In my ontology “virtues” are ethical design patterns about how to make decisions.
I’m a virtue ethicist because I think that this kind of ethical design pattern is more important than ethical design patterns about what decisions to make (albeit with some complications that I’ll explore in some upcoming posts).
(Having said that, I feel some sense that I’m not going to use “ethical design patterns” very much going forward—it’s a little unwieldy as a phrase. I think I will just use “ethics”, by contrast with things like “altruism” which IMO are less well-understood as design patterns.)
In my ontology “virtues” are ethical design patterns about how to make decisions.
I’m a virtue ethicist because I think that this kind of ethical design pattern is more important than ethical design patterns about what decisions to make (albeit with some complications that I’ll explore in some upcoming posts).
(Having said that, I feel some sense that I’m not going to use “ethical design patterns” very much going forward—it’s a little unwieldy as a phrase. I think I will just use “ethics”, by contrast with things like “altruism” which IMO are less well-understood as design patterns.)