Thanks, Marvin. I think it's a lot more than "doing what you like". Take, for example, ethical naturalism, along the lines that Dafyd mentioned above.
The most influential account of human ends comes from Rosalind Hursthouse. Hursthouse says that human life is characterized by four ends: survival, reproduction, characteristic enjoyment and freedom from pain, and the good functioning of the group.
…
Humans alone among the animals act not from mere instinct, but from a rational capacity of deliberation and choice. So good, “flourishing” humans are those who pursue the four ends in accordance with reason.
Individual human beings are quite capable of recognising human flourishing and reasoning about it, while sharing with other human beings biology and ability to reason.
How can you "do what is virtuous" without a common understanding of virtue?
Quite straightforwardly. Through my own experience and reasoning, I can reach my own conclusions about virtue. Why is a common understanding required?
Because otherwise “do what is virtuous” becomes nothing more than “do what you like”.
And I think that reverts to classical "virtu" as Machiavelli understood it. A strong man does what he wants and - gaining social approval for it - it proves his manliness.
Ew.
And there are scholars who think that our old man Machiavelli might've been being a wee bit sarcastic when he wrote The Prince. It's hard to say.
The above discussion reminds me of the quote from Wall Street the movie where Gordon Gekko is quoted as saying: "Greed, for the lack of a better word, is good." The line “Greed…is good” presents a moral dilemma by claiming a traditional vice can produce social benefit. Greed is usually condemned for harming community, exploiting others, and elevating wealth above human dignity. Yet Gordon Gekko argues it fuels innovation, efficiency, and economic growth. The tension lies between individual self‑interest and collective well‑being: can society flourish when personal gain is pursued without restraint? The dilemma also pits economic utilitarianism against ethical character—should “good” be measured by outcomes or by virtue? Ultimately, the quote exposes how a partial truth about ambition becomes destructive when elevated into an absolute principle.
You can ditch the morality altogether: do what is virtuous.
A virtuous agent according to Aristotle does not think "what is the virtuous thing to do?". The formula is that virtuous action is what a virtuous person would do, in the way that they'd do it, for the reasons they'd do it. The courageous hoplite doesn't think, what is the courageous thing to do; they think, how do I support my comrades in the battle line, avoid letting them down, and overcome the enemy.
In point of view of actual decision making, virtue ethics doesn't differ much from deontology. A virtuous person doesn't think about what a virtuous person would do - they act according to some moral principle.
I'm still getting used to the idea of these being called *moral* principles, although I can see why.
Virtue ethicists vary on how much importance they give to the need for a shared framework. On the one hand you have someone like Alisdair MacIntyre, who thinks shared frameworks are vital, that modernity doesn't have them, and has given a lot of thought to the questions of how one can say one has rational knowledge where there are competing frameworks. On the other hand, someone like Rosalind Hursthouse thinks we have enough grounding in biology to reach shared conclusions about the good life.
It's darkly hilarious that anyone thinks one can find human patterns of human flourishing and therefore virtue in nature.
Well, it makes sense to me.
NB I see Rosalind Hursthouse wrote the current Stanford entry on virtue ethics.
On your first point it is fairly obvious why one needs a shared understanding of morality if you stop to think about it.
Consider acts of inhumanity. We both might agree that these are utterly hideous, but obviously that's not a shared belief of everyone. So then you have to explain why your moral is better than an infamous mass murderer. And it can't just amount to "it feels right to me that I should be able to come to my own conclusions on virtue" because he could say the same thing.
Of course many people down the centuries have committed heinous acts and thought they were totally justified in doing so.
One your second point, there are many many different modes of life in nature including everything you can possibly imagine and a whole lot you can't. Many species, for example, kill competitors even when they are closely related or even offspring in a way that humans would rightly consider murder if humans did it. There's absolutely no consistency or morality or anything approaching a moral lesson.
Just everything, altogether, all at once. If you see something admirable, put down your coffee because that will now be followed by ten other behaviours that look utterly revolting.
The above discussion reminds me of the quote from Wall Street the movie where Gordon Gekko is quoted as saying: "Greed, for the lack of a better word, is good." The line “Greed…is good” presents a moral dilemma by claiming a traditional vice can produce social benefit. Greed is usually condemned for harming community, exploiting others, and elevating wealth above human dignity. Yet Gordon Gekko argues it fuels innovation, efficiency, and economic growth. The tension lies between individual self‑interest and collective well‑being: can society flourish when personal gain is pursued without restraint? The dilemma also pits economic utilitarianism against ethical character—should “good” be measured by outcomes or by virtue? Ultimately, the quote exposes how a partial truth about ambition becomes destructive when elevated into an absolute principle.
Yes. A large part of the economy is built on this stuff. What does that say about society?
And I think that reverts to classical "virtu" as Machiavelli understood it. A strong man does what he wants and - gaining social approval for it - it proves his manliness.
Bullfrog, this stuff about virtù seems a bit tenuous, as the word virtù is Italian (unsurprisingly).
Aristotle used the Greek word "aretê", and asked "whether we ought to regard the virtue of a good man and that of a sound citizen as the same virtue".
Machiavelli's set of "virtues" is somewhat different from Aristotle's, which also suggests they're not really talking about the same thing.
Machiavelli had a specific usage of the word "virtù " that was grounded in the notion of power.
And of course he and Aristotle are not exactly the same, but they're playing in the same field.
I'm offering different models of honor and power as they relate to society. And to some extent, that's one way to approach morality and ethics, no? What is the appropriate use of power in society?
Consider acts of inhumanity. We both might agree that these are utterly hideous, but obviously that's not a shared belief of everyone. So then you have to explain why your moral is better than an infamous mass murderer. And it can't just amount to "it feels right to me that I should be able to come to my own conclusions on virtue" because he could say the same thing.
It's a bit more complex than this, because once one has abandoned the idea that morality is shared, one can ask why one has to pay any attention to what a mass murderer says.
Personally, I think the ultimate problem with all forms of moral relativism, quasi-realism, emotivism, and so on is that ultimately they devolve into might makes right, which is what we have morality to avoid. But that's an ultimately that it takes time to get to.
One your second point, there are many many different modes of life in nature including everything you can possibly imagine and a whole lot you can't. Many species, for example, kill competitors even when they are closely related or even offspring in a way that humans would rightly consider murder if humans did it. There's absolutely no consistency or morality or anything approaching a moral lesson.
I doubt any virtue ethicist thinks that morality for humans is the same as morality for tigers. Ethics for humans needs to be grounded in human nature, not tiger nature or ichneumon wasp nature.
I incline towards thinking that human nature does underdetermine ethics, or at least interpretations of human nature are so overloaded by ideological presuppositions as to make direct appeal unpersuasive. However, if ethics isn't about human nature I don't think there's any reason to care about it.
Talking about human nature doesn't help because there's no agreement about that either. According to Hobbes in it's natural state human life is "nasty, brutish and short".
Machiavelli had a specific usage of the word "virtù " that was grounded in the notion of power.
And of course he and Aristotle are not exactly the same, but they're playing in the same field.
I'm offering different models of honor and power as they relate to society. And to some extent, that's one way to approach morality and ethics, no? What is the appropriate use of power in society?
Well … as I understand it, for Aristotle, there is a significant difference between having power and desiring power, in relation to (caring about) acting ethically.
Whereas, for Machiavelli, virtù is most typically exhibited by an individual who (amongst other things) "conspires to seize power, and having seized it secures it".
So I think it would be more appropriate to a consideration of classical virtue ethics than modern virtue ethics, which doesn't appear to be particularly concerned with Machiavelli's virtù.
I don't think you'll ever find a real political actor who comes into power without first desiring it. That's like the perpetual motion machine of political science. So either way, you're going to have to deal with Machiavelli even if you don't like him very much.
And I recall someone up-thread mentioning that Aristotle was another one of those hypocrites who talked a good talk while endorsing slavery.
There is more to Machiavelli than The Prince, though I'll admit I haven't read his other works. I recall being taught that they're less cynical and more republican.
I don't think you'll ever find a real political actor who comes into power without first desiring it. That's like the perpetual motion machine of political science. So either way, you're going to have to deal with Machiavelli even if you don't like him very much.
Hah!
* I do quite like Machiavelli, but he's not very relevant to modern virtue ethics.
* I don't have to deal with Machiavelli, but being told that I do made me laugh.
* As far as I can tell, you're the only person on this thread who wants to talk about power.
And I recall someone up-thread mentioning that Aristotle was another one of those hypocrites who talked a good talk while endorsing slavery.
And? I mean, what's your point here? As already alluded to, was Aristotle a hypocrite by the standards of his own time, or by the standards of our time?
Putting it another way, it's OK to talk about what you want to talk about, the tricky bit is to get other people to want talk about it. (I'm also laughing at myself for saying this.)
Unless all this is a demonstration of political ethics, in which case I think your machiavellianism could use some work.
I would like to talk about the fine line between good and evil when it comes to Greed.
As a former mutual funds rep, I understood my fiduciary purpose was to help my clients get as much return on their investment as possible. But the companies I represented did not invest in tobacco or alcohol or firearms and weapons manufactures. Still those companies have the highest returns. On the other hand, I personally favored funds that were more socially responsible, but the overall yields were one or two points lower than the previously mentioned industries.
Going to the Gordon Gekko quote: Greed, for the lack of a better term, is good. Take recent mergers and acquisitions in fields like health care. As health systems are taken over by larger systems, the goal is to increase more efficiencies and reduce costs-some would say these things are good. But on the other hand, if it allows for more lay-offs and less consumer choice which can be bad in the long run.
Question: how can we balance greed for the good, and keep away from greed causing negative outcomes.
(This is actually from a discussion in business ethics.)
The Tao Te Ching suggests that depending on rules to guide your actions is a sign you’ve lost the Way:
(From Chapter 38, my rendition)
The truly compassionate person
Acts kindly without thinking about it, or having a goal in mind.
The person who aims to be righteous
Has ulterior motives for kindness and tries to force others to submit to it.
If we lose the Way, we can still have integrity.
If we lose integrity, we can still have compassion.
If we lose compassion, we are left with morality.
If we lose morality, we have only obedience to convention.
Obedience is the empty husk of good faith and honesty.
Attachment to rules is the dried-up flower of the Way,
If you’re certain you know the answer, you’ll never learn anything.
That’s how you lose the Way.
So the master looks deeper, to the center, not the surface.
Picking the fruit, not the flower;
Leaving the one, holding to the other.
Consider acts of inhumanity. We both might agree that these are utterly hideous, but obviously that's not a shared belief of everyone. So then you have to explain why your moral is better than an infamous mass murderer. And it can't just amount to "it feels right to me that I should be able to come to my own conclusions on virtue" because he could say the same thing.
It's a bit more complex than this, because once one has abandoned the idea that morality is shared, one can ask why one has to pay any attention to what a mass murderer says.
Personally, I think the ultimate problem with all forms of moral relativism, quasi-realism, emotivism, and so on is that ultimately they devolve into might makes right, which is what we have morality to avoid. But that's an ultimately that it takes time to get to.
One your second point, there are many many different modes of life in nature including everything you can possibly imagine and a whole lot you can't. Many species, for example, kill competitors even when they are closely related or even offspring in a way that humans would rightly consider murder if humans did it. There's absolutely no consistency or morality or anything approaching a moral lesson.
I doubt any virtue ethicist thinks that morality for humans is the same as morality for tigers. Ethics for humans needs to be grounded in human nature, not tiger nature or ichneumon wasp nature.
I incline towards thinking that human nature does underdetermine ethics, or at least interpretations of human nature are so overloaded by ideological presuppositions as to make direct appeal unpersuasive. However, if ethics isn't about human nature I don't think there's any reason to care about it.
You are right it is more complicated. But as far as I'm concerned it fits the parameters of a framework better than virtue ethics (or any kind of self-selected morals/ethics). If you put a mass murderer on the stand it seems to me that you need a whole community to agree that this action is wrong. Ideally I think you want the accused themselves to agree that the action was wrong.
So you have the defence of "I was only carrying out orders" which carries with it a distancing from the mass murder and an implicit acceptance that this was wrong. It's a quite other thing for the accused to stand up and say something like "I did it, I'm not embarrassed by it because it was the right thing to do". This does occasionally happen of course.
If your community just consists of a group of people deciding for themselves what feels right or wrong, that would appear to preclude this kind of thing.
The law is not an exact parallel but my moral framework explanation is like someone living in one country under one set of rules and bureaucracy moving to another country in a different language and culture and finding the system is completely different. Being an upstanding citizen under one law is incomprehensible to the other.
On your other point, I would be fascinated to hear which aspects of morality and ethics can be reasoned from human biology in particular and where that comes from. To me it sounds like a polemic based only on selective data. Human history is not, in general, ethical.
I would like to talk about the fine line between good and evil when it comes to Greed.
As a former mutual funds rep, I understood my fiduciary purpose was to help my clients get as much return on their investment as possible. But the companies I represented did not invest in tobacco or alcohol or firearms and weapons manufactures. Still those companies have the highest returns. On the other hand, I personally favored funds that were more socially responsible, but the overall yields were one or two points lower than the previously mentioned industries.
Going to the Gordon Gekko quote: Greed, for the lack of a better term, is good. Take recent mergers and acquisitions in fields like health care. As health systems are taken over by larger systems, the goal is to increase more efficiencies and reduce costs-some would say these things are good. But on the other hand, if it allows for more lay-offs and less consumer choice which can be bad in the long run.
Question: how can we balance greed for the good, and keep away from greed causing negative outcomes.
(This is actually from a discussion in business ethics.)
Hannah Arendt in the book I'm reading portrays this as a position which changed with Locke. Before the mid 1600s Arendt says that property and wealth was a static thing you gained by conquest or were bequeathed, afterwards there developed this idea that wealth begat wealth and property begat property. She says Adam Smith and Marx extended this thought in different ways, but it was this thought that wealth itself had a natural-like "fertility" to regenerate itself. So a head of wheat in one year might have sufficient nutrition not only for immediate survival but to produce grain, wealth could be "put to work" to produce more wealth. Marx looked at labour (which would appear to be more like 'work' in Arendt's definition) and saw there was a sense to that labourers were being exploited in that there was a difference between what they were paid and what their labour was worth to an employer.
I know this isn't directly what you are introducing but in our day we have all kinds of complicated financial instruments and futures and bets in business investments. Where once you owned a business, today the question is whether the value of a fraction of theoretical ownership goes up or down.
To me this seems a very abstract and weak concept to build an economy upon.
…
Personally, I think the ultimate problem with all forms of moral relativism, quasi-realism, emotivism, and so on is that ultimately they devolve into might makes right, which is what we have morality to avoid. But that's an ultimately that it takes time to get to.
I think that's fair enough, but my observation is that having morality doesn't have a good track record on avoiding might makes right.
I think I'm exploring two ideas. To illustrate:
Modern technology enables anyone with an internet-connected screen of their own (which is a lot of people) to look at what we want, when we want. We've pretty much reached the point where all we have to do is articulate what we want to look at.
So what do I seek out, and what do I avoid? Christianity has a pretty good answer to this question, but most people aren't Christians, and people in secularised Christian societies demonstrate a decreasing obligation to morality. I think this forms part of the background to the (re)emergence of modern virtue ethics (notably with Elisabeth Anscombe, in 1958).
I don't know if it helps to think about virtue ethics from a more explicitly Christian perspective by considering the qualities of love, joy peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (for such there is no law).
The other idea is about the role or responsibility of self. Do we aim for a method or system or approach that works for everybody, in direct collaboration (in the widest sense) with other people; or more individually and indirectly, through my own observation, experience and reasoning about human flourishing? (And, considering the nature I have in common with other human beings, might these two approaches end up converging?)
Individual human beings are quite capable of recognising human flourishing and reasoning about it, while sharing with other human beings biology and ability to reason.
Yes. The problem is that some people have very different ideas about what “human flourishing” means. A eugenicist could say that their goal of a stronger and better species fits the bill. A religious fundamentalist could say that humans cannot truly flourish unless they follow every structure of their religion. Without a common understanding of virtue/morality/ethics what right do you have to even say they are wrong, never mind try to stop them?
Yes. The problem is that some people have very different ideas about what “human flourishing” means. A eugenicist could say that their goal of a stronger and better species fits the bill. A religious fundamentalist could say that humans cannot truly flourish unless they follow every structure of their religion. Without a common understanding of virtue/morality/ethics what right do you have to even say they are wrong, never mind try to stop them?
The eugenicists and religious fundamentalists that come to mind live (or lived) in countries and societies emphasising adherence to rules-based moralities. If anything, it seems more likely that it's a prevailing common understanding of morality that enables or allows them to say what they do is good. It's a person or people rejecting that understanding of morality that would be more likely to question their character, or say that what they do is wrong.
@pease : I've spent a lot of time watching the abject failures of people who built great systems without factoring the machinations of powerful people to manipulate them.
I think people ignore questions of "personal power," such as I'm bringing up, at their own risk. That's the entire thesis of "The Prince." Our old man Nick is warning the lovers of virtue that if they ignore classical virtu, they're going to screw up because the cynics will game their pretty system. People are like that. We are all human, even brilliant ones like Aristotle.
If you're looking to get personal, I think it hits me because that was one of the fundamental lessons I picked up in my undergraduate education (thank you, professor Paul Dawson, wherever you are.) Looking at current events, I think it was a hard earned lesson that too many virtue-thinkers ignore. You have to make room for the will of individual actors inside of your virtue systems. You have to make room for Hobbesian cynicism in your models or else they will crack and fall apart. Just look at current events in the USA. We built too much assuming people would be virtuous and...welp...
Speaking of slavery, chattel or otherwise, I think virtue-thinkers like Aristotle often have massive blind spots when they talk about virtue. Aristotle himself, akin to a certain unfortunate American of more recent history, may have been rationalizing away the problems of his society with systemic thinking. That's why I was bringing up his hypocrisy on the topic. It's interesting to me when people use systemic models to make beautiful ideas and then fudge on the implementation. That's the kind of stuff that draws my interest like steel draws a compass needle, using ethics to highlight a deep fault in morality.
I think it's important to keep cynics like Machiavelli and Nietzsche around because they remind me of the failures of virtue-based systemic thinking, as @Marvin the Martian has done rather elegantly. You have to remember that people are agents, and agents are a lot more than units in a grand moral scheme. This is a point for ethics, perhaps.
@Timothy the Obscure : Just wanted to say that I love the Tao Te Ching. But as a human being I find it quietly terrifying because it really is a profoundly amoral system - and I think it kind of is one on some level. I'm not sure the Tao cares how many people get caught in the flood when the river abruptly changes course.
I guess the moral rule is not to build your house in a floodplain, so to speak.
You are right it is more complicated. But as far as I'm concerned it fits the parameters of a framework better than virtue ethics (or any kind of self-selected morals/ethics). If you put a mass murderer on the stand it seems to me that you need a whole community to agree that this action is wrong. Ideally I think you want the accused themselves to agree that the action was wrong.
I'm not sure what is gained by putting someone who has killed people on the stand. An ideal response might be that person seeing the flaw in their own character and accepting that they needed help to address it. Or that a person (or people) with concern for them might identify the flaw and determine what could be done to address it.
The law is not an exact parallel but my moral framework explanation is like someone living in one country under one set of rules and bureaucracy moving to another country in a different language and culture and finding the system is completely different. Being an upstanding citizen under one law is incomprehensible to the other.
Yet many people relocate from one country to another, and get the hang of new systems, and even end up becoming upstanding citizens.
Thanks. Part of what I'm getting at is that, in our societies, "murder" is the breaking of both a legal rule and a moral rule, which are related, but not the same thing. (Is everything that is currently defined as "murder" legally also considered to be "murder" morally?)
The context of this thread is primarily moral and ethical considerations, whereas putting someone on trial is a legal response.
Considering our ethical response to a "murderer", the reason I used the phrase "someone who has killed people" is that defining a person as a "murderer" in the first place is conceiving of a person who has killed people from the perspective of a particular moral framework, as someone who has broken a moral rule. In this sense, it is still trying to evaluate virtue ethics within the framework of a rule-based morality.
Considering our ethical response to a "murderer", the reason I used the phrase "someone who has killed people" is that defining a person as a "murderer" in the first place is conceiving of a person who has killed people from the perspective of a particular moral framework, as someone who has broken a moral rule. In this sense, it is still trying to evaluate virtue ethics within the framework of a rule-based morality.
Aristotle, who is a virtue ethicist if anyone is, cites murder as one of the things that no virtuous agent would ever do.
As I say, the contrast between virtue ethics and rule-based morality is overblown. The real difference is how they each think of rules. Aristotle's simile is of a mason's ruler, that is flexible in order to measure curved stonework. It's still a rule, but you can't just put it next to the situation without work. I think it's relevant that Anscombe, whose essay Modern Moral Philosophy, is usually cited as the inspiration for modern virtue ethics, was a student of Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein worries a lot about how rules work; I think he points towards the idea that rules have to be grounded in practice and experience.
In brief there was a terrible accident on an Austrian mountain that left one climber dead. The Austrian court decided that the survivor was guilty of incompetence because they were the better and more experienced mountaineer.
It struck me that there is no consistency with regard to human nature on this point.
Regardless of how one got into a situation, a moral position could be so save yourself. Or a moral position could be to get help or to stay and risk death.
I'm not arguing with the court, they have obviously seen all the evidence and decided that they shouldn't have been on the mountain in the first place.
However there does not, in my mind, seem to be a consistent answer to this dilemma.
I heard about a terrible and rapid car fire where the driver scrambled out of a window but the fire was so fast that the passengers died. Yes, his actions were cause of (or directly linked to) the accident happening. But it is hard to argue that they should be punished specifically for not saving the passenger.
If nothing else I think this shows that different people have different instincts as to what the moral/ethical thing should be in a given situation.
You are right it is more complicated. But as far as I'm concerned it fits the parameters of a framework better than virtue ethics (or any kind of self-selected morals/ethics). If you put a mass murderer on the stand it seems to me that you need a whole community to agree that this action is wrong. Ideally I think you want the accused themselves to agree that the action was wrong.
I can't tell what the pronouns are referring to in your first couple of sentences. Nor what you mean by 'the parameters of a framework'?
On your other point, I would be fascinated to hear which aspects of morality and ethics can be reasoned from human biology in particular and where that comes from. To me it sounds like a polemic based only on selective data. Human history is not, in general, ethical.
I would certainly agree that attempts to ground ethics in human biology are selective. The problem is to find a justifiable basis for the selection.
I can think of a couple of traits to select though. The first is that humans have no hair and babies cannot grip. Chimpanzee infants cling to their mothers, leaving the mothers' hands free. If the mother puts the infant down, any passing male will kill the infant, which makes evolutionary sense - either the infant has no mother to look after them, or killing the infant leaves the mother free to breed again. Human mothers have to put their baby down in order to do anything, which they can only do if the evolutionary reasons favouring infanticide have been outweighed by reasons favouring cooperation in child rearing.
A second striking trait is that the sclera in human eyes are white. You can't see the whites of the eyes of other great apes, because the "whites" of their eyes are coloured. I was told you do occasionally get a mutation where chimpanzees do get whites, but it hasn't ever started to spread through the population.
There are good evolutionary reasons to have irises and pupils that don't stand out from the sclera. It makes it harder for prey to spot. For animals that spend a lot of time around conspecifics it makes it easier to conceal what the animals is up to: a chimpanzee who has spotted an interesting piece of food doesn't want another chimpanzee to notice what they're looking at and get there first. A chimpanzee that is planning to mate with or challenge another chimpanzee doesn't want their rivals to get advance warning.
On the other hand, the only clear advantage of having irises that stand out against the white is if it's somehow an advantage to you to make it easier for your conspecifics to see what you're looking at. In other words, the mutation only spread through proto-humans because at some point in our evolutionary history the advantages of communicating what we're looking at outweighed the advantages of concealing what we're looking at.
But you'd be right to point out that someone wanting to argue the other way could select other traits.
I would say all that reasoning from biology is nonsense. An I was saying "from a framework" because I was trying to avoid using "moral" or "ethics" as we disagree which is which.
I could say your objections are nonsense, but it would be cheap, facile, and wouldn't make anyone any the wiser.
Well that's fair except I'm speaking as a biologist who is interested in this stuff.
We can all pick features of the human body and claim that those show a moral/ethical basis for human nature. First there are millions of these features and many are contradictory to the message. Second it seems like an entirely bogus way to determine morals anyway.
"Humans have five fingers therefore when we point at faults in another person we are also pointing back at ourselves.."
Would you be any happier if I'd said psychology rather than biology? I assume psychology is rooted in biology even if the linkage is far more subject to interpretation than a lot of pop scientific treatments would have it?
Aristotle, who is a virtue ethicist if anyone is, cites murder as one of the things that no virtuous agent would ever do.
As I say, the contrast between virtue ethics and rule-based morality is overblown. The real difference is how they each think of rules. Aristotle's simile is of a mason's ruler, that is flexible in order to measure curved stonework. It's still a rule, but you can't just put it next to the situation without work. I think it's relevant that Anscombe, whose essay Modern Moral Philosophy, is usually cited as the inspiration for modern virtue ethics, was a student of Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein worries a lot about how rules work; I think he points towards the idea that rules have to be grounded in practice and experience.
Thanks, Dafyd. Aristotle may be the classical virtue ethicist, but who knows what he'd make of modern (or neo-Aristotelian) virtue ethics, which he obviously inspired, but which appears to be a somewhat different kettle of fish.
Reading around, I note that Aristotle considered that actions like murder 'have names that imply badness’ and are categorically prohibited, and are only ethical when supported by reason. Also that he holds that ethics cannot be reduced to a system of rules, but at the same time insists that some rules are inviolable. Which does look like he's comfortable carving out exceptions, even if he has good reasons for doing so (which turn out to be better founded than just their names).
I note in passing that ‘murder’ tends to be used of any killing of which the speaker disapproves.
In (English) law, however, murder only happens when one person kills another with the intention to unlawfully cause either death or serious injury. (The only complete defences to murder are insanity or self defence. Other ‘partial defences’ may reduce the charge to manslaughter.)
Several kinds of killing may be generally referred to as ‘murder’ when, in fact, they are manslaughter at most.
The slide from murder to manslaughter is like a children's slide lined with sharp objects.
Content warning for a story that includes death and drunk driving...
I read a story in the news years ago about a drunk driver who ran over a cyclist - doing double the speed limit - and years later they were still bickering in the courts because his friends were like "he's a really nice guy and he didn't mean to!" IIRC, he was also otherwise a citizen without a criminal record, suburban middle class, not a monstrous human being by most accounts.
And I'm personally disgusted, arguably terrified as someone who rides a bicycle in traffic. And I'm furious on behalf of many of people I know who carry trauma history with car accidents - including at least a couple drunk-driver-death stories - but there's a logical truth there.
I'm sure he didn't mean to. The degree to which one thinks his sober intentions are salient to the situation is a painful, and very interesting question.
Even if I might want to toss the full weight of the book at this fellow for multiple personal reasons, I must accept that not all anti-social killing is the same, I think. That's why justice is hard.
I've spent a lot of time watching the abject failures of people who built great systems without factoring the machinations of powerful people to manipulate them.
I think people ignore questions of "personal power," such as I'm bringing up, at their own risk.
Thanks, Bullfrog. I think it's not so much a question of ignoring it, but that people on this thread aren't looking at the topic from that particular perspective.
That's why I was bringing up his hypocrisy on the topic. It's interesting to me when people use systemic models to make beautiful ideas and then fudge on the implementation. That's the kind of stuff that draws my interest like steel draws a compass needle, using ethics to highlight a deep fault in morality.
I'm afraid it looks to me more that you're referencing your own sense of morality to criticise someone else's sense of morality. (Incidentally, I note that particular comparison doesn't involve any agency.)
I think it's important to keep cynics like Machiavelli and Nietzsche around because they remind me of the failures of virtue-based systemic thinking, as Marvin the Martian has done rather elegantly.
As I've already noted, I think what Marvin did was draw attention to the failures of rules-based systems (in restricting the actions of eugenicists and religious fundamentalists). At a push, this overlaps with Machiavelli, in his apparent promotion of immorality (or amorality) in pursuit of political goals, and even Nietzsche, in his rejection of prevailing notions of morality.
You have to remember that people are agents, and agents are a lot more than units in a grand moral scheme. This is a point for ethics, perhaps.
Is that like 10 points for Gryffindor? I'm not sure why you're reminding me that people are agents.
To the first: I am often in my own hermeneutic and quite comfortable with it. If other people don't take it the same way I do, that's their problem. I'm pretty content to be ignored if I'm deemed irrelevant. But I don't really think it's your job to tell me how to post in this context. I can take care of myself.
To the second: If we're talking about morality, then we are going to be criticizing each other's sense of morality at some point. I do have a very particular take on morality, for sure, and I'm a rather ruthless deconstructionist and - while I am kind - I do subscribe to a kind of realpolitik that makes some folks uncomfortable. Feel free not to engage me if you're one of them. That's ok.
To the third: I don't care for points, I just say what I think. And truth be told, I don't have the time to self-psychoanalyze that far ever time i post, which is one reason some of my posts get a little hard for people to understand. I'm not ashamed of that.
OK...now that I'm doing some analyzing...my mind does follow patterns from other threads and sometimes my thoughts lead to a kind of cross-pollination. I'm not trying to beef with you, if that's what you're inferring by the "point scoring" remark. These are just big questions in politics and I'm a political theory geek. You're talking about things that I'm a big geek about. It's nothing personal.
If you want to make it personal, that hell thread is still open, but I'm not inclined at the moment.
Bullfrog, if you recall, you were the one who told me I was going to have to deal with Machiavelli. I was pointing out why people don't seem to be engaging with these points. I don't think it's irrelevant to the wider issues, but it just doesn't seem very pertinent to this thread. (And neither does it make me uncomfortable.)
I'm not inferring anything about the point scoring remark - I was just wondering what you meant by something being a point for ethics. Admittedly somewhat flippantly.
To the third: I don't care for points, I just say what I think. And truth be told, I don't have the time to self-psychoanalyze that far ever time i post, which is one reason some of my posts get a little hard for people to understand. I'm not ashamed of that.
Ah. I really hadn't thought about it in terms of being ashamed. If you want to see some truly incomprehensible posting, I suggest going back to some of my earlier collaborations with Martin54. Sorry.
Bullfrog, if you recall, you were the one who told me I was going to have to deal with Machiavelli. I was pointing out why people don't seem to be engaging with these points. I don't think it's irrelevant to the wider issues, but it just doesn't seem very pertinent to this thread. (And neither does it make me uncomfortable.)
I'm not inferring anything about the point scoring remark - I was just wondering what you meant by something being a point for ethics. Admittedly somewhat flippantly.
To the third: I don't care for points, I just say what I think. And truth be told, I don't have the time to self-psychoanalyze that far ever time i post, which is one reason some of my posts get a little hard for people to understand. I'm not ashamed of that.
Ah. I really hadn't thought about it in terms of being ashamed. If you want to see some truly incomprehensible posting, I suggest going back to some of my earlier collaborations with Martin54. Sorry.
OK...I think we were miscommunicating a bit and....ok. I'll see if I can untangle this and let it go.
I think I do imagine a contest, or at least a tension between morality and ethics as systems for working out big questions of "how to live," and I may have been jesting about that by saying something was proving ethics the superior way to go. I do lean more toward ethics as a way of refining and critiquing morality. As you may have guessed, I like to deconstruct systems. It's my tendency to be skeptical of models. I've seen too many fail in my own life. To me, a morality is a model.
I think I've had some posters complaining that my communication style is opaque or "hard to understand" as if this is some kind of fault of mine and...sometimes it's just where I am. I generally get where I'm coming from. The degree to which I'm concerned with explaining every minute detail of my thinking varies. Sometimes I'm too tired to spend that much effort editing my thoughts.
Thanks for clarifying. Communication is legitimately hard if you take it seriously. I appreciate the effort.
I think I do imagine a contest, or at least a tension between morality and ethics as systems for working out big questions of "how to live," and I may have been jesting about that by saying something was proving ethics the superior way to go.
There's a contest or tension between different moral/ethical systems or injunctions - but I can't see a contest between ethics and morality as such. Morality I think I've said is a subset of ethics.
There are some ethical systems that reduce explicit ethics almost entirely to morality (in the sense of a systems of injunctions as to right and wrong) - both deontological systems and utilitarianism do that.
I suppose one could say that there's a tension between those systems and those with a broader explicit ethics. But I think using "morality" to designated just those systems is polemical and a bar to understanding.
Thanks, Bullfrog. Appreciated. Communication is indeed an elusive thing to pursue. And I don't doubt that you get where you're coming from.
I'm intrigued by the idea that you see a tension between ethics and morality. My understanding of those terms doesn't allow for this - the two terms don't share the same conceptual space. For me, ethics is about reasoning about a whole load of stuff, including morality. Although, having said that, ethics can do some of the "work" that morality does, depending on one's approach - for some people it can be mostly about morality, for some people it can be mostly about ethics.
Or maybe there's something else that "fills the space" that can be occupied by morality. Maybe the hardest bit to categorise is the "feeling of rightness" or "feeling of wrongness", or how we experience "rightness" and "wrongness", or even *if* we do.
To my sense of it, morality is about rules and social conventions, while ethics is about the cause-and-effect of actions.
Morality says "Our society has a rule that you shouldn't steal, so you shouldn't do that."
Ethics says "If you steal, then you encourage behavior that is detrimental to the common good. It encourage stealing among other people, which is corrosive to society, so you shouldn't do that."
In a healthy society, morality and ethics are in cooperation, I think.
Here, what you call morality looks to me like deontology, and what you call ethics looks to me like consequentialism / utilitarianism. It is entirely possible for there to be tension between these, and to see one as providing much of overall system, and the other providing some of the detail.
Still thinking about communication, I'm not trying to say these are any better or worse than my categorisations, just how I understand your categories from the perspective of mine.
As I've already noted, I think what Marvin did was draw attention to the failures of rules-based systems (in restricting the actions of eugenicists and religious fundamentalists).
My point was that if you base your ethical or moral systems purely on “virtue” then you first have to define what “virtue” means. Or, as a previous poster put it, you have to have a shared understanding of “virtue”. How else (other than through “might makes right”) can you decide (for example) whether it is more virtuous to protect and nurture all individuals or to allow the weak and unfit to perish in order that the species as a whole will be stronger and better? Proponents of both sides would say their way is the greater virtue.
As I've already noted, I think what Marvin did was draw attention to the failures of rules-based systems (in restricting the actions of eugenicists and religious fundamentalists).
My point was that if you base your ethical or moral systems purely on “virtue” then you first have to define what “virtue” means. Or, as a previous poster put it, you have to have a shared understanding of “virtue”. How else (other than through “might makes right”) can you decide (for example) whether it is more virtuous to protect and nurture all individuals or to allow the weak and unfit to perish in order that the species as a whole will be stronger and better? Proponents of both sides would say their way is the greater virtue.
There is a difference though between a "shared understanding" of virtue and an objective reality of virtue. If virtue is only a "shared understanding" then indeed that is a sort of "might makes right" except that the "might" and the "right" derive from the majority opinion. The individual holding on to virtue in the midst of a corrupt society would be per se deluded. Whereas if virtue is an objective reality the individual is correct to hold on, and could seek and hope to persuade others in society of the error of their ways.
As I've already noted, I think what Marvin did was draw attention to the failures of rules-based systems (in restricting the actions of eugenicists and religious fundamentalists).
My point was that if you base your ethical or moral systems purely on “virtue” then you first have to define what “virtue” means. Or, as a previous poster put it, you have to have a shared understanding of “virtue”. How else (other than through “might makes right”) can you decide (for example) whether it is more virtuous to protect and nurture all individuals or to allow the weak and unfit to perish in order that the species as a whole will be stronger and better? Proponents of both sides would say their way is the greater virtue.
There is a difference though between a "shared understanding" of virtue and an objective reality of virtue. If virtue is only a "shared understanding" then indeed that is a sort of "might makes right" except that the "might" and the "right" derive from the majority opinion. The individual holding on to virtue in the midst of a corrupt society would be per se deluded. Whereas if virtue is an objective reality the individual is correct to hold on, and could seek and hope to persuade others in society of the error of their ways.
My point was that if you base your ethical or moral systems purely on “virtue” then you first have to define what “virtue” means. Or, as a previous poster put it, you have to have a shared understanding of “virtue”. How else (other than through “might makes right”) can you decide (for example) whether it is more virtuous to protect and nurture all individuals or to allow the weak and unfit to perish in order that the species as a whole will be stronger and better? Proponents of both sides would say their way is the greater virtue.
Ah - I see what you're getting at. The simplest answer is yes, as for any universal normative ethical theory - you agree what the rules are; or what the desired outcomes are; or what the virtues are, depending on the category of ethical theory. In this case, you might start off with a shared understanding of the virtues, or a shared understanding of how you arrive at the virtues (which could include their emergence from practice).
What you describe looks to me more like a desired outcome than a virtue. There are versions of modern virtue ethics which head in this direction, but I don't know if they take it this far. However, what you describe does relate to the concerns of some modern theories, which look at the life of rational social animals (ie us) to provide the context for understanding virtuous action.
As I've already noted, I think what Marvin did was draw attention to the failures of rules-based systems (in restricting the actions of eugenicists and religious fundamentalists).
My point was that if you base your ethical or moral systems purely on “virtue” then you first have to define what “virtue” means. Or, as a previous poster put it, you have to have a shared understanding of “virtue”. How else (other than through “might makes right”) can you decide (for example) whether it is more virtuous to protect and nurture all individuals or to allow the weak and unfit to perish in order that the species as a whole will be stronger and better? Proponents of both sides would say their way is the greater virtue.
There is a difference though between a "shared understanding" of virtue and an objective reality of virtue. If virtue is only a "shared understanding" then indeed that is a sort of "might makes right" except that the "might" and the "right" derive from the majority opinion. The individual holding on to virtue in the midst of a corrupt society would be per se deluded. Whereas if virtue is an objective reality the individual is correct to hold on, and could seek and hope to persuade others in society of the error of their ways.
You mean you are a Platonist?
Only in the sense that Plato believed in objective virtue and I do too. I don't think that necessarily implies buying into the whole of Plato's metaphysics.
What you describe looks to me more like a desired outcome than a virtue.
Isn’t everything? Things are virtuous because they have a good outcome (however defined), not in and of themselves.
Strongly disagree!
So do you think things are/can be virtuous regardless of whether they have a good or bad outcome? Or, indeed, regardless of whether a good or bad outcome is intended?
What you describe looks to me more like a desired outcome than a virtue.
Isn’t everything? Things are virtuous because they have a good outcome (however defined), not in and of themselves.
That kind of suits me. It might be the semantic game I've been referencing before, but for various reasons I think of "virtue" as a word that means "usefulness." Ultimately, how do you know if something is useful? Well...it worked the way it was supposed to work, and thus it can be used again.
Comments
Individual human beings are quite capable of recognising human flourishing and reasoning about it, while sharing with other human beings biology and ability to reason.
And I think that reverts to classical "virtu" as Machiavelli understood it. A strong man does what he wants and - gaining social approval for it - it proves his manliness.
Ew.
And there are scholars who think that our old man Machiavelli might've been being a wee bit sarcastic when he wrote The Prince. It's hard to say.
On your first point it is fairly obvious why one needs a shared understanding of morality if you stop to think about it.
Consider acts of inhumanity. We both might agree that these are utterly hideous, but obviously that's not a shared belief of everyone. So then you have to explain why your moral is better than an infamous mass murderer. And it can't just amount to "it feels right to me that I should be able to come to my own conclusions on virtue" because he could say the same thing.
Of course many people down the centuries have committed heinous acts and thought they were totally justified in doing so.
One your second point, there are many many different modes of life in nature including everything you can possibly imagine and a whole lot you can't. Many species, for example, kill competitors even when they are closely related or even offspring in a way that humans would rightly consider murder if humans did it. There's absolutely no consistency or morality or anything approaching a moral lesson.
Just everything, altogether, all at once. If you see something admirable, put down your coffee because that will now be followed by ten other behaviours that look utterly revolting.
Yes. A large part of the economy is built on this stuff. What does that say about society?
Aristotle used the Greek word "aretê", and asked "whether we ought to regard the virtue of a good man and that of a sound citizen as the same virtue".
Machiavelli's set of "virtues" is somewhat different from Aristotle's, which also suggests they're not really talking about the same thing.
Machiavelli had a specific usage of the word "virtù " that was grounded in the notion of power.
And of course he and Aristotle are not exactly the same, but they're playing in the same field.
I'm offering different models of honor and power as they relate to society. And to some extent, that's one way to approach morality and ethics, no? What is the appropriate use of power in society?
Personally, I think the ultimate problem with all forms of moral relativism, quasi-realism, emotivism, and so on is that ultimately they devolve into might makes right, which is what we have morality to avoid. But that's an ultimately that it takes time to get to.
I doubt any virtue ethicist thinks that morality for humans is the same as morality for tigers. Ethics for humans needs to be grounded in human nature, not tiger nature or ichneumon wasp nature.
I incline towards thinking that human nature does underdetermine ethics, or at least interpretations of human nature are so overloaded by ideological presuppositions as to make direct appeal unpersuasive. However, if ethics isn't about human nature I don't think there's any reason to care about it.
Whereas, for Machiavelli, virtù is most typically exhibited by an individual who (amongst other things) "conspires to seize power, and having seized it secures it".
So I think it would be more appropriate to a consideration of classical virtue ethics than modern virtue ethics, which doesn't appear to be particularly concerned with Machiavelli's virtù.
And I recall someone up-thread mentioning that Aristotle was another one of those hypocrites who talked a good talk while endorsing slavery.
There is more to Machiavelli than The Prince, though I'll admit I haven't read his other works. I recall being taught that they're less cynical and more republican.
* I do quite like Machiavelli, but he's not very relevant to modern virtue ethics.
* I don't have to deal with Machiavelli, but being told that I do made me laugh.
* As far as I can tell, you're the only person on this thread who wants to talk about power.
And? I mean, what's your point here? As already alluded to, was Aristotle a hypocrite by the standards of his own time, or by the standards of our time?
Putting it another way, it's OK to talk about what you want to talk about, the tricky bit is to get other people to want talk about it. (I'm also laughing at myself for saying this.)
Unless all this is a demonstration of political ethics, in which case I think your machiavellianism could use some work.
As a former mutual funds rep, I understood my fiduciary purpose was to help my clients get as much return on their investment as possible. But the companies I represented did not invest in tobacco or alcohol or firearms and weapons manufactures. Still those companies have the highest returns. On the other hand, I personally favored funds that were more socially responsible, but the overall yields were one or two points lower than the previously mentioned industries.
Going to the Gordon Gekko quote: Greed, for the lack of a better term, is good. Take recent mergers and acquisitions in fields like health care. As health systems are taken over by larger systems, the goal is to increase more efficiencies and reduce costs-some would say these things are good. But on the other hand, if it allows for more lay-offs and less consumer choice which can be bad in the long run.
Question: how can we balance greed for the good, and keep away from greed causing negative outcomes.
(This is actually from a discussion in business ethics.)
(From Chapter 38, my rendition)
The truly compassionate person
Acts kindly without thinking about it, or having a goal in mind.
The person who aims to be righteous
Has ulterior motives for kindness and tries to force others to submit to it.
If we lose the Way, we can still have integrity.
If we lose integrity, we can still have compassion.
If we lose compassion, we are left with morality.
If we lose morality, we have only obedience to convention.
Obedience is the empty husk of good faith and honesty.
Attachment to rules is the dried-up flower of the Way,
If you’re certain you know the answer, you’ll never learn anything.
That’s how you lose the Way.
So the master looks deeper, to the center, not the surface.
Picking the fruit, not the flower;
Leaving the one, holding to the other.
You are right it is more complicated. But as far as I'm concerned it fits the parameters of a framework better than virtue ethics (or any kind of self-selected morals/ethics). If you put a mass murderer on the stand it seems to me that you need a whole community to agree that this action is wrong. Ideally I think you want the accused themselves to agree that the action was wrong.
So you have the defence of "I was only carrying out orders" which carries with it a distancing from the mass murder and an implicit acceptance that this was wrong. It's a quite other thing for the accused to stand up and say something like "I did it, I'm not embarrassed by it because it was the right thing to do". This does occasionally happen of course.
If your community just consists of a group of people deciding for themselves what feels right or wrong, that would appear to preclude this kind of thing.
The law is not an exact parallel but my moral framework explanation is like someone living in one country under one set of rules and bureaucracy moving to another country in a different language and culture and finding the system is completely different. Being an upstanding citizen under one law is incomprehensible to the other.
On your other point, I would be fascinated to hear which aspects of morality and ethics can be reasoned from human biology in particular and where that comes from. To me it sounds like a polemic based only on selective data. Human history is not, in general, ethical.
Hannah Arendt in the book I'm reading portrays this as a position which changed with Locke. Before the mid 1600s Arendt says that property and wealth was a static thing you gained by conquest or were bequeathed, afterwards there developed this idea that wealth begat wealth and property begat property. She says Adam Smith and Marx extended this thought in different ways, but it was this thought that wealth itself had a natural-like "fertility" to regenerate itself. So a head of wheat in one year might have sufficient nutrition not only for immediate survival but to produce grain, wealth could be "put to work" to produce more wealth. Marx looked at labour (which would appear to be more like 'work' in Arendt's definition) and saw there was a sense to that labourers were being exploited in that there was a difference between what they were paid and what their labour was worth to an employer.
I know this isn't directly what you are introducing but in our day we have all kinds of complicated financial instruments and futures and bets in business investments. Where once you owned a business, today the question is whether the value of a fraction of theoretical ownership goes up or down.
To me this seems a very abstract and weak concept to build an economy upon.
I think I'm exploring two ideas. To illustrate:
Modern technology enables anyone with an internet-connected screen of their own (which is a lot of people) to look at what we want, when we want. We've pretty much reached the point where all we have to do is articulate what we want to look at.
So what do I seek out, and what do I avoid? Christianity has a pretty good answer to this question, but most people aren't Christians, and people in secularised Christian societies demonstrate a decreasing obligation to morality. I think this forms part of the background to the (re)emergence of modern virtue ethics (notably with Elisabeth Anscombe, in 1958).
I don't know if it helps to think about virtue ethics from a more explicitly Christian perspective by considering the qualities of love, joy peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (for such there is no law).
The other idea is about the role or responsibility of self. Do we aim for a method or system or approach that works for everybody, in direct collaboration (in the widest sense) with other people; or more individually and indirectly, through my own observation, experience and reasoning about human flourishing? (And, considering the nature I have in common with other human beings, might these two approaches end up converging?)
Yes. The problem is that some people have very different ideas about what “human flourishing” means. A eugenicist could say that their goal of a stronger and better species fits the bill. A religious fundamentalist could say that humans cannot truly flourish unless they follow every structure of their religion. Without a common understanding of virtue/morality/ethics what right do you have to even say they are wrong, never mind try to stop them?
I think people ignore questions of "personal power," such as I'm bringing up, at their own risk. That's the entire thesis of "The Prince." Our old man Nick is warning the lovers of virtue that if they ignore classical virtu, they're going to screw up because the cynics will game their pretty system. People are like that. We are all human, even brilliant ones like Aristotle.
If you're looking to get personal, I think it hits me because that was one of the fundamental lessons I picked up in my undergraduate education (thank you, professor Paul Dawson, wherever you are.) Looking at current events, I think it was a hard earned lesson that too many virtue-thinkers ignore. You have to make room for the will of individual actors inside of your virtue systems. You have to make room for Hobbesian cynicism in your models or else they will crack and fall apart. Just look at current events in the USA. We built too much assuming people would be virtuous and...welp...
Speaking of slavery, chattel or otherwise, I think virtue-thinkers like Aristotle often have massive blind spots when they talk about virtue. Aristotle himself, akin to a certain unfortunate American of more recent history, may have been rationalizing away the problems of his society with systemic thinking. That's why I was bringing up his hypocrisy on the topic. It's interesting to me when people use systemic models to make beautiful ideas and then fudge on the implementation. That's the kind of stuff that draws my interest like steel draws a compass needle, using ethics to highlight a deep fault in morality.
I think it's important to keep cynics like Machiavelli and Nietzsche around because they remind me of the failures of virtue-based systemic thinking, as @Marvin the Martian has done rather elegantly. You have to remember that people are agents, and agents are a lot more than units in a grand moral scheme. This is a point for ethics, perhaps.
I guess the moral rule is not to build your house in a floodplain, so to speak.
Yet many people relocate from one country to another, and get the hang of new systems, and even end up becoming upstanding citizens.
The context of this thread is primarily moral and ethical considerations, whereas putting someone on trial is a legal response.
Considering our ethical response to a "murderer", the reason I used the phrase "someone who has killed people" is that defining a person as a "murderer" in the first place is conceiving of a person who has killed people from the perspective of a particular moral framework, as someone who has broken a moral rule. In this sense, it is still trying to evaluate virtue ethics within the framework of a rule-based morality.
As I say, the contrast between virtue ethics and rule-based morality is overblown. The real difference is how they each think of rules. Aristotle's simile is of a mason's ruler, that is flexible in order to measure curved stonework. It's still a rule, but you can't just put it next to the situation without work. I think it's relevant that Anscombe, whose essay Modern Moral Philosophy, is usually cited as the inspiration for modern virtue ethics, was a student of Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein worries a lot about how rules work; I think he points towards the idea that rules have to be grounded in practice and experience.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0k1xkllknmo
In brief there was a terrible accident on an Austrian mountain that left one climber dead. The Austrian court decided that the survivor was guilty of incompetence because they were the better and more experienced mountaineer.
It struck me that there is no consistency with regard to human nature on this point.
Regardless of how one got into a situation, a moral position could be so save yourself. Or a moral position could be to get help or to stay and risk death.
I'm not arguing with the court, they have obviously seen all the evidence and decided that they shouldn't have been on the mountain in the first place.
However there does not, in my mind, seem to be a consistent answer to this dilemma.
I heard about a terrible and rapid car fire where the driver scrambled out of a window but the fire was so fast that the passengers died. Yes, his actions were cause of (or directly linked to) the accident happening. But it is hard to argue that they should be punished specifically for not saving the passenger.
If nothing else I think this shows that different people have different instincts as to what the moral/ethical thing should be in a given situation.
I would certainly agree that attempts to ground ethics in human biology are selective. The problem is to find a justifiable basis for the selection.
I can think of a couple of traits to select though. The first is that humans have no hair and babies cannot grip. Chimpanzee infants cling to their mothers, leaving the mothers' hands free. If the mother puts the infant down, any passing male will kill the infant, which makes evolutionary sense - either the infant has no mother to look after them, or killing the infant leaves the mother free to breed again. Human mothers have to put their baby down in order to do anything, which they can only do if the evolutionary reasons favouring infanticide have been outweighed by reasons favouring cooperation in child rearing.
A second striking trait is that the sclera in human eyes are white. You can't see the whites of the eyes of other great apes, because the "whites" of their eyes are coloured. I was told you do occasionally get a mutation where chimpanzees do get whites, but it hasn't ever started to spread through the population.
There are good evolutionary reasons to have irises and pupils that don't stand out from the sclera. It makes it harder for prey to spot. For animals that spend a lot of time around conspecifics it makes it easier to conceal what the animals is up to: a chimpanzee who has spotted an interesting piece of food doesn't want another chimpanzee to notice what they're looking at and get there first. A chimpanzee that is planning to mate with or challenge another chimpanzee doesn't want their rivals to get advance warning.
On the other hand, the only clear advantage of having irises that stand out against the white is if it's somehow an advantage to you to make it easier for your conspecifics to see what you're looking at. In other words, the mutation only spread through proto-humans because at some point in our evolutionary history the advantages of communicating what we're looking at outweighed the advantages of concealing what we're looking at.
But you'd be right to point out that someone wanting to argue the other way could select other traits.
Well that's fair except I'm speaking as a biologist who is interested in this stuff.
We can all pick features of the human body and claim that those show a moral/ethical basis for human nature. First there are millions of these features and many are contradictory to the message. Second it seems like an entirely bogus way to determine morals anyway.
"Humans have five fingers therefore when we point at faults in another person we are also pointing back at ourselves.."
Reading around, I note that Aristotle considered that actions like murder 'have names that imply badness’ and are categorically prohibited, and are only ethical when supported by reason. Also that he holds that ethics cannot be reduced to a system of rules, but at the same time insists that some rules are inviolable. Which does look like he's comfortable carving out exceptions, even if he has good reasons for doing so (which turn out to be better founded than just their names).
In (English) law, however, murder only happens when one person kills another with the intention to unlawfully cause either death or serious injury. (The only complete defences to murder are insanity or self defence. Other ‘partial defences’ may reduce the charge to manslaughter.)
Several kinds of killing may be generally referred to as ‘murder’ when, in fact, they are manslaughter at most.
Content warning for a story that includes death and drunk driving...
I read a story in the news years ago about a drunk driver who ran over a cyclist - doing double the speed limit - and years later they were still bickering in the courts because his friends were like "he's a really nice guy and he didn't mean to!" IIRC, he was also otherwise a citizen without a criminal record, suburban middle class, not a monstrous human being by most accounts.
And I'm personally disgusted, arguably terrified as someone who rides a bicycle in traffic. And I'm furious on behalf of many of people I know who carry trauma history with car accidents - including at least a couple drunk-driver-death stories - but there's a logical truth there.
I'm sure he didn't mean to. The degree to which one thinks his sober intentions are salient to the situation is a painful, and very interesting question.
Even if I might want to toss the full weight of the book at this fellow for multiple personal reasons, I must accept that not all anti-social killing is the same, I think. That's why justice is hard.
I'm afraid it looks to me more that you're referencing your own sense of morality to criticise someone else's sense of morality. (Incidentally, I note that particular comparison doesn't involve any agency.)
As I've already noted, I think what Marvin did was draw attention to the failures of rules-based systems (in restricting the actions of eugenicists and religious fundamentalists). At a push, this overlaps with Machiavelli, in his apparent promotion of immorality (or amorality) in pursuit of political goals, and even Nietzsche, in his rejection of prevailing notions of morality.
Is that like 10 points for Gryffindor? I'm not sure why you're reminding me that people are agents.
To the first: I am often in my own hermeneutic and quite comfortable with it. If other people don't take it the same way I do, that's their problem. I'm pretty content to be ignored if I'm deemed irrelevant. But I don't really think it's your job to tell me how to post in this context. I can take care of myself.
To the second: If we're talking about morality, then we are going to be criticizing each other's sense of morality at some point. I do have a very particular take on morality, for sure, and I'm a rather ruthless deconstructionist and - while I am kind - I do subscribe to a kind of realpolitik that makes some folks uncomfortable. Feel free not to engage me if you're one of them. That's ok.
To the third: I don't care for points, I just say what I think. And truth be told, I don't have the time to self-psychoanalyze that far ever time i post, which is one reason some of my posts get a little hard for people to understand. I'm not ashamed of that.
OK...now that I'm doing some analyzing...my mind does follow patterns from other threads and sometimes my thoughts lead to a kind of cross-pollination. I'm not trying to beef with you, if that's what you're inferring by the "point scoring" remark. These are just big questions in politics and I'm a political theory geek. You're talking about things that I'm a big geek about. It's nothing personal.
If you want to make it personal, that hell thread is still open, but I'm not inclined at the moment.
I'm not inferring anything about the point scoring remark - I was just wondering what you meant by something being a point for ethics. Admittedly somewhat flippantly.
Ah. I really hadn't thought about it in terms of being ashamed. If you want to see some truly incomprehensible posting, I suggest going back to some of my earlier collaborations with Martin54. Sorry.
OK...I think we were miscommunicating a bit and....ok. I'll see if I can untangle this and let it go.
I think I do imagine a contest, or at least a tension between morality and ethics as systems for working out big questions of "how to live," and I may have been jesting about that by saying something was proving ethics the superior way to go. I do lean more toward ethics as a way of refining and critiquing morality. As you may have guessed, I like to deconstruct systems. It's my tendency to be skeptical of models. I've seen too many fail in my own life. To me, a morality is a model.
I think I've had some posters complaining that my communication style is opaque or "hard to understand" as if this is some kind of fault of mine and...sometimes it's just where I am. I generally get where I'm coming from. The degree to which I'm concerned with explaining every minute detail of my thinking varies. Sometimes I'm too tired to spend that much effort editing my thoughts.
Thanks for clarifying. Communication is legitimately hard if you take it seriously. I appreciate the effort.
There are some ethical systems that reduce explicit ethics almost entirely to morality (in the sense of a systems of injunctions as to right and wrong) - both deontological systems and utilitarianism do that.
I suppose one could say that there's a tension between those systems and those with a broader explicit ethics. But I think using "morality" to designated just those systems is polemical and a bar to understanding.
I'm intrigued by the idea that you see a tension between ethics and morality. My understanding of those terms doesn't allow for this - the two terms don't share the same conceptual space. For me, ethics is about reasoning about a whole load of stuff, including morality. Although, having said that, ethics can do some of the "work" that morality does, depending on one's approach - for some people it can be mostly about morality, for some people it can be mostly about ethics.
Or maybe there's something else that "fills the space" that can be occupied by morality. Maybe the hardest bit to categorise is the "feeling of rightness" or "feeling of wrongness", or how we experience "rightness" and "wrongness", or even *if* we do.
Anyway, looking back at your first post, Here, what you call morality looks to me like deontology, and what you call ethics looks to me like consequentialism / utilitarianism. It is entirely possible for there to be tension between these, and to see one as providing much of overall system, and the other providing some of the detail.
Still thinking about communication, I'm not trying to say these are any better or worse than my categorisations, just how I understand your categories from the perspective of mine.
My point was that if you base your ethical or moral systems purely on “virtue” then you first have to define what “virtue” means. Or, as a previous poster put it, you have to have a shared understanding of “virtue”. How else (other than through “might makes right”) can you decide (for example) whether it is more virtuous to protect and nurture all individuals or to allow the weak and unfit to perish in order that the species as a whole will be stronger and better? Proponents of both sides would say their way is the greater virtue.
There is a difference though between a "shared understanding" of virtue and an objective reality of virtue. If virtue is only a "shared understanding" then indeed that is a sort of "might makes right" except that the "might" and the "right" derive from the majority opinion. The individual holding on to virtue in the midst of a corrupt society would be per se deluded. Whereas if virtue is an objective reality the individual is correct to hold on, and could seek and hope to persuade others in society of the error of their ways.
You mean you are a Platonist?
What you describe looks to me more like a desired outcome than a virtue. There are versions of modern virtue ethics which head in this direction, but I don't know if they take it this far. However, what you describe does relate to the concerns of some modern theories, which look at the life of rational social animals (ie us) to provide the context for understanding virtuous action.
Isn’t everything? Things are virtuous because they have a good outcome (however defined), not in and of themselves.
Strongly disagree!
Only in the sense that Plato believed in objective virtue and I do too. I don't think that necessarily implies buying into the whole of Plato's metaphysics.
So do you think things are/can be virtuous regardless of whether they have a good or bad outcome? Or, indeed, regardless of whether a good or bad outcome is intended?
I don’t see how that can possibly be true.
That kind of suits me. It might be the semantic game I've been referencing before, but for various reasons I think of "virtue" as a word that means "usefulness." Ultimately, how do you know if something is useful? Well...it worked the way it was supposed to work, and thus it can be used again.