Reddit mentions of Back to Virtue: Traditional Moral Wisdom for Modern Moral Confusion

Pre-script (I guess that's the opposite of a post-script?): One of the biggest flaws to secular ethics, to me, is why. I would appreciate any and all input on that topic, as well as feedback on the rest of this morass.

There's bound to be some pithy quote I could insert here about being a critic because that's easier than being a creator, and I'm a big fan of pithy quotes and cliches.

Perhaps a paraphrase: "Those who can teach philosophy, do; those who can't, critique those who do."

That was the longer way to say: nope, I got nothin'. Or rather, not absolutely nothing, but nothing so extensive as I would like to provide. It's one of the big projects that I chip away at slowly.

What follows is a meandering exploration of thoughts on the topic; I'm planning on starting a blog in the not too distant future and will be exploring this somewhat more systematically, and I'll link it here.

TL;DR of the below: A system that says "here's good traits, do those" is likely going to produce better long-term results than a system that says "constantly attempt impossible math to decide what to do."

I lean towards some form of virtue ethics; Kreeft's Back to Virtue was great for me. But it's also a deeply Christian approach, and I think it's possible to create an approach that works for secular and religious people more or less evenly (why I think so when people have been trying for centuries, if not millennia... I guess I'm a little more idealistic than I like to admit).

Virtue ethics (VE) (and I'd lump in Stoicism as a related topic of interest) shares at least one flaw of Scott's consequentialism (SC): how do you define good? Consequentialism enjoys it's woo-woo math about utilons or utility points, but since there's no grand utilometer, is it that different from Marcus Aurelius writing "You know what is good, do it"? You're still relying on your intuitions about what is good, which does bother me about VE still.

Part of the appeal of the virtue ethics/Stoicism approach to me is the same as Peterson phrased it: Clean your room! VE is, to me, a much more personal, human, humane ethic than SC. I think it is important to be a good person first, and that will 'ripple out' to create a better world. Scott called it Newtonian ethics, but I think that misses something; it's not that "deservingness" decreases with distance, but complications increase with geographic and cultural distance. This concentric localism reduces the "bang for your buck" compared to SC (and thus EA), but I think it also reduces the failure mode risks.

What SC says about doing good changes based on any number of factors: how you rate different kinds of suffering, what you think does the most good, what you think generates the most utilons, what time scale you're judging everything on, etc. You can be an awful, hateful person but still "do a lot of good" under SC, which depending on perspective could be good or bad, but I think that possibility leaves a lot of room for SC to burn itself out by ignoring the interpersonal effects (Organized EA seems to have recognized this and started to deal with it, although Rob Wiblin at least still acknowledges it as an integral component of the philosophy that most can't live up to).

I also think VE involves more flexibility innately, whereas flexibility of SC is contingent on a peace treaty of sorts. Scott says outright SC should lead to one answer of what is right. This should mean that everyone following SC is doing the exact same thing: we can look at EA to show this is not currently happening, which means SC is failing to provide that one obvious answer. I recognize I decried the wishy-washy "my feels" as a flaw of SC, and this is part of why- if it is supposed to provide one answer, but doesn't, is it doing its goal? The variety of missions operating under EA indicate that SC is not that good at providing answers, and that those involved aren't particularly consequentialist. VE on the other hand has the flexibility of allowing personal definitions of good: this can be abused by selfish definitions of "good" but also gives that variety without violating its ideal. Your good is not quite the same as my good, simply because we're different people in different situations, but we can acknowledge we are both being good. This only occurs in SC because of a peace treaty of accepted dissent; were it taken seriously, anyone not following your specific good is dooming the universe (a la Bostrom's calculations) (This might be my least favorite paragraph of my rambling; I think there's an important point here but the way I'm phrasing it sounds very self-serving. I'm leaving it in hopes of figuring it out eventually)

I'll stop here because my rambling isn't really clarifying anything at this point, I don't think. But I would add an excerpt from a comment on one of Scott's old blogs against virtue ethics:

>I feel like, in saying “virtue ethics is bad”, based on the specific virtue ethics you’ve encountered, you’re doing something akin to saying “consequentialism is bad” after reading consequentialist writing by Clippy. Consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics are not moral frameworks; they are categories of moral frameworks, or rather, categories that individual fragments of moral knowledge fall into, according to whether they do their good/bad classification on events, on actions, or on people.

>My position is that consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics are all valid, and any complete moral framework must gracefully handle fragments of moral knowledge in all three forms. I think a surprisingly large amount of our moral knowledge comes from hero/villain classifications given to us in fiction, spread across weak-evidence relations like “the goals of good people are good”.

I'd pretty much agree with that. There's useful aspects to each, and distinctly saying one is good or bad is to overlook the advantages of the others, and the flaws of the one you've picked. My second-biggest issue with Scott's ethical writings is that he handwaves over the gaps of his consequentialism without digging, in a satisfying manner, into them (digging into gaps is not the best turn of phrase, I know). He tries, sort of, but I don't find the answers even remotely solid (hence I said I dismiss them for being specific to Scott, not to the broader philosophy). The "why" question posed at the top would be the biggest. He wants to good because he wants to do good; is it a virtuous tautology and we can't answer more than that?

Peter Kreeft's "Back to Virtue" is excellent! I read it (when I was in my 20's I believe?) and it really resonated with me.

https://www.amazon.com/Back-Virtue-Traditional-Wisdom-Confusion/dp/0898704227/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2OX5HFBVSCH6Q&keywords=peter+kreeft+back+to+virtue&qid=1566528034&s=gateway&sprefix=peter+kreeft+back+to+%2Caps%2C163&sr=8-1