Meta: Influenced by a cool blog post by Kaj, which was influenced by a cool Michael Vassar (like pretty much everything else; the man sure has a lot of ideas). The name of this post is intended to be taken slightly more literally than the similarly titled Deontology for Consequentialists.

There's been a hip new trend going around the Singularity Institute Visiting Fellows house lately, and it's not postmodernism. It's virtue ethics. "What, virtue ethics?! Are you serious?" Yup. I'm so contrarian I think cryonics isn't obvious and that virtue ethics is better than consequentialism. This post will explain why.

When I first heard about virtue ethics I assumed it was a clever way for people to justify things they did when the consequences were bad and the reasons were bad, too. People are very good at spinning tales about how virtuous they are, even more so than at finding good reasons that they could have done things that turned out unpopular, and it's hard to spin the consequences of your actions as good when everyone is keeping score. But it seems that moral theorists were mostly thinking in far mode and didn't have too much incentive to create a moral theory that benefited them the most, so my Hansonian hypothesis falls flat. Why did Plato and Aristotle and everyone up until the Enlightenment find virtue ethics appealing, then? Well...

A while back I did a couple of posts on the care and feeding of young rationalists. Though it is not new, I recently found a truly excellent post on this topic, in Dale Mcgowan's blog, The Meming of Life. The post details a survey carried out on ordinary citizens of Hitler's Germany, searching for correlations between style of upbringing, and adult moral decisions. 

Everyday Germans of the Nazi period are the focus of a fascinating study discussed in the PBB seminars and in the Ethics chapter of Raising Freethinkers. For their book The Altruistic Personality, researchers Samuel and Pearl Oliner conducted over 700 interviews with survivors of Nazi-occupied Europe. Included were both “rescuers” (those who actively rescued victims of persecution) and “non-rescuers” (those who were either passive in the face of the persecution or actively involved in it). The study revealed interesting differences in the upbringing of the two groups — specifically the language and practices that parents used to teach their values.

Non-rescuers were 21 times more likely than rescuers to have been raised in families that emphasized obedience—being given rules that were to be followed without question—while rescuers were over three times more likely than non-rescuers to identify “reasoning” as an element of their moral education. “Explained,” the authors said, is the single most common word used by rescuers in describing their parents’ ways of talking about rules and ethical ideas.

George Hamilton's autobiography Don't Mind if I Do, and the very similar book by Bob Evans, The Kid Stays in the Picture, give a lot of insight into human nature and values.  For instance: What do people really want?  When people have the money and fame to travel around the world and do anything that they want, what do they do?  And what is it that they value most about the experience afterward?

You may argue that the extremely wealthy and famous don't represent the desires of ordinary humans.  I say the opposite: Non-wealthy, non-famous people, being more constrained by need and by social convention, and having no hope of ever attaining their desires, don't represent, or even allow themselves to acknowledge, the actual desires of humans.

I noticed a pattern in these books:  The men in them value social status primarily as an ends to a means; while the women value social status as an end in itself.

Less Wrong readers are familiar with the idea you can and should put a price on life. Unfortunately the Big Lie that you can't and shouldn't has big consequences in the current health care debate. Here's some articles on it:

Yvain's blog post here (HT: Vladimir Nesov).
Peter Singer's article on rationing health care here.
Wikipedia here.
Experts and policy makers who debate this issue here.

For those new to Less Wrong, here's the crux of Peter Singer's reasoning as to why you can put a price on life:

A tenet of traditional rationality is that you can't learn much about the world from armchair theorizing. Theory must be epiphenomenal to observation-- our theories are functions that tell us what experiences we should anticipate, but we generate the theories from *past* experiences. And of course we update our theories on the basis of new experiences. Our theories respond to our evidence, usually not the other way around. We do it this way because it works better then trying to make predictions on the basis of concepts or abstract reasoning. Philosophy from Plato through Descartes and to Kant is replete with failed examples of theorizing about the natural world on the basis of something other than empirical observation. Socrates thinks he has deduced that souls are immortal, Descartes thinks he has deduced that he is an immaterial mind, that he is immortal, that God exists and that he can have secure knowledge of the external world, Kant thinks he has proven by pure reason the necessity of Newton's laws of motion.

These mistakes aren't just found in philosophy curricula. There is a long list of people who thought they could deduce Euclid's theorems as analytic or a priori knowledge. Epicycles were a response to new evidence but they weren't a response that truly privileged the evidence. Geocentric astronomers changed their theory *just enough* so that it would yield the right predictions instead of letting a new theory flow from the evidence. Same goes for pre-Einsteinian theories of light. Same goes for quantum mechanics. A kludge is a sign someone is privileging the hypothesis. It's the same way many of us think the Italian police changed their hypothesis explaining the murder of Meredith Kercher once it became clear Lumumba had an alibi and Rudy Guede's DNA and hand prints were found all over the crime scene. They just replaced Lumumba with Guede and left the rest of their theory unchanged even though there was no longer reason to include Knox and Sollecito in the explanation of the murder. These theories may make it over the bar of traditional rationality but they sail right under what Bayes theorem requires.

Most people here get this already and many probably understand it better than I do. But I think it needs to be brought up in the context of our ongoing discussion of normative ethics.

Unless we have reason to think about ethics differently, our normative theories should respond to evidence in the same way we expect our theories in other domains to respond to evidence. What are the experiences that we are trying to explain with our ethical theories? Why bother with ethics at all? What is the mystery we are trying to solve? The only answer I can think of is our ethical intuitions. When faced with certain situations in real life or in fiction we get strong impulses to react in certain ways, to praise some parties and condemn others. We feel guilt and sometimes pay amends. There are some actions which we have a visceral abhorrence of.

These reactions are for ethics what measurements of time and distance are for physics -- the evidence.

Background:  This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License and Creative Commons Attributions-Share-Alike Unported. It was posted to Wikipedia by an author who wished to remain anonymous, known variously as "24" and "142".  It was subsequently removed from view on Wikipedia, but its text has been preserved by a number of mirrors.  While it could be seen as no more than a basic primer in moral philosophy, it is arguably required reading to anyone unfamiliar with the philosophical background of such concepts as Friendly AI and Coherent Extrapolated Volition.

The search for a formal method for evaluating and quantifying ethicality and morality of human actions stretches back to ancient times. While any simple view of right, wrong and dispute resolution relies on some linguistic and cultural norms, a 'formal' method presumably cannot, and must rely instead on knowledge of more basic human nature, and symbolic methods that allow for only very simple evidence.