Been thinking about morality recently. Here are my current thoughts, take them with a grain of salt because they aren’t battle-tested yet.
There are some strong arguments for utilitarianism, but regardless of what is correct theoretically, in practise utilitarianism doesn’t work well without some kind of deontological bars.
Continuing with attempting to develop a pragmatic morality, it then become clear that virtue ethics is important too because a) rules are rigid compared to judgement b) decisions aren’t independent but also affect how you’ll act in the future[1].
Some folks may be quite tepid in integrating virtue ethics, but my intuition is that the more common fault will be to give yourself too much latitude, so you’ll probably want to revive some of your old deontological bars.
I view the next stage after this as introducing a sort of meta-virtue ethics to balance the three components (utilitarianism, deontology and virtue ethics; obviously it would be possible to break this down further). But this likely gives you too much latitude again, so you’ll probably want to introduce some kind of meta-deontology to limit how you update the balance.
You could go further than this, but you’d probably be running into decreasing marginal utility.
I quite liked this article by Martha Nussbaum: Virtue Ethics is a Misleading Category. She points out that both the classical utilitarians and Kant talked extensively about virtues. On the other hand, there’s great variation among those who call themselves ‘virtue ethicists’, such that it’s not clear if virtue ethics is really a thing.
But the point I want to make is: a good utilitarian has to acknowledge the role of virtue, and I think a lot of modern utilitarians have forgotten this. We want to use utility-calculation to guide our actions, but humans can’t think like calculators all the time.
I’m not really into deontological constraints myself. Rules of thumb, yes, but they should always be open to revision. Exceptional circumstances can always justify breaking rules—and in those cases, I will refer to what maximizes utility.
Been thinking about morality recently. Here are my current thoughts, take them with a grain of salt because they aren’t battle-tested yet.
There are some strong arguments for utilitarianism, but regardless of what is correct theoretically, in practise utilitarianism doesn’t work well without some kind of deontological bars.
Continuing with attempting to develop a pragmatic morality, it then become clear that virtue ethics is important too because a) rules are rigid compared to judgement b) decisions aren’t independent but also affect how you’ll act in the future[1].
Some folks may be quite tepid in integrating virtue ethics, but my intuition is that the more common fault will be to give yourself too much latitude, so you’ll probably want to revive some of your old deontological bars.
I view the next stage after this as introducing a sort of meta-virtue ethics to balance the three components (utilitarianism, deontology and virtue ethics; obviously it would be possible to break this down further). But this likely gives you too much latitude again, so you’ll probably want to introduce some kind of meta-deontology to limit how you update the balance.
You could go further than this, but you’d probably be running into decreasing marginal utility.
Thanks to Austen Erickson who I first learned this perspective from.
I quite liked this article by Martha Nussbaum: Virtue Ethics is a Misleading Category. She points out that both the classical utilitarians and Kant talked extensively about virtues. On the other hand, there’s great variation among those who call themselves ‘virtue ethicists’, such that it’s not clear if virtue ethics is really a thing.
But the point I want to make is: a good utilitarian has to acknowledge the role of virtue, and I think a lot of modern utilitarians have forgotten this. We want to use utility-calculation to guide our actions, but humans can’t think like calculators all the time.
I’m not really into deontological constraints myself. Rules of thumb, yes, but they should always be open to revision. Exceptional circumstances can always justify breaking rules—and in those cases, I will refer to what maximizes utility.