However, I feel like traditional virtue-ethical notions e.g. “courage,” “integrity,” have the same adversarial Goodharting problem (3) as in your critique of utilitarianism. “Loyalty is when you obey the Master,” “courage is when you go to war against the Enemy without fearing death,” etc. I suspect utilitarianism is maybe only barely worse than other ethical systems in regards to (2). It’s worthwhile to compare EA against regular humans. I don’t really understand either.
I think of virtue ethics as something like “being a healthy and functional cog in the Humanity machine,” where the Humanity machine is ultimately utilitarian.
Further, I think a lot of arguments for utilitarian behaviors “pass through” to virtue ethics insofar as we think that traits like “ambition” and “scope sensitivity” are virtues. I think they are: seeing their characteristic absence has a similar sliminess to seeing a cowardly or slavish person.
(Sometimes it’s just a lack of underlying numeracy, which I would not consider a lack of virtue but rather of education. I spoke to a man who said he wouldn’t suck a dick for a billion dollars, because he just couldn’t. I walked him through the size of a billion, and he changed his mind.)
I refactored my thinking similarly a while ago.
However, I feel like traditional virtue-ethical notions e.g. “courage,” “integrity,” have the same adversarial Goodharting problem (3) as in your critique of utilitarianism. “Loyalty is when you obey the Master,” “courage is when you go to war against the Enemy without fearing death,” etc. I suspect utilitarianism is maybe only barely worse than other ethical systems in regards to (2). It’s worthwhile to compare EA against regular humans. I don’t really understand either.
I think of virtue ethics as something like “being a healthy and functional cog in the Humanity machine,” where the Humanity machine is ultimately utilitarian.
Further, I think a lot of arguments for utilitarian behaviors “pass through” to virtue ethics insofar as we think that traits like “ambition” and “scope sensitivity” are virtues. I think they are: seeing their characteristic absence has a similar sliminess to seeing a cowardly or slavish person.
(Sometimes it’s just a lack of underlying numeracy, which I would not consider a lack of virtue but rather of education. I spoke to a man who said he wouldn’t suck a dick for a billion dollars, because he just couldn’t. I walked him through the size of a billion, and he changed his mind.)