It’s not news to anyone that it’s pretty easy to screw up consequentialists. The lesson I take from this is this: “maximize to solve a particular problem, rather than as a lifestyle choice.”
It’s a solution to a problem of bad (underspecified) ethics. The lifestyle choice I am referring to here is “MAXIMIZE ALL THE THINGS.”
But of course ethics is hard to fully specify because human minds are involved. It’s hard to have models of those. Most of the specification work, the dominating term, is in the most difficult to model part. In this sense I think virtue ethics is playing in the right stadium. They are trying to describe things in terms of the part of the problem that is hardest to model.
It’s not news to anyone that it’s pretty easy to screw up consequentialists. The lesson I take from this is this: “maximize to solve a particular problem, rather than as a lifestyle choice.”
Is that a solution to a particular problem, or a lifestyle choice?
It’s a solution to a problem of bad (underspecified) ethics. The lifestyle choice I am referring to here is “MAXIMIZE ALL THE THINGS.”
But of course ethics is hard to fully specify because human minds are involved. It’s hard to have models of those. Most of the specification work, the dominating term, is in the most difficult to model part. In this sense I think virtue ethics is playing in the right stadium. They are trying to describe things in terms of the part of the problem that is hardest to model.
Is that a lifestyle choice?