While good results (consequences) are the end of my ethics, the real world is too complex
I’ve been thinking along these lines lately myself, and I think the classic ‘push a fat man in front of the train’ thought experiment is a good example of it. In thought-experiment-land, it’s stipulated that pushing the fat man would stop the train and save lives… but in the real world you don’t know that with any certainty. So if you make the consequentialist decision to push him, but it doesn’t stop the train, you ended up killing one more person than otherwise would have been… not because your moral philosophy was wrong, but because your mental calculations of the physics of stopping a train were wrong.
If, on the other hand, you make your moral decision on the basis of virtue, then so long as your virtues are well calibrated heuristics for real world consequences, then you end up making, on average, correct decisions (meaning decisions leading to good consequences) without needing to get the physics (or whatever) right in individual instances. In this case, the heuristic/virtue in question would be “It’s wrong to kill innocent people”, leading you to NOT push the fat man, which I believe would be the correct decision in real life.
I’ve been thinking along these lines lately myself, and I think the classic ‘push a fat man in front of the train’ thought experiment is a good example of it. In thought-experiment-land, it’s stipulated that pushing the fat man would stop the train and save lives… but in the real world you don’t know that with any certainty. So if you make the consequentialist decision to push him, but it doesn’t stop the train, you ended up killing one more person than otherwise would have been… not because your moral philosophy was wrong, but because your mental calculations of the physics of stopping a train were wrong.
If, on the other hand, you make your moral decision on the basis of virtue, then so long as your virtues are well calibrated heuristics for real world consequences, then you end up making, on average, correct decisions (meaning decisions leading to good consequences) without needing to get the physics (or whatever) right in individual instances. In this case, the heuristic/virtue in question would be “It’s wrong to kill innocent people”, leading you to NOT push the fat man, which I believe would be the correct decision in real life.