For consequences of your actions to be good, it’s not necessary for you to personally hold the consequences in your conscious attention. Something has to process the process of moral evaluation of consequences, but it’s not necessary, and as you point out not always and never fully possible, for that something to be you. If you have a good rule, following that rule becomes a new option to choose from; deciding on virtues can be as powerful as deciding on actions.
But looking at virtue ethics as a foundation for decision-making is like looking at the wings of Boeing 747 as fundamental elements of reality. Virtues are concepts that exist in the mind to optimize thinking about what’s moral, not the morality itself. There is only one level to morality, as is to physics, the bottom level, the whole thing. All the intermediate concepts, aspects of goodness we understand, exist in the mind, not in morality. Morality does not care about our mathematical difficulties. It determines value the inefficient way.
Let us not lose sight of the reductionist nature of morality, even as we take comfort in the small successes of high-level tools we have for working with it. You don’t need to believe in the magical goodness of flu vaccines to benefit from them, on the contrary it helps to understand the real reason for why the vaccines work, distinct from the fantasy of magical goodness.
For consequences of your actions to be good, it’s not necessary for you to personally hold the consequences in your conscious attention. Something has to process the process of moral evaluation of consequences, but it’s not necessary, and as you point out not always and never fully possible, for that something to be you. If you have a good rule, following that rule becomes a new option to choose from; deciding on virtues can be as powerful as deciding on actions.
But looking at virtue ethics as a foundation for decision-making is like looking at the wings of Boeing 747 as fundamental elements of reality. Virtues are concepts that exist in the mind to optimize thinking about what’s moral, not the morality itself. There is only one level to morality, as is to physics, the bottom level, the whole thing. All the intermediate concepts, aspects of goodness we understand, exist in the mind, not in morality. Morality does not care about our mathematical difficulties. It determines value the inefficient way.
Let us not lose sight of the reductionist nature of morality, even as we take comfort in the small successes of high-level tools we have for working with it. You don’t need to believe in the magical goodness of flu vaccines to benefit from them, on the contrary it helps to understand the real reason for why the vaccines work, distinct from the fantasy of magical goodness.