Utilitarianism vs Virtue Ethics
Apr. 18th, 2013 12:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackUntil recently, I tended to follow an automatically utilitarian approach. After all, people would say, if one action does more good than another, how can it possibly be true than the second is the "right" one?
But it started to bother me, and I started to think maybe you needed both something like utilitarianism and something like virtue ethics.
I imagined using the same language to describe different ways of getting something right that’s somewhat less subjective and emotional than morality, say, the right way to write reliable computer programs.
Some people would say “here is a list of rules, follow them”. But this approach sucks when the technology and understanding get better, because you keep writing code that saves two bytes if it’s compiled on a 1990's 8-bit home computer, because that was a good idea at the time.
Other people would say, “choose whichever outcome will make the code more reliable in the long run”. That’s better than “follow these outdated rules”, but doesn't really tell you what to do hour-by-hour.
In fact, the people who do best seem to be those who have general principles they stick to, like “fix the security holes first”, even if it’s impossible to truly estimate the relative plusses and minusses of avoiding an eventual security breach versus adding a necessary new feature now. But they don’t stick to them blindly, and are willing to update or bypass those principles if the opposite is obviously better in some particular situation.
My thought, which I’m not yet very sure of, is the same applies to morality.
But it started to bother me, and I started to think maybe you needed both something like utilitarianism and something like virtue ethics.
I imagined using the same language to describe different ways of getting something right that’s somewhat less subjective and emotional than morality, say, the right way to write reliable computer programs.
Some people would say “here is a list of rules, follow them”. But this approach sucks when the technology and understanding get better, because you keep writing code that saves two bytes if it’s compiled on a 1990's 8-bit home computer, because that was a good idea at the time.
Other people would say, “choose whichever outcome will make the code more reliable in the long run”. That’s better than “follow these outdated rules”, but doesn't really tell you what to do hour-by-hour.
In fact, the people who do best seem to be those who have general principles they stick to, like “fix the security holes first”, even if it’s impossible to truly estimate the relative plusses and minusses of avoiding an eventual security breach versus adding a necessary new feature now. But they don’t stick to them blindly, and are willing to update or bypass those principles if the opposite is obviously better in some particular situation.
My thought, which I’m not yet very sure of, is the same applies to morality.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-18 02:19 pm (UTC)I understood Peter to be using "commitment" in the sense of committing yourself to it ...
Still confused about whether you mean "deciding", "promising" or something else (e.g. ensuring that you will be physically compelled to do it).
I don't think that's relevant to the basic method of deciding which option is most utilitarious* though - it just means you have a different number of options to consider.
This always seems to be the difficult bit in utilitarianism -- comparing an immediate bad thing against "this will make society worse in the long term".
Yes, this is difficult! But trying to do it and doing it imperfectly is often better than not trying.
And if it's not worth the effort of not trying, then not trying is the utilitarian thing to do.
* Nb this probably isn't a word.