Virtue ethics

[Anonymous No.19934810]

1. Is virtue ethics the ultimate ethical framework?
2. Do you follow it?
2.1. Why/why not?
3. Does one need to study volumes by Aristotle, MacIntyre, etc to understand and be able to follow it?
3.1. If there are must-read books on virtue ethics, what are they?
4. Misc.

Pic unrelated.

[Anonymous No.19935012]

bump

[Anonymous No.19935059]

>>19934810
>1. Is virtue ethics the ultimate ethical framework?
>2. Do you follow it?
>2.1. Why/why not?

To all of the above: it's the only one that makes sense to me.

Richard Weaver once wrote that:

>There is abroad in democracies today an idea that to criticize anybody for anything is treasonable, that the weak, the self-indulgent, and the vicious have the same claims toward respect and reward as anybody else, and that if a man chooses to be a beast, he has a sort of natural, inviolable right to be one.

I'm not well versed in philosophy, but I started thinking about virtue ethics because this idea is ubiquitous in our culture and I had to confront it while making ethical decisions in my personal life. And the truth is, regardless of whether it's actively harming anyone, there is something that unsettles us about this behavior. By virtue of being human, nobody actively aspires to be like the consumers in Wall-E, Zarathustra's last man, or the people in Brave New World.

It seems difficult for people who start with the premise "pain = bad, pleasure = good" to explain why any of these situations are undesirable. In Utilitarianism, JS Mill just asserts as a priori that there are such things as higher and lower pleasures, and that "it's better to be a man dissatisfied than a pig satisfied."

I don't think anybody would contest Mill here, because we have some innate knowledge about what it means to be a good person. We understand intuitively that man has a different telos than a pig. I like virtue ethics because it begins with what is already known rather than venturing into this absurd world of abstraction where happiness is quantifiable and people are tied to railroad tracks.

>3. Does one need to study volumes by Aristotle, MacIntyre, etc to understand and be able to follow it?

No. Christianity is a system of virtue ethics, for example, and there are countless believers who have never picked up a book and yet lead lives that would be considered virtuous by both the Church and Aristotle. Reading certainly helps, though, since there's a lot of bad information out there.

>3.1. If there are must-read books on virtue ethics, what are they?

Nichomachean Ethics.

>4. Misc.

Thanks for reading my blog post

[Anonymous No.19935154]

>>19935059
Thank you for a quality post.

[Anonymous No.19935242]

>>19935059
Got any thoughts of Moral Foundation Theory and the works of Jonathan Haidt?

[Anonymous No.19935352]

>>19935242
I own The Righteous Mind paperback but haven't bothered to read it yet, so not really. I'm in the same camp as Haidt re: ethical intuition being pre-rational, though.

[Anonymous No.19935458]

MacIntyre’s major insight is that in an alienated social body, there’s no clear telos for man to conform to, being a virtuous man doesn’t mean anything coherent like it did for aristotle. Instead you have to ground virtues with respect to coherent practices or fields. You can aim to be a good knitter, where your judgments about the evenness of your stitches or whatever have a clear telos, but if you try to be a good man, you quickly confront the “existence precedes essence” characteristic of subjectivity.

[Anonymous No.19935546]

>>19935458
I haven't read MacIntyre, but why does he rule out that there still might be a sort of a personal eudaimonia one could strive for, one achieved by gaining/practicing some general virtues? What does it have to do with society being alienated or not?
As for the specific list of these, for example, the cardinal virtues of prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice seem to me as relevant as ever.

[Anonymous No.19935554]

>>19935352
Just to add: Aristotle understood this to be true as well. He notes in the beginning of his Ethics that moral reasoning like a race track, we start with what we know and eventually return to it. We have certain intuitions due to evolution, God, wherever and all moral reasoning is to some degree a circular ex post facto rationalization for them.

[Anonymous No.19935584]

*ahem * Virtue is a spook

[Anonymous No.19935949]

>>19935584
Shoo, nigger!

[Anonymous No.19936118]

>>19934810
1. yes
2. sorta, if you consider nietzsche virtue ethics
2.1. i think deontology and consequentialism are results of a modern worldview. i'm somewhat of a postmodernist, and so am even skeptical of virtue ethics but to a lesser extent since it's more compatible with a postmodern worldview
3. not really
3.1 nichomachean ethics and after virtue

[Anonymous No.19936133]

>>19934810
The first season of HBO’s Rome is a masterpiece (haven’t seen the second, need to rewatch the first at this point). The brotherhood of the two in OP’s photo is one of the most compelling and endearing portraits of friendship.

[Anonymous No.19936266]

>>19935546
He doesn’t, he actually concludes After Virtue by suggesting something similar:

>what matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes pan of our predicament We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another -doubtless very different— St
Benedict

His real gripe is that we abandoned virtue ethics after the enlightenment and thus the socially mediated reinforcement of virtuous behavior we see in cultures like those in ancient Greece. Individuals can still pursue and attain virtue, but it’s no longer the norm. Instead, it’s been subsumed by an ethical schizophrenia in which we collectively have no understanding of how to live or of what it means to live well.

[Anonymous No.19936357]

>Pic unrelated.
B-but Lucius Vorenus is the personification of Roman virtues in the show.

[Anonymous No.19936362]

>>19934810
>Aristotle, MacIntyre, etc
This fucking pseud

[Anonymous No.19936399]

>>19936118
You shouldn't post if you're retarded

[Anonymous No.19937421]

>>19935554
Michael Huemer is also an ethical intuitionist if you’re looking for another writer. However, I’ve only read some of “Problems of Political Authority,” none of his ethics works

[Anonymous No.19937431]

>>19936357
Until he realizes no one else follows the same virtues in that era.

[Anonymous No.19937475]

>>19935242
I think that Haidt, like all social psychologists, is a grifter. His work is neologism-ridden, unfalsifiable crap and his claims that his work is 'universal', as opposed to contemporary moral schemas, is contradicted by how the entire book all about specific American political debates.

[Anonymous No.19938014]

>>19937421
I'd never heard of him until recently but two anons have recommended him to me. Redpill me on him.