Rosalind Hursthouse really thoroughly addressed the character before rules objection in On Virtue Ethics (2002) and lays out a theory of v-rules, but I'd be even more interested in your read of this by McDowell which treats both this question and the continence question. Love your stuff!
How is it that virtue ethics doesnt tell you what to do but can be a good heuristic for telling you what to do?
Here's a VE criterion of right action: an action is right iff a virtuous person would be disposed to do it (or whatever your heuristic was). Would that not make for a (good) VE theory and actually count as a theory? If you think that's a good heuristic it seems like there's is a legitimate theoretical counterpart.
Virtue ethics doesn't tell you what to do in the sense that it doesn't tell you which moral rules are correct and incorrect. A Kantian or utilitarian can have commands having the form of rules which tell you to use a certain heuristic; "Use this heuristic if you're in such-and-such circumstances (including your cognitive limitations)" and "Don't steal in such-and-such circumstances" have the same form. Virtue ethicists, rather, want to eschew questions about what rules are correct, instead thinking that correct conclusions about how to act are ultimately determined by the perceptions only accessible to a sufficiently virtuous person.
Another point is that Kantians and utilitarians have an independent notion of virtue in terms of which the heuristic can be defined; a virtuous disposition is one which has the agent instinctively act in a way that best tracks what is unqualifiedly moral (that is, moral, not taking into account cognitive limitations), the way the good agent would want to act if they weren't so limited. The virtue ethicist, in contrast, thinks one can only tell what a virtuous disposition is insofar as one is already virtuous. (I may be wrong about my *general* impressions of what virtue ethicists believe; maybe my sample is skewed).
I am on the record as disagreeing with you about virtue ethics, but part of this, I admit, has to be the mainstream of philosophical virtue ethics making really poor arguments about e.g. particularism and rules and the relationship between virtue and act that I think neither Aristotle nor Anscombe would recognize.
Christine Swanton gives a criterion of right action that *doesn’t* put character before action, for what it’s worth. On her account, and I think this is correct, virtue ethics is about thick evaluative notions, like justice and courage and temperance, being prior to thin deontic ones, but not necessarily character being prior to act.
Character is, of course, central to virtue ethics in a way it isn’t to Kantianism or utilitarianism or Rossian intuitionism or whatever of the myriad other ethical views one can hold. But that doesn’t mean virtue ethicists have to be character fundamentalists. I think fit is probably the fundamental normative concept—that or goodness.
As for what virtue ethicists and particularists say about rules—since virtue ethicists are to some extent particularists—I think probably what it comes down to is parallel to the difference between, like, a built-from-the-ground-up AI like what Eliezer imagined we’d have back in 2010, and the current neural network paradigm that gave us LLMs. Yes, the latter still runs some algorithm or other, so strictly speaking saying that there are no ethical rules or algorithms is just wrong. But these algorithms aren’t just really complex; they are so complex that creating a full description of them is tantamount to just giving a full description of the ethics-relevant neurology of a virtuous person. The concept of computational irreducibility might be relevant too: the only way to figure out what the right thing to do is is to actually decide using squishy things such as “judgement” and “gut calls” as a virtuous person would, and you can’t take shortcuts that bypass the exercise of phronesis.
Maybe you think I’m watering down virtue ethics and particularism too much, but I do think, for what it’s worth, that my views remain recognizably Aristotelian underneath this.
All sounds very reasonable. I personally suspect virtuous character could be a sort of end in itself good it makes sense to think of humans pursuing in addition to pleasure which I sense is being denied.
I think that in epistemology we have truth, then we have truth preserving inference (deductive logic, mathematics) then we have ampliative inference that gets us new truths (mathematical intuitions, principles of scientific investigation and theory generation etc.) and then we have habits that are conducive to good inference (get a good nights sleep before math tests, declare conflicts of interest in medical research etc.) Each is a different thing while related and there are complex foundational disagreements among schools of epistemology about the arrangement and those relations.
Likewise in ethics we can evaluate situations, worlds, lives etc. as good or bad (or at least compare them better or worse), we can decide what rules of conduct to follow in given specific instances (or rules for generating specific actions in specific instances) and finally habits and institutions that are not specific rules of conduct. I think different ethical positions tend to emphasize different aspects of the overall field.
But they also differ on what the good etc. is. Is something like pleasure the good, is being better just about more pleasure or more satisfaction etc. or is about more prosaic things (number of true beliefs held is what we maximize) or a broader elements of character (so people being more courageous say is an end we should value). Logically the definition of the Good and what part of moral analysis is emphasized can and does come apart in an ethical school (Epicureans are hedonists but Epicurus emphasizes the importance of habits like prudence and continence, not trying to employ a hedonic calculus), but we tend to essentialize/simplify as if they do (deontologists identify the good with rule following and focus on following rules, utilitarians define the good hedonistically and focus on hedonic calculus and virtue ethics defines the good as virtuous character and emphasize character formation).
I take it a lot of views end up converging in practical ethics just because the context of life itself as humans live it is constraining what you can do and how you can talk about and plan it.
Rosalind Hursthouse really thoroughly addressed the character before rules objection in On Virtue Ethics (2002) and lays out a theory of v-rules, but I'd be even more interested in your read of this by McDowell which treats both this question and the continence question. Love your stuff!
https://www.jstor.org/stable/27902600?seq=7
How is it that virtue ethics doesnt tell you what to do but can be a good heuristic for telling you what to do?
Here's a VE criterion of right action: an action is right iff a virtuous person would be disposed to do it (or whatever your heuristic was). Would that not make for a (good) VE theory and actually count as a theory? If you think that's a good heuristic it seems like there's is a legitimate theoretical counterpart.
Virtue ethics doesn't tell you what to do in the sense that it doesn't tell you which moral rules are correct and incorrect. A Kantian or utilitarian can have commands having the form of rules which tell you to use a certain heuristic; "Use this heuristic if you're in such-and-such circumstances (including your cognitive limitations)" and "Don't steal in such-and-such circumstances" have the same form. Virtue ethicists, rather, want to eschew questions about what rules are correct, instead thinking that correct conclusions about how to act are ultimately determined by the perceptions only accessible to a sufficiently virtuous person.
Another point is that Kantians and utilitarians have an independent notion of virtue in terms of which the heuristic can be defined; a virtuous disposition is one which has the agent instinctively act in a way that best tracks what is unqualifiedly moral (that is, moral, not taking into account cognitive limitations), the way the good agent would want to act if they weren't so limited. The virtue ethicist, in contrast, thinks one can only tell what a virtuous disposition is insofar as one is already virtuous. (I may be wrong about my *general* impressions of what virtue ethicists believe; maybe my sample is skewed).
Ah okay gotcha, thanks
I am on the record as disagreeing with you about virtue ethics, but part of this, I admit, has to be the mainstream of philosophical virtue ethics making really poor arguments about e.g. particularism and rules and the relationship between virtue and act that I think neither Aristotle nor Anscombe would recognize.
Christine Swanton gives a criterion of right action that *doesn’t* put character before action, for what it’s worth. On her account, and I think this is correct, virtue ethics is about thick evaluative notions, like justice and courage and temperance, being prior to thin deontic ones, but not necessarily character being prior to act.
Character is, of course, central to virtue ethics in a way it isn’t to Kantianism or utilitarianism or Rossian intuitionism or whatever of the myriad other ethical views one can hold. But that doesn’t mean virtue ethicists have to be character fundamentalists. I think fit is probably the fundamental normative concept—that or goodness.
As for what virtue ethicists and particularists say about rules—since virtue ethicists are to some extent particularists—I think probably what it comes down to is parallel to the difference between, like, a built-from-the-ground-up AI like what Eliezer imagined we’d have back in 2010, and the current neural network paradigm that gave us LLMs. Yes, the latter still runs some algorithm or other, so strictly speaking saying that there are no ethical rules or algorithms is just wrong. But these algorithms aren’t just really complex; they are so complex that creating a full description of them is tantamount to just giving a full description of the ethics-relevant neurology of a virtuous person. The concept of computational irreducibility might be relevant too: the only way to figure out what the right thing to do is is to actually decide using squishy things such as “judgement” and “gut calls” as a virtuous person would, and you can’t take shortcuts that bypass the exercise of phronesis.
Maybe you think I’m watering down virtue ethics and particularism too much, but I do think, for what it’s worth, that my views remain recognizably Aristotelian underneath this.
Found this dauntingly long :/ was intrigued but skipped a lot of it
In a nation with strong animal rights protections why should I not be vegitarian? That seems to me what a virtuous person would be, not vegan.
All sounds very reasonable. I personally suspect virtuous character could be a sort of end in itself good it makes sense to think of humans pursuing in addition to pleasure which I sense is being denied.
I think that in epistemology we have truth, then we have truth preserving inference (deductive logic, mathematics) then we have ampliative inference that gets us new truths (mathematical intuitions, principles of scientific investigation and theory generation etc.) and then we have habits that are conducive to good inference (get a good nights sleep before math tests, declare conflicts of interest in medical research etc.) Each is a different thing while related and there are complex foundational disagreements among schools of epistemology about the arrangement and those relations.
Likewise in ethics we can evaluate situations, worlds, lives etc. as good or bad (or at least compare them better or worse), we can decide what rules of conduct to follow in given specific instances (or rules for generating specific actions in specific instances) and finally habits and institutions that are not specific rules of conduct. I think different ethical positions tend to emphasize different aspects of the overall field.
But they also differ on what the good etc. is. Is something like pleasure the good, is being better just about more pleasure or more satisfaction etc. or is about more prosaic things (number of true beliefs held is what we maximize) or a broader elements of character (so people being more courageous say is an end we should value). Logically the definition of the Good and what part of moral analysis is emphasized can and does come apart in an ethical school (Epicureans are hedonists but Epicurus emphasizes the importance of habits like prudence and continence, not trying to employ a hedonic calculus), but we tend to essentialize/simplify as if they do (deontologists identify the good with rule following and focus on following rules, utilitarians define the good hedonistically and focus on hedonic calculus and virtue ethics defines the good as virtuous character and emphasize character formation).
I take it a lot of views end up converging in practical ethics just because the context of life itself as humans live it is constraining what you can do and how you can talk about and plan it.