Are you a virtue ethicist at heart?

Shmi

16 Are you a virtue ethicist at heart?

27th Jan 2014

1 min read

16

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?

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16 Are you a virtue ethicist at heart?

by Shmi

27th Jan 2014

1 min read

16

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.

Personal Blog

16

New Comment

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(show more) Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 11:37 PM

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Shmi12y10

I found the Prime Directive to be one of the hardest lessons in consequentialism. If it existed in the real world, we would not have many of the current problems in the developing world, where people slaughter each other using modern weapons instead of spears and bows. And they coordinate the slaughter using modern tech, too. And the radicalization of Islam has been caused in part by the Western ideas of decompartmentalization. Exploiting poorer nations and depleting their natural resources doesn't help much, either. The so-called foreign aid does more harm than good, too. If only Europeans had enough sense to refrain from saving the savages until they are ready.

Viliam_Bur12y10

If it existed in the real world, we would not have many of the current problems in the developing world, where people slaughter each other using modern weapons instead of spears and bows.

I am still not convinced that in the parallel reality the life would be better. Why exactly is being killed by a gun worse than being killed by a spear?

49eB112y

As I said in another comment in this thread, we know that the real-world reason the Prime Directive exists is because Gene Roddenberry hated historical European imperialism. I grant that the Prime Directive may be a handy rule of thumb given imperfect knowledge and the in-universe history of interference. My main problem with it is that it is a zero tolerance policy where the outcome of following it is, rather than someone being expelled for bringing Tylenol to school, the extinction of a species with billions of lives. It would be like if Europeans knew Africa was going to sink into the ocean in one year and weren't even willing to tell the Africans it was going to happen (and then patting themselves on the back for being so enlightened). And this becomes the core founding principle of the Federation.

-1[anonymous]12y

In many cases, those civilizations were knocked back to "savage level" by dehumanizing levels of exploitation, colonization, and sheer deliberate destruction by Europeans in the first place. This doesn't excuse the behavior of post-colonialist Third World countries, except in the sense that one who creates a power vacuum may bear some responsibility for whoever fills it.

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