Darn… beat me to it. Good job. I’ll still totally write a post about virtue ethics when I’m done with my dissertation though.
You skipped some of the important criticisms here...
Yes, it is important to have some framework for action other than simple consequentialism, since we’re bounded agents and are working against a lot of in-built biases. But what’s the evidence that virtue ethics is the best thing we’ve got for that? Philosophers are okay with taking Aristotle’s word for it, but we shouldn’t, even if he was fairly accurate when it came to most things.
Virtue ethics gets a lot of its strength from an assumption about human psychology that can be empirically verified. The assumption is that the things we call ‘virtues’ are strong habits of action, such that a person who is ‘honest’ (possessing the virtue of ‘honesty’) will be honest in all situations. However, there is some evidence that this is not true, that people’s actions can vary significantly from their apparent ‘virtues’ based on the situation.
That said, my money’s on virtue ethics, and I think there’s a lot to be said for returning to the conception of ethics as encompassing all of our actions, not just weird situations with a lisp token called ‘moral’ attached. As I’ve noted before, I initially resisted the ‘planning model of rationality’ often invoked around here because it’s infeasable for humans to use such a model to perform millions of ordinary, everyday tasks.
But it’s entirely possible to use expected utility calculations when you have time, and well-cultivated habits the rest of the time, and I think it’s obvious that they both have their place.
I don’t think this post is going to get promoted, so there wouldn’t be much apparent overlap to most Less Wrong readers, and I would very much like to see your take. (Aren’t you a philosophy grad? I’m just a high school dropout with next to no knowledge of philosophy. Our approaches are very different.)
Darn… beat me to it. Good job. I’ll still totally write a post about virtue ethics when I’m done with my dissertation though.
You skipped some of the important criticisms here...
Yes, it is important to have some framework for action other than simple consequentialism, since we’re bounded agents and are working against a lot of in-built biases. But what’s the evidence that virtue ethics is the best thing we’ve got for that? Philosophers are okay with taking Aristotle’s word for it, but we shouldn’t, even if he was fairly accurate when it came to most things.
Virtue ethics gets a lot of its strength from an assumption about human psychology that can be empirically verified. The assumption is that the things we call ‘virtues’ are strong habits of action, such that a person who is ‘honest’ (possessing the virtue of ‘honesty’) will be honest in all situations. However, there is some evidence that this is not true, that people’s actions can vary significantly from their apparent ‘virtues’ based on the situation.
That said, my money’s on virtue ethics, and I think there’s a lot to be said for returning to the conception of ethics as encompassing all of our actions, not just weird situations with a lisp token called ‘moral’ attached. As I’ve noted before, I initially resisted the ‘planning model of rationality’ often invoked around here because it’s infeasable for humans to use such a model to perform millions of ordinary, everyday tasks.
But it’s entirely possible to use expected utility calculations when you have time, and well-cultivated habits the rest of the time, and I think it’s obvious that they both have their place.
I don’t think this post is going to get promoted, so there wouldn’t be much apparent overlap to most Less Wrong readers, and I would very much like to see your take. (Aren’t you a philosophy grad? I’m just a high school dropout with next to no knowledge of philosophy. Our approaches are very different.)