Virtue ethics is wrong, but you should live like a virtue ethicist

No human is smart enough to not be a virtue ethicist

Take, then, an ugly soul. It is dissolute, unjust, teeming with lusts, torn by inner discord, beset by craven fears and petty envies. It thinks indeed. But it thinks only of the perishable and the base. In everything perverse, friend to filthy pleasures, it lives a life abandoned to bodily sensation and enjoys its depravity. … the life it leads is dark with evil, sunk in manifold death. It sees no longer what the soul should see. It can no longer rest within itself but is forever being dragged towards the external, the lower, the dark. It is a filthy thing, I say, borne every which way by the allurement of objects of sense, branded by the bodily, always immersed in matter and sucking matter into itself. In its trafficking with the unworthy it has bartered its Idea for a nature foreign to itself.¹

So, I’m on paper as not liking virtue ethics. I don’t think it’s a real view, since it doesn’t tell you what to do. Ethics is about telling you what actions in what circumstances are correct and incorrect; this is the information the Moral Law gives you. Every time you act, you presuppose a belief as to which actions are correct and incorrect, meaning you presuppose something about what the Moral Law contains. Our job is to figure out what the Moral Law is, so that we can act only in a correct manner, after which point I will have no further questions about how to live. What does not help me is telling me to act in a way that someone who knows how to act would act.

“Moral character is prior to claims about how to act.” Perhaps; then I invite you to join me in abstracting from all our desires and preconceived intuitions and discovering the content of the Moral Law. If it turns out that its content will say something about moral character, that will be an exciting and useful discovery. “Looking for rules as to what actions are correct and incorrect is not the right question to center ethical investigation on.” Then either I am bound by my nature as a rational being to center the wrong question, or I have not made this alleged mistake. I have to figure out which actions are correct, so I can do them; I have no information to go on except the properties of my circumstances; and a function that takes in properties of circumstances and spits out a thing to do is called a rule.² I do not yet know if I am guilty of centering the wrong questions; I merely know that what the correct moral rules are is a question I need answers to, whatever those answers may look like.

Nevertheless, the Moral Law does not simply command actions; it commands actions hypothetical on certain circumstances. It does not forbid or permit swinging my fist unqualifiedly. It forbids swinging my fist when an innocent guy is in front of me, and it permits swinging my fist when a punching bag is in front of me. The Moral Law issues commands of the form “If you are in the circumstance C, then do one of the actions X, Y, ….”

One of the kinds of circumstances the Moral Law takes into account concern the agent’s capabilities. Why is Elon Musk obligated to give (at least) $100,000 to the Shrimp Welfare Project, while I am not? In part, because he is capable of doing so, and I am not. The Moral Law is a merciful Lord: if something good is beyond your capability, then he will adjust his commands in turn.

More generally, the Moral Law will adjust its commands based on the cognitive limitations of the agent. To imagine an extreme example, there may be a man so limited in his ability to discern the particularities of his situation that he cannot tell on a moment’s notice whether he is in the sort of circumstances which would usually justify punching someone (e.g. when necessary to defend someone else). So, for him, the only two rules he can follow are “Don’t punch people, even if it seems like you need to” or “Punch someone every time it seems like you need to, even though there will be a lot of false positives.” There is (I stipulate) no way he can adopt the rule “Only punch people when you need to defend someone” without it being a consequence of his adopting the rule that he just punches random people all the time. I feel uneasy saying anything about which rule the man should adopt, but one thing is certain: either one rule is the correct one given his limitations, or they are both permissible. The man is not obligated to only punch people when necessary to defend someone else, as long as we assume that his limitation is inescapable.

That’s an extreme example, but there are many cases like it in our own lives. “Don’t yell at people out of anger” is probably not a correct principle for someone with great perception and self-control; there are times when that reaction is totally justified. But in my case, were I to decide to adopt this rule, I’d have a lot of false-positives, since when you’re angry it really seems like yelling is justified, and only later do you realize you were being a jerk. So maybe the correct rule for me is “Only yell out of anger when the circumstances meet a high threshold of justification.” If I were to yell out of anger in a situation where things are not so uncertain, even if it turned out that I judged the case correctly, I still would have done something I shouldn’t have.

Does this mean morality fails to be well-defined, or that it is relative? Well, no. There is only one Moral Law, and once you specify the circumstances—indeed, including your limitations in your ability to judge what the circumstances are—it gives you a clear answer. Just as there is no one answer as to whether it is okay to swing your first (we need to know whether it’s a person or a punching bag in front of you), there is no one answer as to whether you should yell at people whenever it seems justified, for we need further details of the circumstances to know whether that’s a good rule to adopt. But once we spell out the circumstances, the Moral Law gives you a clean, objectively correct answer.

So, be wary that your emotions and perceptions might be wrong, think things through, and when planning how to act when you only have a moment’s notice, be cautious when false positives are likely and would be very unfortunate. I imagine that strikes you all as anodyne. But humans—all of us—are stupid in many ways, in particular we are morally stupid, so the consequences of what I say are far-reaching. We do not perform any one act in isolation, except maybe relatively high-stakes and infrequent cases. Nearly every act we will and every thought we think is part of a pattern of habits that we have to optimize, indeed optimize taking into account our known limitations when it comes to apprehending the True and the Good, limitations that exist both on a moment’s notice and in general.

So, as it turns out, “Do what a person of virtuous disposition would do” is a pretty good heuristic for us to figure out what to do given our limited ability to reason precisely about the circumstances we find ourselves in. I think the ideal moral human would probably use the Moral Law to figure out what kinds of general ends we ought to have—truth, the perfection of one’s own will, others’ happiness, a just political system, etc.—and then, when it comes to everyday actions, think and do whatever appears appropriate and virtuous, in the absence of compelling arguments that another way is better. And as it turns out, the virtue people are right that this will make you happy—however, be warned, so acting for the sake of happiness will not make you happy.

What is an example? Well, say your friend lent you $20 but then forgot, so you can forget too; even if they remember, you can just say “Oh, right, here you go.” Say also they’re financially better off than you, so the money really would create more happiness in your hands. You may even genuinely like the idea of your friend having $20 instead of you in the hypothetical case where they’re worse off, so it’s not like you’re making an exception of yourself. But keeping the money is not the virtuous thing to do. Indeed, it would not even occur to a virtuous person to keep the money; this is not the kind of choice they perceive as salient enough to warrant deliberation.

That latter aspect—warranting deliberation—is what should really strike you; Bernard Williams was right that virtue isn’t just about doing the right thing, but also more covert attitudes of how you think through what to do; the person who thinks “one thought too many” is not one you wish to be friends with.³ (He was, of course, in error in thinking this fact reveals anything about the status or limits of moral theory.) Now, I am not telling you not to think about things; you should think about everything. But if you’re entering deliberation in circumstances where that seems weird and unvirtuous, go ahead and think through that on your own time as a philosophical exercise, but make sure you keep this thinking far far away from your actual action, unless you really encounter and double- and triple- check some evidence that the virtuous-seeming act is not required, evidence strong enough that it could even compel the risk-averse. But if, under normal circumstances, thoughts like “I could just keep the money” even enter your head when you’re coming to a judgment about how you will in fact act, you are being reckless to entertain them.

Sorry, guys, this one is a veganism post. So, the facts on the table are pretty clear; watch Dominion if you haven’t. In addition to getting sent to gas chambers, being suffocated through other means, having your throat slit, being skinned alive, or if you’re lucky getting shot in the head or thrown into a macerator, animals get abused by workers, suffer disease, live amongst the corpses of their friends, raped (yes, literally), and so on, all because some American guy would just die for a bacon cheeseburger right now. Let us think about what seems like a virtuous way to respond to these considerations.

I know you don’t like being told you might be doing something wrong, but please just think about what I am saying instead of letting your brain autocomplete your response for you. If you can’t be bothered to do such a thing, then it is a grave injustice of the world that you are capable of making choices that are consequential.

I worry those words will not be enough to prevent the autocompleted responses, so here is an incentive. I talk about these things—I talk about the world, the effects on others, what the moral thing to do is—and people think I’m talking about myself. They think I’m in the slightest bit motivated by wanting to look like, or at least convince myself I am, a good person (as a matter of fact, some of the below are responses to my own vice). So that we can be sure that that is not what’s motivating me, I can give you a promise: by the end of this post, it will be apparent that you can easily and in an instant become a far better person than me. My past actions have left me undeserving of salvation, but most reading this will have a head start.

So, what should we do? The scale of the horror is utterly incomprehensible. Tens of billions of animals—individuals with desires, feelings, individuals who would do anything to avoid death, individuals for whom death means the loss of their whole world and their complete annihilation—forced to live in these horrid conditions and killed. Many of you are probably reading this and having difficulty being convinced to not pay for this to happen. I would wager to guess that you’d have the exact same reaction if, in fact, there were only one-tenth as many victims. If I’m right, then you should react as if the considerations against doing what you’re doing are at least ten times stronger than you currently feel they are.

Moreover, of all the atrocities humans have committed against each other, motivated by land or wealth or a deluded vision of an ideal society or a paranoid desire to protect oneself from a nonexistent enemy, none to my knowledge have had so pathetic and ignoble a motivation as what people to do nonhuman animals. All this death, blood, and pain, just so you can keep eating your favorite meals. This is not what a society of virtuous individuals looks like, and a virtuous man has no desire to act as others do in such a world.

“It’s not that easy; most restaurants don’t have a lot of good vegan options. The moral responsibility is not all on me, it’s society’s fault for making these the easiest options to get.” It does not seem virtuous to be moved by such considerations. The reason being vegan is hard is because most people are like you. It’s wrong for society to do something, but then okay for you to become part of what constitutes a society acting immorally because it’s hard?

“This is my way of life, it’s part of my culture.” Food. We’re walking about hamburgers, don’t forget. The virtuous man, as soon as he thinks this thought, already knows everything he needs to desist. If he thought about what is such a morally serious matter if he is wrong, and then the idea occurred to him that this is a way of life, something existentially significant to him, it would chill him to his core. How could he be such a slave to food that that even seems like a serious consideration? He would right then become vegan for a while, and only think about the matter again once he is sure his mind is freed from whatever weakness he was suffering from.

“What if you’re on a desert island and….” This is a fine philosophical exercise; I’m no enemy of thought experiments, even the ones Aella posts that strike many as offensive. But bringing this up as a relevant consideration when actually thinking about what to do in the actual world cannot be but a diversion. If the question seems hard, then just thank God you don’t have to answer it.

“Would it be ethical to have eggs or milk if they were made without abuse? Is it okay to eat flesh if it’s just being provided at a party, and you’re not contributing to the demand?” Hearing about the considerations above, the question of what to purchase, at least, is obvious. But when a virtuous person sees that society engages in an immoral practice, one they can very cleanly desist from, they do not put effort into trying to achieve the closest approximation to the immoral practice they can get away with. Especially over food. They just stop eating that stuff. (Again, I stress, I am here condemning myself just as much as anyone else.)

In my opinion, the virtuous answer to the issue of having torment-free eggs or cheese is: “In principle, that’s probably okay. But it’s unlikely we’re going to have a humane system that feeds billions of people with the excretions of those who cannot tell the police about abuse. It seems a lot easier to just not eat eggs or cheese and not have to worry about that.”

“I need to eat flesh for health reasons.” This, in my experience, is mostly said by people for whom the natural conclusion is just to unthinkingly act like everyone else. If this is a serious concern, your reaction should be “Am I certain there isn’t a supplement I could take, or something about my diet I could be more careful of? If not, what is the absolute minimum of flesh I can eat, and how can I make sure I never exceed that?” I once had a mutual on X (formerly Twitter), a much better person than I, who had health problems after going vegan. After some effort, she discovered that this was a result of her having some rare disorder which made her incapable of producing some enzyme or something that most people didn’t need to get from food; she then discovered that one slice of cheese every couple weeks was what she needed to correct that. This is what a serious person who has to make tradeoffs between health and the welfare of others looks like; they do not look like someone saying “Welp, guess I can’t be vegan” and then eating like everyone else.

I know I haven’t given any new arguments for veganism in this post; I do not think that is what would push anyone’s knowledge of the matter further. The bottleneck is not a result of our not having found the Decisive Argument yet; it is the severe limitation on every human’s ability to discern which arguments are decisive in the first place. If you continue to pay others to torture and kill, please, at the very least have some dignity and say your position is that humans are so great that getting to have cheeseburgers outweighs such unconscionable effects. Do not pretend that the above sorts of responses make any sense at all conditional on the latter being a weighty consideration.

In the off chance that this post has convinced you to change your mind on the matter for the first time, I should make good on my promise before. If I am a virtuous person, it is as of extremely recently. My history with regard to veganism is incredibly shameful. I was convinced of ethical veganism when I was seventeen, after seeing this video by philosopher Garret Merriam. The conclusion felt as obvious to me as it was, and I never changed my mind. I became vegetarian for a year, but to my utter failure, I stopped while I was in undergrad. I only woke back up once I began studying philosophy again during my masters at Tufts, and resulting from nothing but my own depravity, it took until this previous October—around seven years later—for me to be consistently and permanently vegan. My past does not bother me on a day-to-day basis, but I wish I could take it back. You, reader, probably have something I do not: you have the opportunity to decide what is right, and then never do such horrendous evils while knowing full well what you do. Even better would be to never have committed them, but we are not in a world where most are given that opportunity. But you still have a gift that I squandered.

1. Plotinus, Enneads 1.6.5, trans. Elmer O’Brien.

2. I do not understand what particularists claim to believe. The way I see it, once you admit there are no irreducibly indexical obligations—i.e. in two circumstances that are qualitatively identical, correct conclusions about what to do are the same—then you have rules. The arguments particularists make seem to be better understood as arguments that the rules that directly govern action—the ones that say “In this circumstance, you should not steal”—are very complicated and cannot be cleanly articulated. But, first, I am entirely capable of apprehending and acting on rules that I cannot articulate. I am not limited to act in ways that I can express with a literal interpretation of some sentence. Second, that rules that directly govern action are complicated leaves open whether they are instances of a more general rule that can can be cleanly articulated. In the game chess*—a variant of chess I just invented which has no draws—a completely and utterly correct and exceptionless rule for deciding how to move is “Make whatever move maximizes your probability of winning.” But any rule you apply that is closer to telling you what move in particular to make will be complicated and riddled with exceptions.

3. See his “Persons, Character, and Morality.”