Virtues and Relativism
Read Technology and the Virtues first?
Also Dale Jamieson When Utilitarians should be virtue theorists
What pitfalls are there in trying to maximise virtue over a life? e.g. romantics/idealists swinging hard to reaction like coleridge.
Also in a community brings in comparative advantage on more utilitarian accounts of virtue - is this coherent with eudaimonia? Aliens outside our lightcone? Irrelevant changes.
Important to note that the virtue = freedom to do highest activities like genuine love and friendship seems to be compatible with aristocratic elitism. Since we can only have these relations with ~150 people who cares about the plebs? What kind of more distant benevolent relations that are a part of eudaimonia does virtue enable? Intuitively, none in times of crisis, where you can’t reliably help strangers and doing so hurts your family. How does it change now? it cant just be the reduction in opportunity costs and marginal benefits for helping your family in times of prosperity can it?
If we want to make trajectory shifts for the world, the fact we move in more diverse sets of incentives actually means virtue is more necessary for good, (rather than merely neutral) outcomes than it was in the village, where a lack of vice was more important to avoid bad outcomes.
Consider explore exploit wrt writing and reading. What kinds of writing are the most exploratory ie appropriate to young people?
Does capitalism actually make acquiring virtue easier, or does it make virtue unnecessary due to easier circumstances? Is virtue path dependent, with deliberate and/or effortful acquisition an intrinsic part of it?
Should the answer effect how good we think virtue is? Does the answer depend on which horn of the paradox of virtue we take?
Is all the stuff about the obsolescence of virtue just alienation like Smith and Marx lol. Check sep I guess
- Montesquieu vs Madison is a great example of the modern obsolescence of virtue
- Federalist 10 makes jury theorem-esque arguments in favour of large diverse democracies as being the safest, contra Montesquieu and others who thought small homogeneous civic virtuous republics were the only stable ones.
More on the paradox of virtue; remember RYC’s demon that will destroy the world unless you take the viciousness pill. A virtuous person will take the pill. Both exemplarist and consequentialist virtue theories can recommend this provided you consider virtuousness/viciousness as a trait that extends over one’s whole life - not an intrinsic property of your person-stages. This lets the consequentialist virtue theorist say the EV/choiceworthiness of destroying your virtue is positive, since you’re unlikely to be able to redeem yourself after taking the pill. Alternately, the consequentialist can say you only have an agent-relative reason to promote your virtue, but your virtue isn’t promoted just by living longer as a virtuous person - this lets suicide be virtuous. Adding in the continuity of responsibility/responsiveness theory of personal identity you get the verdict that taking the pill is just suicide + bringing a vicious person into existence.
How different would virtues of the immortals be qua zagzebski and Aristotle’s conceptions of virtue? Maybe also relevant to ideal agent theories generally like Michael Smith’s.
Moral and epistemic virtues of power and powerlessness - can power somehow imply responsibility, yet also conceal certain aspects of a person’s character? Does this suggest a tension between responsibility/virtue/vice and revealingness of the self?
Are there superlinear returns to becoming good at forecasting. What about other intellectual virtues? If not, should we prioritise developing other skills with higher RoR first? Skill and concept acquisition might be an example. Does ords model of virtue as a -3 to +3 multiplier operate here.
Is there some deeper strangeness operating if the order of virtue development matters? Does this mean full generality can’t be a precondition for being a virtue, or that there will always be an element of (temporal) relativism here?