Kind of. From a virtue ethicist standpoint, things that happen aren’t really good or bad in and of themselves. It’s not bad for a child to drown, and it’s not good for a child to be saved, because those aren’t 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 “Consequentialists 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?”
Kind of. From a virtue ethicist standpoint, things that happen aren’t really good or bad in and of themselves. It’s not bad for a child to drown, and it’s not good for a child to be saved, because those aren’t 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 “Consequentialists 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?”
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.