I thought the âwhy a Virtue Ethicist might care about consequenceâ section didnât really make a convincing argument. E.g.
âFor them, the issue is not that the world is the kind of place where children drown, it is that the people in it are not the kinds of people who would save a drowning child. But itâs still an issue! â
But what if the child is on its own and nobody has the opportunity to save the child, regardless of what kind of people they are? Is it OK for children to drown then?
Kind of. From a virtue ethicist standpoint, things that happen arenât really good or bad in and of themselves. Itâs not bad for a child to drown, and itâs not good for a child to be saved, because those arenât the sorts of things that can be good or bad.
It seems very unintuitive if you look at it from a consequentialist standpoint, but it is consistent and coherent, and people who are committed to it find it intuitive.
I guess an equivalent argument from the other side would be something like âConsequentialists think that virtues only matter in terms of their consequences. But if someone were unknowningly in a simulation, and they were really evil, and spent all their time drowning simulated children, would they not be a bad person?â
I thought the âwhy a Virtue Ethicist might care about consequenceâ section didnât really make a convincing argument. E.g.
âFor them, the issue is not that the world is the kind of place where children drown, it is that the people in it are not the kinds of people who would save a drowning child. But itâs still an issue! â
But what if the child is on its own and nobody has the opportunity to save the child, regardless of what kind of people they are? Is it OK for children to drown then?
Kind of. From a virtue ethicist standpoint, things that happen arenât really good or bad in and of themselves. Itâs not bad for a child to drown, and itâs not good for a child to be saved, because those arenât the sorts of things that can be good or bad.
It seems very unintuitive if you look at it from a consequentialist standpoint, but it is consistent and coherent, and people who are committed to it find it intuitive.
I guess an equivalent argument from the other side would be something like âConsequentialists think that virtues only matter in terms of their consequences. But if someone were unknowningly in a simulation, and they were really evil, and spent all their time drowning simulated children, would they not be a bad person?â
Does that make sense?
It makes sense, but it feels like a very narrow conception of what morality ought to concern itself with.
In your simulation example, I think it depends on whether we can be fully confident that simulated entities cannot suffer, which seems unlikely to me.