Virtue Ethics

Virtue Ethics is an ethical framework that judges a person's ethical value based on their character, rather than a set of principles. Aristotle is often credited for developing this framework. He claimed that an object or being can be "proper functioning", e.g. a knife is good if it can cut well, a flower is good if it can reproduce well, wild dogs are good if they can hunt well together, etc. He laid out a few generally beneficial qualities in people: we grow, are healthy and fertile, use reason, and we get along well together. This is partially derived from Natural Law Theory, which is a concept discussed by Christian philosophers like Thomas Aquinas. Natural Law Theory states that there are certain rights, beliefs, laws, etc. that are given by God to all people.

Aristotle stated that, in order to make ethical decisions, people should try to become more virtuous, and then the correct decisions will be self-evident. He proposed a list of 18 moral virtues of each person- things like courage, truthfulness, and ambition. The virtuous person holds a "golden mean" between excess and deficiency in each trait. For example, perfect courage stands between cowardice and recklessness, perfect generosity is between stinginess and prodigality, etc. Aristotle calls the knowledge of what decisions to make "practical wisdom". People with practical wisdom habitually do the right thing. To have practical wisdom is known as having "Eudimonia", which is sometimes translated as "human flourishing", and is sort of like ethical decision-making enlightenment. In order to find Eudimonia, you look to "moral exemplars", and try to make decisions like them. Asking yourself "What would Jesus do?" is an example of this, under Christian moral virtues.

This framework excels in that it provides a framework to become ethical, and can be practically helpful, whereas Consequantialism sometimes boils down to "hindsight is 20/20".

This framework falls short in that it can have overlap with Deontological ethics, and it isn't entirely clear where the two differ. Consider the situation in which two people leave a bar drunk, one at 1:13 am and the other at 1:20 am. Both drive home, and both drive the same distance and on similarly residential streets. The first driver makes it home without incident, but the second one hits a pedestrian and kills them. In this situation, both drivers made the same decisions, but the second driver had a bad result, while the first one had a neutral one. Under Consequentialism, the second driver was in the wrong, while the first one wasn't. Under Deontology, both drivers are in the wrong, since they made the same decisions. Under Virtue Ethics, we first ask ourselves "what would a virtuous person do?"- clearly, they would not drive drunk, but aren't we really just applying a rule, the same way we would with Deontology?

CrashCourse. “Aristotle & Virtue Theory: Crash Course Philosophy #38.” YouTube, CrashCourse, 5 Dec. 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrvtOWEXDIQ.

CrashCourse. “ Moral Luck: Crash Course Philosophy #39. ” YouTube, CrashCourse, 5 Dec. 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpDSPVv8lUE.

Hursthouse, Rosalind, and Glen Pettigrove. “Virtue Ethics.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 8 Dec. 2016, plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Technology and Security

Cyber attacks pose an increasingly large threat to US security. Donald Trump has declared a national emergency regarding threats along the border with Mexico, though a recent Worldwide Threat Assessment from Daniel Coats, the US Director of National Intelligence barely mentions border security. Instead, it emphasizes cyber threats from Russia, China, and to a degree North Korea and Iran. The public should understand the nature of these threats, and what they can do to protect themselves. One facet of cyber attacks is large, temporarily disruptive attacks on critical infrastructure. For example, China has the ability to disrupt a natural gas pipeline for days or weeks (Coats, 5). Russia has the ability to disrupt electrical grids for a few hours, which they have previously done to the Ukraine in 2015 and 2016 (Coats, 6). Moscow is currently mapping out US infrastructure for this purpose. Iran has been preparing to disrupt large corporate networks, which they have previously done to
Read more

Good Business Practices

Some major tech companies operate on a three-phase testing cycle where new code first goes through unit testing, then integration testing, and then QA and A/B testing. Although it comes under criticism from some developers, I think it's a very effective methodology that can be time-efficient once you're experienced with the tools involved. Unit testing, for example, often is criticized because the tests themselves follow the structure of the code very closely. If you have a function that issues a service request and formats the response, the unit test might just mock the service and assert that the returned value matches the mocked input. The point of the unit test, then, is not to verify that the code functions as intended (that's the job of integration testing), but to make sure that the dependencies don't make breaking changes down the line. I've heard some people talk about "blind black-box tests", in which one developer writes unit tests for another&
Read more

Social Media

I use a variety of social media platforms, but I think the growth of Discord has influenced my social media habits the most. Discord is a free VoIP group chat platform often compared to Skype. Initially, it was developed as a chat platform for gaming communities, much like Ventrilo, Teamspeak, or Mumble, though Discord does not require or support user-hosted servers. The majority of Discord servers are used for gaming, but there's a small percentage of servers built around the discussion of "everything from crypto-currency to stock trading, music appreciation to language lessons and fantasy football" (Crecente). Discord has become a social platform for myself and my friends- many of my friends from UT and earlier have congregated on Discord. For myself, Discord is a platform for discussion of music, video games, politics, internships and careers, and social functions. We moved from Skype several years ago because we found that Discord offers a much more reliable platfo
Read more