The Nonlinear Library EA - Beneficentric Virtue Ethics by Richard Y Chappell
May 17, 2024
08:32
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Beneficentric Virtue Ethics, published by Richard Y Chappell on May 17, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
I've previously suggested a constraint on warranted hostility: the target must be ill-willed and/or unreasonable. Common hostility towards either utilitarianism or effective altruism seems to violate this constraint. I could see someone reasonably disagreeing with the former view, and at least abstaining from the latter project, but I don't think either could reasonably be regarded as inherently ill-willed or unreasonable.
Perhaps the easiest way to see this is to just imagine a beneficentric virtue ethicist who takes scope-sensitive impartial benevolence to be the central (or even only) virtue. Their imagined virtuous agent seems neither ill-willed nor unreasonable. But the agent thus imagined would presumably be committed to the principles of effective altruism. On the stronger version, where benevolence is the sole virtue, the view described is just utilitarianism by another name.[1]
The Good-Willed Utilitarian
A lot of my research is essentially about why an ideally virtuous person would be a utilitarian or something close to it. (Equivalently: why benevolence plausibly trumps other virtues in importance.) Many philosophers make false assumptions about utilitarianism that unfairly malign the view and its proponents.
For a series of important correctives, see, e.g., Bleeding-Heart Consequentialism, Level-up Impartiality, Theses on Mattering, How Intention Matters, and Naïve Instrumentalism vs Principled Proceduralism. (These posts should be required reading for anyone who wants to criticize utilitarianism.)
Conversely, one of my central objections to non-consequentialist views is precisely that they seem to entail severe disrespect or inadequate concern for agents arbitrarily disadvantaged under the status quo. My new paradox of deontology and pre-commitment arguments both offer different ways of developing this underlying worry. As a result, I actually find it quite mysterious that more virtue ethicists aren't utilitarians.
(Note that the demandingness objection to utilitarianism is effectively pleading to let us be less than ideally virtuous.)
At its heart, I see utilitarianism as the combination of (exclusively) beneficentric moral goals + instrumental rationality. Beneficentric goals are clearly good, and plausibly warrant higher priority than any competing goals.
("Do you really think that X is more important than saving and improving lives?" seems like a pretty compelling objection for any non-utilitarian value X.) And instrumental rationality, like "competence", is an executive virtue: good to have in good people, bad to have in bad people. It doesn't turn good into bad. So it's very puzzling that so many seem to find utilitarianism "deeply appalling".
To vindicate such a claim, you really need to trace the objectionability back to one of the two core components of the view: exclusively beneficentric goals, or instrumental rationality. Neither seems particularly "appalling".[2]
Effective Altruism and Good Will
Utilitarianism remains controversial. I get that. What's even more baffling is that hostility extends to effective altruism: the most transparently well-motivated moral view one could possibly imagine. If anyone really think that the ideally virtuous agent would be opposed to either altruism or effectiveness, I'd love to hear their reasoning! (I think this is probably the most clear-cut no-brainer in all of philosophy.)
A year ago, philosopher Mary Townsend took a stab, writing that:
any morality that prioritizes the distant, whether the distant poor or the distant future, is a theoretical-fanaticism, one that cares more about the coherence of its own ultimate intellectual triumph - and not getting its hands dirty - than about the fate of huma...
I've previously suggested a constraint on warranted hostility: the target must be ill-willed and/or unreasonable. Common hostility towards either utilitarianism or effective altruism seems to violate this constraint. I could see someone reasonably disagreeing with the former view, and at least abstaining from the latter project, but I don't think either could reasonably be regarded as inherently ill-willed or unreasonable.
Perhaps the easiest way to see this is to just imagine a beneficentric virtue ethicist who takes scope-sensitive impartial benevolence to be the central (or even only) virtue. Their imagined virtuous agent seems neither ill-willed nor unreasonable. But the agent thus imagined would presumably be committed to the principles of effective altruism. On the stronger version, where benevolence is the sole virtue, the view described is just utilitarianism by another name.[1]
The Good-Willed Utilitarian
A lot of my research is essentially about why an ideally virtuous person would be a utilitarian or something close to it. (Equivalently: why benevolence plausibly trumps other virtues in importance.) Many philosophers make false assumptions about utilitarianism that unfairly malign the view and its proponents.
For a series of important correctives, see, e.g., Bleeding-Heart Consequentialism, Level-up Impartiality, Theses on Mattering, How Intention Matters, and Naïve Instrumentalism vs Principled Proceduralism. (These posts should be required reading for anyone who wants to criticize utilitarianism.)
Conversely, one of my central objections to non-consequentialist views is precisely that they seem to entail severe disrespect or inadequate concern for agents arbitrarily disadvantaged under the status quo. My new paradox of deontology and pre-commitment arguments both offer different ways of developing this underlying worry. As a result, I actually find it quite mysterious that more virtue ethicists aren't utilitarians.
(Note that the demandingness objection to utilitarianism is effectively pleading to let us be less than ideally virtuous.)
At its heart, I see utilitarianism as the combination of (exclusively) beneficentric moral goals + instrumental rationality. Beneficentric goals are clearly good, and plausibly warrant higher priority than any competing goals.
("Do you really think that X is more important than saving and improving lives?" seems like a pretty compelling objection for any non-utilitarian value X.) And instrumental rationality, like "competence", is an executive virtue: good to have in good people, bad to have in bad people. It doesn't turn good into bad. So it's very puzzling that so many seem to find utilitarianism "deeply appalling".
To vindicate such a claim, you really need to trace the objectionability back to one of the two core components of the view: exclusively beneficentric goals, or instrumental rationality. Neither seems particularly "appalling".[2]
Effective Altruism and Good Will
Utilitarianism remains controversial. I get that. What's even more baffling is that hostility extends to effective altruism: the most transparently well-motivated moral view one could possibly imagine. If anyone really think that the ideally virtuous agent would be opposed to either altruism or effectiveness, I'd love to hear their reasoning! (I think this is probably the most clear-cut no-brainer in all of philosophy.)
A year ago, philosopher Mary Townsend took a stab, writing that:
any morality that prioritizes the distant, whether the distant poor or the distant future, is a theoretical-fanaticism, one that cares more about the coherence of its own ultimate intellectual triumph - and not getting its hands dirty - than about the fate of huma...