If you care about consequences your performance on those consequences can be contradicted empirically, but there isn’t a similar way of contradicting your virtue if you are willing to twist your impressions of what is virtuous enough.
If you care about the consequences of your crypto philanthropy strategy, your performance on those consequences can be contradicted empirically. But so what if the contradiction arrives in the form of your bankruptcy, along with blemishing the reputation of the movement you were trying to support?
“Basic virtue ethics” would probably prevent this (if not through by making you correct your strategy, at least it would light up more red flags in other people’s heads) (as would “non-naive consequentialism”). Of course, virtue ethics has its own failure modes. Virtue ethics and consequentialism have different failure profiles.
For clarity, I’m not trying to make the case for or against consequentialism/virtue ethics, I’m just trying to respond to the narrow point that I quoted. I don’t think people should choose an approach to ethical decision making based primarily on this one specific point.
If you care about the consequences of your crypto philanthropy strategy, your performance on those consequences can be contradicted empirically. But so what if the contradiction arrives in the form of your bankruptcy, along with blemishing the reputation of the movement you were trying to support?
I think this is consistent with my point. From what I can tell SBF continues to claim that he was acting with good intentions and high integrity, despite being convicted for fraud, which I think most people would reasonably assume demonstrates a strong lack of those characteristics. This seems like it might be a case of self deception about one’s own virtues. This is the kind of thing I meant when I said it seems like this is a quintisentially example of self deception. From what I can tell it is extremely common that people who aren’t virtuous still think of themselves as virtuous.
It seems to me like a lot of people involved in the SBF scandal admit that it was bad and that they made strategic mistakes by trusting SBF, but they often don’t say that this is related to virtue failures on their part, such as lacking integrity or honesty. In other words, they admit to their actions potentially having bad consequences as the result of evidence about those consequences, but don’t admit to these events shedding light on their virtues or character.
If you care about the consequences of your crypto philanthropy strategy, your performance on those consequences can be contradicted empirically. But so what if the contradiction arrives in the form of your bankruptcy, along with blemishing the reputation of the movement you were trying to support?
“Basic virtue ethics” would probably prevent this (if not through by making you correct your strategy, at least it would light up more red flags in other people’s heads) (as would “non-naive consequentialism”). Of course, virtue ethics has its own failure modes. Virtue ethics and consequentialism have different failure profiles.
For clarity, I’m not trying to make the case for or against consequentialism/virtue ethics, I’m just trying to respond to the narrow point that I quoted. I don’t think people should choose an approach to ethical decision making based primarily on this one specific point.
I think this is consistent with my point. From what I can tell SBF continues to claim that he was acting with good intentions and high integrity, despite being convicted for fraud, which I think most people would reasonably assume demonstrates a strong lack of those characteristics. This seems like it might be a case of self deception about one’s own virtues. This is the kind of thing I meant when I said it seems like this is a quintisentially example of self deception. From what I can tell it is extremely common that people who aren’t virtuous still think of themselves as virtuous.
It seems to me like a lot of people involved in the SBF scandal admit that it was bad and that they made strategic mistakes by trusting SBF, but they often don’t say that this is related to virtue failures on their part, such as lacking integrity or honesty. In other words, they admit to their actions potentially having bad consequences as the result of evidence about those consequences, but don’t admit to these events shedding light on their virtues or character.