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I've had a theory that: In the long run, consequentialism and virtue ethics converge. Calibrate your chosen virtues to produce good outcomes. The more experie

I've had a theory that: In the long run, consequentialism and virtue ethics converge. Calibrate your chosen virtues to produce good outcomes. The more experience you have, the more closely you can understand which virtues result in which ends. It's like playing poker, choose your bets.

naravara 7y ago
>Calibrate your chosen virtues to produce good outcomes. The more experience you have, the more closely you can understand which virtues result in which ends. Utilitarians do like rule and virtue versions of the philosophy, but it also kind of begs the question by accepting utilitarian assumptions. The key thing with consequentialism is that you are positing a world where what is "good" is known, measurable, and directly comparable and rankable. This kind of misses the virtue or deontological contention though. Those philosophies aren't saying to ignore the consequences, they're saying that you can't resolve ethical dilemmas by scoring the "outcomes" and picking what has a higher score. They will address the gaps through horror-story hypotheticals, like the "infinite pleasure machine[1]" problem, the "utility monster[2]" problem, or the "this expects too much of us[3]" problem. You can get around it by arguing that the idea of "good" doesn't have to resolve based on hedonic calculus, but then you go back around to deciding that virtue is the chief marker of good and not utility, and then you're not really consequentialist anymore, you're just using consequentialism as a heuristic to approximate whatever other framework you have. [1] What if we invented a machine or drug that can directly stimulate the pleasure/utility sense in people and rig everyone up to it such that they are always ecstatically happy? Would the ethical thing be to plug everyone into this machine even if they're, functionally, living in The Matrix? [2] What if someone comes along who derives SO MUCH JOY out of consumption that the rational utility calculation decides that we should vastly over prioritize their happiness. In some formulations it could just mean that they get a bigger share than anyone else. In other formulations it posits that the utility monster's utility is so great that it's worth making other individual people miserable since their misery does not outweigh the utility monster's happiness. There is also an inter-temporal angle where you might say it's worth it to be miserable for big stretches of your life to maximize the resources available in your most utility-appreciating years. The problem, though, is that the version of yourself in the less-than-max-appreciation years is still gonna be unhappy and resent their younger/older self's happiness. There is also the religious version, where you argue that the utility in heaven is so great that you should just ignore suffering here on this mortal plane altogether. Presumably a loving God wouldn't have created a world where that even makes sense as a moral system, why create the world then? So God can't be a utilitarian. [3] You can also call this the Chidi Anagonye problem. Basically human cognition can't anticipate all the consequences of an action, so utility-wise where do you draw the line on how far or how many degrees of separation a consequence has from an action? If we were all to be true utilitarians it would cripple us with indecision. This also suggests that smarter people have the inherent capacity to be ethically superior to others, and it can be read to downgrade the moral status of animals or the mentally disabled. One of the strongest things about utilitarianism, though, is that it is one of the few moral frameworks with very strong arguments to account for the moral status of animals and the disabled, so losing that advantage rubs a lot of people the wrong way. That's an argument from consequences though, and some here might say it's invalid. ;-)

naravara 7y ago

>Calibrate your chosen virtues to produce good outcomes. The more experience you have, the more closely you can understand which virtues result in which ends. Utilitarians do like rule and virtue versions of the philosophy, but it also kind of begs the question by accepting utilitarian assumptions. The key thing with consequentialism is that you are positing a world where what is "good" is known, measurable, and directly comparable and rankable. This kind of misses the virtue or deontological contention though. Those philosophies aren't saying to ignore the consequences, they're saying that you can't resolve ethical dilemmas by scoring the "outcomes" and picking what has a higher score. They will address the gaps through horror-story hypotheticals, like the "infinite pleasure machine[1]" problem, the "utility monster[2]" problem, or the "this expects too much of us[3]" problem. You can get around it by arguing that the idea of "good" doesn't have to resolve based on hedonic calculus, but then you go back around to deciding that virtue is the chief marker of good and not utility, and then you're not really consequentialist anymore, you're just using consequentialism as a heuristic to approximate whatever other framework you have. [1] What if we invented a machine or drug that can directly stimulate the pleasure/utility sense in people and rig everyone up to it such that they are always ecstatically happy? Would the ethical thing be to plug everyone into this machine even if they're, functionally, living in The Matrix? [2] What if someone comes along who derives SO MUCH JOY out of consumption that the rational utility calculation decides that we should vastly over prioritize their happiness. In some formulations it could just mean that they get a bigger share than anyone else. In other formulations it posits that the utility monster's utility is so great that it's worth making other individual people miserable since their misery does not outweigh the utility monster's happiness. There is also an inter-temporal angle where you might say it's worth it to be miserable for big stretches of your life to maximize the resources available in your most utility-appreciating years. The problem, though, is that the version of yourself in the less-than-max-appreciation years is still gonna be unhappy and resent their younger/older self's happiness. There is also the religious version, where you argue that the utility in heaven is so great that you should just ignore suffering here on this mortal plane altogether. Presumably a loving God wouldn't have created a world where that even makes sense as a moral system, why create the world then? So God can't be a utilitarian. [3] You can also call this the Chidi Anagonye problem. Basically human cognition can't anticipate all the consequences of an action, so utility-wise where do you draw the line on how far or how many degrees of separation a consequence has from an action? If we were all to be true utilitarians it would cripple us with indecision. This also suggests that smarter people have the inherent capacity to be ethically superior to others, and it can be read to downgrade the moral status of animals or the mentally disabled. One of the strongest things about utilitarianism, though, is that it is one of the few moral frameworks with very strong arguments to account for the moral status of animals and the disabled, so losing that advantage rubs a lot of people the wrong way. That's an argument from consequences though, and some here might say it's invalid. ;-)