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scientism comments on Two arguments for not thinking about ethics (too much) - Less Wrong Discussion
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I can personally attest that thinking about ethics has significantly affected my life and has given me a lot of insight.
This is a problem only if you assume that morality is external, as utilitarianism, Kantianism, and similar ethical systems are. If you take an internal approach to morality, as in contractarianism, virtue ethics, and egoism, this isn't a problem.
Yes, when I gave up consequentialism for virtue ethics it was both a huge source of personal insight and led to insights into politics, economics, management, etc. I'm of the belief that the central problem in modern society is that we inherited a bad moral philosophy and applied it to politics, management, the economy, personal relationships, etc.
So you gave up consequentialism because virtue ethics had better consequences?
Exactly, the way people talk about this on LW confuses me. I think I agree with everything, but it is framed in a weird way.
I don't think that "modern society" has anything coherent enough to be called a moral philosophy. Scattered moral intuitions, perhaps, but not a philosophy.
Also, virtue ethics and consequentialism are orthogonal. I'm a virtue ethicist and a consequentialist.
anti-slavery, equal pay for equal work, laws should not limit freedom unnecessarily, laws should not apply to groups based on irrelevant differences like skin color, religion, gender, the poor should be helped...
All of these seem to me to be components of modern society's moral philosophy. I think it could be said that there is not universal sign-on or agreement to the components of society's moral philosophy, but I don't think that negates the rich content. Plus there are many things where sign-on seems nearly universal, anti-slavery for instance.
Those are outputs of a moral philosophy, not components of one. Or they're freely floating moral intuitions, which is usually the case.
The presence of modern outputs of a moral philosophy would seem to suggest the existence of a modern moral philosophy.
Or if they are free floating intuitions, it is remarkable how they seem consistent with a fairly complicated view where the individual humans have great value and significant rights against the collective or other random strangers. And how different this modern view of the individual is then hundreds of years ago or more when moral theories revolved around various authoritarian institutions or supernatural beings rather than individuals.
The presence of outputs of a moral philosophy need not mean that the moral philosophy is still present, or even that there's one moral philosophy. For example, imagine a world in which for centuries, the dominant moral philosophy was that of fundamentalist Christianity, and popular moral ideas are those derived from it. Then there is a rise in secularism and Christianity retreats, but many of its ideas remain, disconnected from their original source. Temporarily, Christianity is replaced by some kind of egalitarianism, which produces some of its own moral ideas, but then it retreats too, and then there isn't any dominant moral philosophy. You would find that in such a society, there would be various scattered ideas that can be traced back to Christianity or egalitarianism, even though it's possible that no one would be a Christian or an egalitarian.
If you put it that broadly, it's not concrete enough to be called a moral philosophy. Utilitarians, Kantians, and others would all agree that individuals have great value, but they're very different moral philosophies.