Richard Y Chappell🔸 comments on Beneficentric Virtue Ethics

[Richard Y Chappell🔸]

But negligence /​ lack of concern for obvious risks to others is a classic form of vice? (In this case, the connection to toilet waste may amplify disgust reactions, for obvious evolutionary reasons.)

If you specify that the staff are from a distant tribe that never learned about basic hygiene facts, I think people would cease to be “appalled” in the same way, and instead just feel that the situation was very lamentable. (Maybe they’d instead blame the restaurant owner for not taking care to educate their staff, depending on whether the owner plausibly “should have known better”.)

[Owen Cotton-Barratt]

Thanks, that helped me sharpen my intuitions about what triggers the “appalled” reaction.

I think I’m still left with: People may very reasonably say that fraud in the service of effective altruism is appalling. Then it’s pretty normal and understandable (even if by my lights unreasonable) to label as “appalling” things which you think will predictably lead others to appalling action.

[Richard Y Chappell🔸]

I mean, lots of fallacious reasoning is “normal and understandable”, but I’m still confused when philosophers do it—I expect better from them!