Thread by @meekaale

it seems like a mistake to group "virtue ethics" with theories like utilitarianism and then argue about which one is better

virtue ethics is the study of how excellence is conceived and taught within traditions & communities

it's not a procedure for making decisions

a virtue ethicist could for example take the rationalist effective altruism community as a case study and look at which goods it upholds, which virtues enable attainment of those goods, and how the whole thing functions in practice

that also means looking at how conflicts are negotiated within the community, and which virtues enable efficient and constructive negotiation, which blends into general virtues that apply to community as such

one of MacIntyre's major points is that reasoning happens within traditions and communities, and especially when philosophers make universal claims they must be situated historically; utilitarianism was a cultural response to a particular situation in England and Scotland

the conditions leading to utilitarianism includes the preceding forceful rejection of Aristotelian teleology in early modern and medieval times, which shifted the whole focus of ethical thought away from excellence towards religious divine command and secular altruism

"Aristotelian teleology" just means that the culture carries a coherent conception of the semantics of being a good human being, in a general sense that applies to all humans but also in particular ways inextricable from society's roles

such a conception makes reference to the world in which it's embedded, and its rejection, by e.g. Luther who thought Aristotle was a nearly demonic pagan figure, flips over into a view that goodness is an internal attribute of the soul uncorrelated with excellence

the way MacIntyre describes this history, it's like Aristotle's society had a secular & worldly view of ethics as bound up with excellence, happiness, flourishing, which was then rejected as pagan by certain medieval theologists, and THAT then mutated into Enlightenment ethics

so the whole language of morality, goodness, altruism, and so on that we inherited from our predecessor culture is deeply influenced by this theological turn in the conception of what it means to be a good person in God's judgement

but we don't believe in that anymore so the language and reasoning is actually unmoored from reality, it's a bunch of weird legacy workarounds for a cultural context that's over, Nietzsche already ran a stake through the corpse of this whole monster but it still haunts us

I think for MacIntyre, virtue ethics means approaching the question "How should I live?" by asking questions like "Who am I? What stories do I find myself playing a role in? What are the values of my cultural environment?"

so Scott Alexander says virtue ethics offers no useful resources for dealing with the real moral dilemmas that his utilitarianism can resolve, but actually it points to deep riches of resources and generative questions

utilitarianism might have some answers for questions I face in my life, but when I see myself as the father of a particular child I find myself only marginally interested in calculating the discounted net present pleasure of all sentient beings

but again I don't really compare these systems as rivals

"consequentialism" as the general idea that we ought to act in ways that bring good consequences would not be radically surprising to Aristotle

Scott Alexander's FAQ on consequentialism states that ideally, all of political decisionmaking could be replaced with the calculation of utility — so ideally, there's no need for discussing the nature of the good, it's a matter of objective scientific inquiry

and that is anathema to Aristotle and any virtue ethicist because they have a fundamentally different view of good that doesn't and cannot ever boil down to a single universal variable predetermined by neutral rationality