A pretty common trope in moral philosophy is the idea that since we’ve all met plenty of (and have many historical examples of) decent, good, and sometimes extraordinarily good people, it just can’t the be case that the pre-theoretical intuitions of such people are just plain wrong. The direction of fit in a moral theory is theory->world: if our theory doesn’t capture the way (decent or good) people actually do think about moral problems, it’s probably wrong. If that’s right, the fact that we are all virtue ethicisits at heart (or whatever we are), would be pretty good evidence for virtue ethics as the correct theory.
I have a physicist’s view on this. Every model is an approximation, including ethical ones. I think that virtue ethics is a decent approximation in many realistic situations. To me it often encodes precommitment to symmetric decisions. E.g. I will cooperate (be honest, generous...) as long as the other person does, because it’s a virtuous thing to do. It does not stumble on PD or Parfit’s hitchhiker as long as everyone values the same set of virtues. However, like any other normative ethics, it goes awry in many edge cases or when the symmetry breaks down. Thus I don’t much care about the notion of eudaimonia or any attempts to pronounce VE “correct” or “incorrect”. Again, it’s one approximation which often works well, nothing more.
A pretty common trope in moral philosophy is the idea that since we’ve all met plenty of (and have many historical examples of) decent, good, and sometimes extraordinarily good people, it just can’t the be case that the pre-theoretical intuitions of such people are just plain wrong. The direction of fit in a moral theory is theory->world: if our theory doesn’t capture the way (decent or good) people actually do think about moral problems, it’s probably wrong. If that’s right, the fact that we are all virtue ethicisits at heart (or whatever we are), would be pretty good evidence for virtue ethics as the correct theory.
What do you think of this?
I have a physicist’s view on this. Every model is an approximation, including ethical ones. I think that virtue ethics is a decent approximation in many realistic situations. To me it often encodes precommitment to symmetric decisions. E.g. I will cooperate (be honest, generous...) as long as the other person does, because it’s a virtuous thing to do. It does not stumble on PD or Parfit’s hitchhiker as long as everyone values the same set of virtues. However, like any other normative ethics, it goes awry in many edge cases or when the symmetry breaks down. Thus I don’t much care about the notion of eudaimonia or any attempts to pronounce VE “correct” or “incorrect”. Again, it’s one approximation which often works well, nothing more.