Glad you’re interested in the topic and that you seem willing to engage in debate. :)
You say this: “Utilitarianism (hedonistic utilitarianism, to be precise) has easy answers in line with its one, big, principled intuition—that positive felt experience is good, and negative bad…”
Really? Easy answers? You don’t think “positive felt experience” suffers from vagueness as well? Are we talking first or third-order effects?Physical or emotional (or spiritual) wellness? Higher or lower pleasures, a la JS Mill?
Yeah, utiltiarians do often have trouble defining welfare. But when I say "hedonistic utilitarianism," I'm talking about valuing first-order effects, not differentiating between physical/emotional and higher/lower pleasures, and so on. Whatever feels best is best.
The broader defense for "some kind of utilitarianism" being better grounded than "some kind of virtue ethics" is that, presumably, your view of what welfare & pleasure are will be less culturally- and situationally-determined than your view of what "virtue" is. At least it restricts the question "what is good?" to a subset of possible answers (things that *feel* good) and then lets us debate specifically over what feels better and what feels worse. Whereas virtue ethics, generally speaking, only restricts "what is good?" to "what do we think is good?" which seems... less than productive.
I think you lost me a bit in your second paragraph when you reintroduced “welfare and pleasure” as units of for measuring goodness and then, it seems, also tried to synonymously define the unit of measure as ‘what feels good.” Those metrics seem very different to me, and actually, the “welfare and pleasure” measure sounds much closer in spirit to the kind of flourishing that virtue ethics is oriented towards.
Furthermore, I’m curious if you really want to bite the “first-order effects” bullet here. I think this version of utilitarianism is certainly harder to defend from an ethical standpoint, given that it leads to all kinds of scenarios that hugely violate our universal sense of justice (killing babies, innocent “criminals,” euthanizing every living thing on the planet, etc.). You can try to argue against a universal sense of justice, but I think that’s a very tough argument to make.
Right, I do want to do a bit more detailed writing about this in the future... but I think, basically, that pleasure = "what feels good" is a legitimate claim, and hedonists believe that welfare = pleasure, so all that equivalence checks out in my mind.
Hm, I think I misunderstood what you meant by first-order effects—good hedonistic utilitarians probably should be longtermists and humanitarians who believe that moral progress is possible, that creating life is good, that killing innocents is generally bad (for social knock-on effects & lost opportunity to live a pleasurable life), and generally that human impact on the universe can be positive in the long run. (Though I can't say I'm opposed to taking humans out of the equation if the broader view of universal wellbeing demands it! [https://mistakesweremade.substack.com/p/benthams-bulldog-should-think-aligned])
What I guess I mean to say is that utilitarians are allowed to ignore deontic constraints—e.g., *never* kill innocent people. Not sure how I turned "first or third-order effects" into that question, though!
Gotcha! Sorry if my wording confused things. I think you are on much better ground to argue for ethical principles on the basis of "pleasure" if you have long-term wellbeing in mind, so I'm glad to hear your thoughts in that direction, and I'll be interested to see how you develop the ideas further.
I've never heard a totally successful defense of utilitarianism, but I'm always interested in new attempts. On that note, I'll be looking out for your writing on this in the future :)
A lot of what you're saying seems right. But the points you're criticizing seem unique to Laird's personal interpretation of virtue ethics, and aren't endorsed by virtue ethicists as a whole. Mainstream virtue ethicists don't care if most people think homosexuality is disgusting/dishonorable (I'll stick with "dishonorable" for now, since it's much clearer that this is a vice - it's not like maggots are steeped in vice just because they're disgusting). That's because they think most people aren't very virtuous. They also probably don't care where your intuitions lead you. In "Unresolvable and Tragic Dilemmas", for instance, Rosalind Hursthouse writes that some actions are intuitively approved of by many people but aren't virtuous because they lead you away from eudaimonia. One example might be pulling the lever in the trolley problem. You might not be *morally blameworthy* for pulling the lever, it might even be the *right decision* in some sense, but it probably won't make your life better, since you might be traumatized by doing so. I think she'd say something similar about the idea that homosexuality is intuitively dishonorable. If it leads to people to live happy, loving, wholesome lives - lives compatible with eudaimonia - then who cares about your intuitions?
In general, virtue ethicists seem to think it's *really hard* to be virtuous. You need practical wisdom (which is the faculty you have that tells you to ignore your instinct to be disgusted and let other people live their lives, among other things), and that's not easy to come by because of how broadly it's conceived of. Aristotle once said that nobody can be truly virtuous until they reach old age, because they'd lack the requisite life experience and moral crucible-ing before then. And many virtue ethicists defend the "unity of the virtues", which claims that you can't have one virtue unless you have them all. This is a high standard to meet! How many people do you know who are wise, honest, loving, honorable, brave, kind, etc. all at once? Probably not many. The upshot of this is, many virtue ethicists think being virtuous is a truly exalted status, and requires lots of life experience and moral analysis to figure out what's really right and what's really wrong. You can't figure out if homosexuality is a vice just by testing a bunch of random guys to see if they get stressed out when they see gay sex. Besides, there are good arguments that homophobia itself is a vice: it seems pretty contrary to the virtue of compassion and benevolence.
You're right, though, that virtue ethics suffers from being a bit vague about defining what the virtues are and who counts as a virtuous person. (I've written a bit above about criteria for being truly virtuous, but notice that I didn't give a rigorous or stance-independent test for it. That's because such a test doesn't exist.) That's a big weakness of virtue ethics, and it's one of the reasons I'm not one myself. But a lot of Laird's interpretations seem pretty unorthodox compared with mainstream virtue ethics - so him being wrong (which he is) shouldn't impugn the rest of virtue ethics.
I think you're right that a more intellectually humble view of virtue is probably more defensible... but I imagine you'll still run into problems where two people's practical wisdoms point in vastly different directions. I like this old SlateStarCodex article, it's a good intuition pump that the divergence really is a thing that will happen: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/
Broadly speaking, the idea that Laird can even *have* such unorthodox interpretations while still making them look sort-of-virtuous is the issue here. Mainstream virtue ethicists are probably good people living good lives—but I suspect they've just landed on the lucky side of the "doing random crap" spectrum, not locked onto some obviously true normative system.
> I imagine you'll still run into problems where two people's practical wisdoms point in vastly different directions
You're totally right. The traditional virtue ethicist response is to say that both of them can be right, at the same time, such that both positions are permissible/virtuous. This is deeply unintuitive to me - it can't be that it's right to both pull the lever and not pull the lever in the trolley problem.
As something of a virtue ethicist myself, I don't think intuition is by itself probative, but that. The fact that you find something disgusting, doesn't mean it's un-virtuous. For all you know, the reason why you find it disgusting is you yourself lack virtue.
It's my understanding (and I'm not as read on the literature of virtue ethics as others in this thread) that virtue ethics isn't really reducible to one principle (like intuitionism) so much as it's noticing patterns of behavior that lead to human happiness and/or flourishing, figuring out what those are, and coming up with a system to cultivate those patterns (virtue).
Admittedly, it is subjective! But there are noticeable constraints that apply to most people (like 99% of people are not going to live a good, happy life drunk all the time). What's compelling to me about virtue ethics is the lack of clear answers, because what's clear for one person may not be clear for another.
Edit: I think if we're going to say something is harmful or bad, we have to define those terms clearly. In many ways, it's one not define solely by intuition, but also facts and the outcomes of those facts. Disgusting things are not bad in themselves (like surgery is really disgusting!). You can be a consequentialist on macro ethical problems (without being a utilitarian) and a virtue ethics on the practical/normative problems. I think ethics is kind of like physics in that the macro and the micro can be incompatible.
Surgery is done for the purpose of fixing a bodily problem.
Suppose that someone cut up dead human and animal bodies just for fun - not for any medical of scientific purpose. Would you think that was un-virtuous?
Response coming soon...
Glad you’re interested in the topic and that you seem willing to engage in debate. :)
You say this: “Utilitarianism (hedonistic utilitarianism, to be precise) has easy answers in line with its one, big, principled intuition—that positive felt experience is good, and negative bad…”
Really? Easy answers? You don’t think “positive felt experience” suffers from vagueness as well? Are we talking first or third-order effects?Physical or emotional (or spiritual) wellness? Higher or lower pleasures, a la JS Mill?
Yeah, utiltiarians do often have trouble defining welfare. But when I say "hedonistic utilitarianism," I'm talking about valuing first-order effects, not differentiating between physical/emotional and higher/lower pleasures, and so on. Whatever feels best is best.
The broader defense for "some kind of utilitarianism" being better grounded than "some kind of virtue ethics" is that, presumably, your view of what welfare & pleasure are will be less culturally- and situationally-determined than your view of what "virtue" is. At least it restricts the question "what is good?" to a subset of possible answers (things that *feel* good) and then lets us debate specifically over what feels better and what feels worse. Whereas virtue ethics, generally speaking, only restricts "what is good?" to "what do we think is good?" which seems... less than productive.
Thanks for the response!
I think you lost me a bit in your second paragraph when you reintroduced “welfare and pleasure” as units of for measuring goodness and then, it seems, also tried to synonymously define the unit of measure as ‘what feels good.” Those metrics seem very different to me, and actually, the “welfare and pleasure” measure sounds much closer in spirit to the kind of flourishing that virtue ethics is oriented towards.
Furthermore, I’m curious if you really want to bite the “first-order effects” bullet here. I think this version of utilitarianism is certainly harder to defend from an ethical standpoint, given that it leads to all kinds of scenarios that hugely violate our universal sense of justice (killing babies, innocent “criminals,” euthanizing every living thing on the planet, etc.). You can try to argue against a universal sense of justice, but I think that’s a very tough argument to make.
If I’ve misunderstood you, please let me know.
Right, I do want to do a bit more detailed writing about this in the future... but I think, basically, that pleasure = "what feels good" is a legitimate claim, and hedonists believe that welfare = pleasure, so all that equivalence checks out in my mind.
Hm, I think I misunderstood what you meant by first-order effects—good hedonistic utilitarians probably should be longtermists and humanitarians who believe that moral progress is possible, that creating life is good, that killing innocents is generally bad (for social knock-on effects & lost opportunity to live a pleasurable life), and generally that human impact on the universe can be positive in the long run. (Though I can't say I'm opposed to taking humans out of the equation if the broader view of universal wellbeing demands it! [https://mistakesweremade.substack.com/p/benthams-bulldog-should-think-aligned])
What I guess I mean to say is that utilitarians are allowed to ignore deontic constraints—e.g., *never* kill innocent people. Not sure how I turned "first or third-order effects" into that question, though!
Gotcha! Sorry if my wording confused things. I think you are on much better ground to argue for ethical principles on the basis of "pleasure" if you have long-term wellbeing in mind, so I'm glad to hear your thoughts in that direction, and I'll be interested to see how you develop the ideas further.
I've never heard a totally successful defense of utilitarianism, but I'm always interested in new attempts. On that note, I'll be looking out for your writing on this in the future :)
A lot of what you're saying seems right. But the points you're criticizing seem unique to Laird's personal interpretation of virtue ethics, and aren't endorsed by virtue ethicists as a whole. Mainstream virtue ethicists don't care if most people think homosexuality is disgusting/dishonorable (I'll stick with "dishonorable" for now, since it's much clearer that this is a vice - it's not like maggots are steeped in vice just because they're disgusting). That's because they think most people aren't very virtuous. They also probably don't care where your intuitions lead you. In "Unresolvable and Tragic Dilemmas", for instance, Rosalind Hursthouse writes that some actions are intuitively approved of by many people but aren't virtuous because they lead you away from eudaimonia. One example might be pulling the lever in the trolley problem. You might not be *morally blameworthy* for pulling the lever, it might even be the *right decision* in some sense, but it probably won't make your life better, since you might be traumatized by doing so. I think she'd say something similar about the idea that homosexuality is intuitively dishonorable. If it leads to people to live happy, loving, wholesome lives - lives compatible with eudaimonia - then who cares about your intuitions?
In general, virtue ethicists seem to think it's *really hard* to be virtuous. You need practical wisdom (which is the faculty you have that tells you to ignore your instinct to be disgusted and let other people live their lives, among other things), and that's not easy to come by because of how broadly it's conceived of. Aristotle once said that nobody can be truly virtuous until they reach old age, because they'd lack the requisite life experience and moral crucible-ing before then. And many virtue ethicists defend the "unity of the virtues", which claims that you can't have one virtue unless you have them all. This is a high standard to meet! How many people do you know who are wise, honest, loving, honorable, brave, kind, etc. all at once? Probably not many. The upshot of this is, many virtue ethicists think being virtuous is a truly exalted status, and requires lots of life experience and moral analysis to figure out what's really right and what's really wrong. You can't figure out if homosexuality is a vice just by testing a bunch of random guys to see if they get stressed out when they see gay sex. Besides, there are good arguments that homophobia itself is a vice: it seems pretty contrary to the virtue of compassion and benevolence.
You're right, though, that virtue ethics suffers from being a bit vague about defining what the virtues are and who counts as a virtuous person. (I've written a bit above about criteria for being truly virtuous, but notice that I didn't give a rigorous or stance-independent test for it. That's because such a test doesn't exist.) That's a big weakness of virtue ethics, and it's one of the reasons I'm not one myself. But a lot of Laird's interpretations seem pretty unorthodox compared with mainstream virtue ethics - so him being wrong (which he is) shouldn't impugn the rest of virtue ethics.
Thanks for the clarification!
I think you're right that a more intellectually humble view of virtue is probably more defensible... but I imagine you'll still run into problems where two people's practical wisdoms point in vastly different directions. I like this old SlateStarCodex article, it's a good intuition pump that the divergence really is a thing that will happen: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/
Broadly speaking, the idea that Laird can even *have* such unorthodox interpretations while still making them look sort-of-virtuous is the issue here. Mainstream virtue ethicists are probably good people living good lives—but I suspect they've just landed on the lucky side of the "doing random crap" spectrum, not locked onto some obviously true normative system.
> I imagine you'll still run into problems where two people's practical wisdoms point in vastly different directions
You're totally right. The traditional virtue ethicist response is to say that both of them can be right, at the same time, such that both positions are permissible/virtuous. This is deeply unintuitive to me - it can't be that it's right to both pull the lever and not pull the lever in the trolley problem.
My response: https://simonlaird.substack.com/p/the-philosophical-use-of-moral-intuition
As something of a virtue ethicist myself, I don't think intuition is by itself probative, but that. The fact that you find something disgusting, doesn't mean it's un-virtuous. For all you know, the reason why you find it disgusting is you yourself lack virtue.
It's my understanding (and I'm not as read on the literature of virtue ethics as others in this thread) that virtue ethics isn't really reducible to one principle (like intuitionism) so much as it's noticing patterns of behavior that lead to human happiness and/or flourishing, figuring out what those are, and coming up with a system to cultivate those patterns (virtue).
Admittedly, it is subjective! But there are noticeable constraints that apply to most people (like 99% of people are not going to live a good, happy life drunk all the time). What's compelling to me about virtue ethics is the lack of clear answers, because what's clear for one person may not be clear for another.
Edit: I think if we're going to say something is harmful or bad, we have to define those terms clearly. In many ways, it's one not define solely by intuition, but also facts and the outcomes of those facts. Disgusting things are not bad in themselves (like surgery is really disgusting!). You can be a consequentialist on macro ethical problems (without being a utilitarian) and a virtue ethics on the practical/normative problems. I think ethics is kind of like physics in that the macro and the micro can be incompatible.
Surgery is done for the purpose of fixing a bodily problem.
Suppose that someone cut up dead human and animal bodies just for fun - not for any medical of scientific purpose. Would you think that was un-virtuous?