What sort of moral system to use should depend on what you’re using it for. I find virtue ethics the most useful way to view the world, generally.
My sense is that we mostly can’t evaluate things from a consequentialist perspective. We’re not very good at predicting consequences, and we’re even worse at evaluating whether somebody else is behaving in a proper consequentialist way, given the information at their disposal.
Moreover, consequentialism requires us to pin down what we mean by “consequence” and “cause”, and those are hard. If a bad thing happens because of the joint decisions of two people, and could have been avoided by either, how is the blame to be divided?
Virtue ethics asks about states of mind and habits, and I think those are easier to judge in others, and easier to improve in ourselves. When you’re trying to decide whether to give money to a hobo, you have no real way to evaluate consequences. You do have the ability to evaluate the balance you want to strike between generosity and gullibility.
The downside is that virtue ethics doesn’t help you make decisions—in any particular situation, it tells you “to do what a virtuous person would do, striking the appropriate balance between competing claims.” And this is true, but mostly not very helpful. I’m prepared to pay that price in my personal life. Mostly when I have a real moral dilemma, I don’t reason it out from first principles, I ask my friends and people I respect what they would do.
What sort of moral system to use should depend on what you’re using it for. I find virtue ethics the most useful way to view the world, generally.
My sense is that we mostly can’t evaluate things from a consequentialist perspective. We’re not very good at predicting consequences, and we’re even worse at evaluating whether somebody else is behaving in a proper consequentialist way, given the information at their disposal.
Moreover, consequentialism requires us to pin down what we mean by “consequence” and “cause”, and those are hard. If a bad thing happens because of the joint decisions of two people, and could have been avoided by either, how is the blame to be divided?
Virtue ethics asks about states of mind and habits, and I think those are easier to judge in others, and easier to improve in ourselves. When you’re trying to decide whether to give money to a hobo, you have no real way to evaluate consequences. You do have the ability to evaluate the balance you want to strike between generosity and gullibility.
The downside is that virtue ethics doesn’t help you make decisions—in any particular situation, it tells you “to do what a virtuous person would do, striking the appropriate balance between competing claims.” And this is true, but mostly not very helpful. I’m prepared to pay that price in my personal life. Mostly when I have a real moral dilemma, I don’t reason it out from first principles, I ask my friends and people I respect what they would do.