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Is anyone ever virtuous?
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- čas přidán 17. 05. 2023
- #philosophy #ethics #virtues
Virtue ethics is back! But social scientists didn't like that at all, so they tried to disprove virtue ethics empirically. Did they succeed?!
Stock footage by Pexels & Pixabay
Here are some of the books and articles I discuss in this video:
Annas, Julia. 2011. Intelligent Virtue. Oxford University Press.
Doris, John. 1998. Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics. Nous 4 (32), 504-530.
Hursthouse, Rosalind. 2001. On Virtue Ethics. Oxford University Press.
The point is that being virtuous is often understood as a static state of moral being for the moral actor, which it is not. Being virtuous is understood better in the active sense: "being" virtuous. You will never be the paragon of virtue you seek to be, but in the constant act and process of trying to be (or, actively being) you'll be far better at "being" virtuous than being "virtuous".
What is the good? What is it’s ontological status? Where do you get your anthropology or idea of “personhood”? How can you justify your criteria for true knowledge without appealing to another set of properly basic beliefs as justification criteria, and so on until you have appealed to the same facts you started out with and completed your circular justification? It’s unavoidable in this system. Also how do you know your thoughts and mental processes conform to the real existent phenomenological world. Is that presupposition just assumed without good reasons?
Bro stick to one question at a time
@@TheFeatInk its a skill issue, dw
@@icecream_philosopher Oh I see my bad the reason you can't answer any questions at all is because I asked too many. Plus I'm mean. Plus it's a skill issue. You don't have answers because this is a pop philosophy channel for kids. It's definitely 100% not because you don't even begin to comprehend the questions at all. Keep skilling.
@@RedShnow blimey, think you need a timeout dude. Take a glass of water and sit down for 10. Just relax
Check out the replication crisis in social psychology and how both of those "scientific" experiments at best have serious methodological issues and at worst are...
Badiou book on ethics ("Ethics: an Essay on the Understanding of Evil") is certainly one of the most influential things for me. His ethics, connected with notion of being "Faithful to event" is great for fighting with what you called as "situationist" because it is focused on the particular event, not to some imaginary, stable and unchanging structure of ethical world.
If we live in a society that does not have virtue ethics as a norm we shouldn't be surprised that people aren't virtuous in random tests? It's a skill you have to train.
I have some criticism, I might be wrong as I don't study philosophy, and one might say I'm a bad psychology student (despite being one), but:
1-I think you misrepresented Aristotle, as you should have talked about teleology (a thing is good based on how much it fulfills its end/ends, or telos) more than the law of the middle, otherwise, how can you tell which opposite ends should you place yourself in?
2-Why presenting an experiment when you could have make a longitudinal study? You could disprove (I know it's not your intention with this video, I'm just being rethorical), you could disprove Aristotle by showing that even after people develop habits (virtues/vices), they won't influence the outcome of moral decisions at all, making it an untrue theory because it simply doesn't work. Make people develop prudence, or even just courage, for a year, and then perfoms Milgram's test
So, sorry, but I think there's a big non-sequitir in the video, I think it could be done waaay better.
And yes I'm all for virtue ethics
He could have even brought up the notion of whether an ethical theory can even be “disproven” by experiments.
The idea that normative ethical theories are subject to testing is certainly not one I’ve read in any philosophical work before!
You should check out experimental philosophy or empirically informed ethics! It's in a sense "early days", but that's exactly what they're doing
@@PhilosophicalQuestions do you take us for fools? imagine "experimental geometry" or "empircally informed logic". It's an absurdity on the face of it.
Nope, feel free to read about it!
@@TheFeatInk no I think he's totally right on this, offcourse philosophy is its own field, so you will still have to primarely do philosophical work in order to progress morality, but moral theories seem to all claim something about our psychology, so psychology can say if it's true or not.
Bentham, for example, said that Utilitarianism is true wheter you like it or not, because even if you accept other moral theories, you will always end up obeying the two principles of "seeking good" and "avoiding pain". So, if psychology tells you that people aren't so biased, you will disprove this claim of his, which is at the very center of his theory
Just because Aristotle didn't see a need for a god to justify virtue ethics doesn't mean he was right. The same arguments you made to discount consequentialist and deontological ethical systems can be said about virtue ethics as well.
Why should I not think the law of means is just as arbitrary as maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain?
Either there is no ethics (nihilism), or there is and only because there is a God. (Note, I don't put any restrictions of what that God is, physical, metaphysical, purely psychological, etc are all possible. But there must be a God if you accept that morality exists).
When having this discussion with a buddy of mine, we came to the conclusion that one would need to declare axioms of morality (deciding on the "right" course of action) in the same way that one would have to declare axioms of mathematics. At least if one wants to apply logic to moral arguments, which I think we try to do.
The choice of axioms can be debated but the additional axiom "and these are the axioms because (a) God(s) want(s) it to be so" is an unnecessary axiom attempting to justify the choice of axioms. Which isn't meant to be disrespectful; he was super catholic and I'm agnostic (divinity is unfalsifiable based on our current understanding) but we still agree on most things.
The nihilist stance also isn't quite "there are no ethics" but there isn't a set of God(s) given axioms from which everything follows.
Choosing to interpret that as "and therefore nothing is right, nothing is wrong, there is no morality" neglects the thought that you can put into it.
We can still choose things that are right and wrong and all sorts of greys.
If instead we try to choose things "for the greater good" (like the Tau from Warhammer), we would need to collectively agree on what the greater good means (sounds kinda like legalism which isn't a particularly good social philosophy).
If we try to choose things "which are good for me" like Max Stirner, we arrive at something akin to what we have now. It does make a similar assumption to modern economic theory of a rational and informed consumer (which we demonstrably aren't).
So you can propose a set of moralistic axioms which are centered on personal pleasure, but hopefully the society as a whole would see how that wouldn't result in a stable society.
You're free to make the argument and there's more than enough material wealth in the world such that small pockets of folks can behave outside of social norms, but at the end of the day, morality is "whatever society demands." If that morality stems from a religion, fine. Despite my own beliefs, I was raised in a Judeo-Christian society and undoubtedly take most of their "thou shalt not"s as axioms of my morality. If that morality stems from elsewhere, that's fine too.
The only thing that matters is societal stability. If a morality makes a society unstable, that society tends to disappear such that you only encounter societies with stable moralities, no matter how much they rub against our own.
@@michaeldasilva5976 If you allow whatever axiom you choose, yes, morality can be justified without God. But if we accept this argument it makes as much sense to say that we can accept the existence of God simply as an axiom, without justification. Sure, we can, but that doesn't make it helpful.
Nor have you really understood why axioms are justified in mathematics. We can choose whatever axioms we wish, but that doesn't mean our resulting algebra is isomorphic with reality.
Similarly, we can accept axioms of morality to be whatever we wish. Not only any set of axioms, but we can do as mathematics does, and accept any and all set of axioms, even contradictory ones, and just call it a different algebra, that has no relation to reality.
Accepting axioms just because is only valid because we don't care whether it is isomorphic with reality or not. When we want to apply a specific algebra to reality we have to actually justify why that algebra with its axioms applies.
So you may daydream about alternative ethical systems. And then you can choose whatever random axioms you want. Now you have to justify why those axioms are isomorphic with reality. Why does morality "exist". Not in your purely mathematical platonic description, but here in the real world.
@@josephsummerhays4650 Agreed!
Math and its axioms get an easy check though; if math produces results which reflect reality, then the axioms might be "good enough".
Morality may have a similar constraint in that any moral axioms chosen are "good enough" if they produce a stable society.
(Regarding why math is so successful at describing reality, I have no clue. I'm a physicist and it's flabbergasting how often modeling things as harmonic oscillators with a small perturbation is a good way to describe complex systems. Everything is an oscillator. Everything is a thermometer.)
Regarding the justification for those moral axioms, we can look at which axioms survived the crucible of history (keeping in mind the survivorship bias) and try to work backwards towards some universal set of axioms.
If we take Christianity, for example, the 10 commandments may very well be a "good enough" basis for a society: don't kill, don't steal, don't covet, etc.
(I especially like how, in Genesis, biblical God rested on the 7th day. He didn't have to do so of course so that means resting is necessary to complete a work. I wish we emphasized that more :D)
Islam has similar declarations for personal property and non-violence.
Judaism and Christianity share an origin story so on this level they're also compatible.
So we may conclude that, at least looking at the monotheistic, book-ish religious narratives, internal non-violence and personal property rights may be important foundations of a stable society. (Of course, externally, all bets are off. The morals of war (or towards an out-group) are very different)
But if we turn to India with its polytheism and caste system, there's certainly a stable society that doesn't share those axioms of non-violence and personal property that still operates at scale. Unfortunately, it's difficult to make sweeping statements about India because it's such a culturally diverse land mass but that too is interesting. No one culture really dominated until the British colonized. The great Indian empires were all relatively short lived; never more than a couple generations. It was only stable when fragmented (is that a bad thing?).
Or if we look at smaller, more animist cultures like some Native American tribes, personal property isn't necessary. But that might not scale well once a society grows beyond knowing everyone in their tribe. So there's a size element to social systems and choices of moral axioms.
So I think, when trying to define moral axioms, it's more like an engineering problem where there are tradeoffs for every choice.
Yeah non-violence is probably good (the Purge would be unpleasant) but does that make us martially weak?
Yeah personal property rights are probably good but how do we address cases where too much accumulates in too few hands?
But beyond these choices, is a designed society possible? Can we know the impact of our choices of moral axioms? I'd argue no, but I'm open to other answers.
If we describe an axiomatic moral system that is logically consistent, does it suffer from the same fate as set theory with respect to Godel's incompleteness theory? So the system can't be self-referential?
Well, instead of a system to which we can apply logic, perhaps we would need to go the way of Aristotle and Kierkegaard and virtue ethics.
Ethics on faith rather than on logic; everything need be interpreted through a very specific lens or by an authority where the final arbiter is someone's gut feeling.
I dunno.
Maybe I'm evil for generally trying not to make a fuss as asserted by Peter Singer (neat lecture on this thesis: czcams.com/video/KVl5kMXz1vA/video.html)
I dunno.
(sorry for the book but this is a fun conversation)
@michaeldasilva5976 nice comment. I wonder if one can accurately predict what moral axioms a culture adopts by knowing some demographic parameters.
youtube comment destroys thousands of years of philosophy on ethics with one bold and unsubstatiated assertion. nice
1:16
The worst critique ever in history. Christianity is virtue ethic and not deontology. 🤦🏻♂️
This isn't true, Deontological ethics are ones that are duty based, whereas virtue ethics are individual based. Christianity defines morality via an external god, and duties relating to or derived from it. Due to this, it cant be considered a virtue-ethic framework.
You should definitely google something before you throw out the "worst critique ever in history" take, otherwise it may end up just being a projection.
@@La0bouchere you are both very much wrong in this case. @RedShnow is wrong to claim Christianity is not deontology. But you are wrong to claim it is not virtue-ethics.
These are not mutually exclusive theories.
@@josephsummerhays4650 They ARE different theories. Was just trying to point out her terrible oversimplification. Also this is my response. There are many different sects that call themselves Christian. So you can always cherry pick an interpretation to fit your idea. But assuming we're going with the correct thing. Let's take as an example the two most important commandments. Love your God with all your soul, and love your neighbor as yourself. I think this is a great example because the exegesis of this text is that, although there are many many duties and obligations given to the Israelites, "the whole law hangs on this". The reason Israelites have to sacrifice so many animals and do so many things is not because you're right this is deontology bro. But in order that they become more and more like God, who is the exemplar of every virtue. In other words. The actions of a Christian are directed at attaining virtue, not fulfilling obligations. In other words. It's where we get the word "pharisaical" also.
@@RedShnow I know they're different theories, I didn't claim they were the same. I said they were not mutually exclusive.