasoning, and evaluate the consequences of adopting that mode of thought, I find that I expect virtue ethics to produce the best adherence rate in me, most encourage practice, and otherwise result in actually-good outcomes.
But if anyone thinks we ought not to be consequentialists on the meta-level, I say unto you that lo they have rocks in their skulls, for they shall not steer their brains unto good outcomes.
Funny, I always thought it was the other way around... consequentialism is useful on the tactical level once you've decided what a "good outcome" is, but on the meta-level, trying to figure out what a good outcome is, you get into questions that you need the help of virtue ethics or something similar to puzzle through. Questions like "is it better to be alive and suffering or to be dead", or "is causing a human pain worse than causing a pig pain", or "when does it become wrong to abort a fetus", or even "is there good or bad at all?"
I think that the reason may be that consequentionalism requires more computation; you need to re-calculate the consequences for each and every action.
The human brain is mainly a pattern-matching device - it uses pattern-matching to save on computation cycles. Virtues are patterns which lead to good behaviour. (Moreover, these patterns have gone through a few millenia of debugging - there are plenty of cautionary tales about people with poorly chosen virtues to serve as warnings). The human brain is not good at quickly recalcuating long-term consequences from small changes in behaviour.
What actually happens is you should be consequential at even-numbered meta-levels and virtue-based on the odd numbered ones... or was it the other way around? :p