Re: Re: Re: Which Ethical System
Yahweh said:
(Snip very good sources).
Of the three, I like Virtue Ethics.
Wow, thanks YHWH. Good sources. Plus, that philosophy pages site is awesome.
However, I am going to have to vote for consequentialism. The only reason to have ethics is that we have a value system for determining the "goodness" of a situation. Ethics are there to improve said situation. We can know nothing truly of intent or motives for other people, and I don't like a theory not applicable to only myself. Deontology is out. Virtue ethics seems good, but blindly following any virtue is clearly not optimal, nor is it clear which relative weights virtue should have (I was trying to point this out in another thread, but it died by Godwin's law).
Plus, *neither* of those systems seem to acknowledge that you should be held responsible if bad things still happen. This runs counter to several war crimes laws (i.e. in deontology, a soldier might be following orders (Kant's favorite of duty), but still be brought up on war crimes). While in virue ethics you can have the best intentions or virtues, make things worse, and not be responsible for it.
I would take consequentialism as my vote. Do not take this to mean "the ends justify the means." This would mean many intermediate "bad things" could still be morally good. They are not, in my thinking. Actions are discrete, not compound in my moral view. The only problem with consequentialism is that you need a good way to relatively weigh outcomes. I believe this is a less serious problem than dealing with the vagueness of virtue ethics, however.
(Interesting how I did not know these terms, but conceptually they map very well to the different moral systems I have thought about... great minds think alike? ;-)
Yahweh, your examples help show why this system is good at dealing with imperfect knowledge (i.e. you can't know people's intentions, nor what virtue they are trying to follow). In your example, the latter would get in more trouble, simply because objectively, it is worse (obviously in your example the stealing is not known about) for the owner and everyone involved, by all accounts. Reality is more of an absolute than ideals, virtues, or purpose (how do you know what someone's true ideals, virtues or puposes are?). We get around the problem of blaming people when bad things just happen, even with the best intentions, by claiming that humans should learn from mistakes, and if the situation were repeated again, they should make another choice. This makes people responsible for finding the patterns in behaviour that elicit the best situations, regardless of some set of lofty, confliciting ideals that are poorly defined and whose meanings vary from person to person. Now, we just have one term that we need to define: "good".
Edited to change some "morals" to "ethics". I get the two confused all the time.
