This post makes sense to me though it feels almost trivial. I’m puzzled by the backlash against consequentialism, it just feels like people are overreacting. Or maybe the ‘backlash’ isn’t actually as strong as I’m reading it to be.
I’d think of virtue ethics as some sort of equilibrium that society has landed ourselves in after all these years of being a species capable of thinking about ethics. It’s not the best but you’d need more than naive utilitarianism to beat it (this EA forum post feels like commonsense to me too), which you describe as reflective consequentialism. It seems like it all boils down to: be a consequentialist, as long as you 1) account for second-order and higher effects, and 2) account for bad calculation due to corrupted hardware.
This post makes sense to me though it feels almost trivial. I’m puzzled by the backlash against consequentialism, it just feels like people are overreacting. Or maybe the ‘backlash’ isn’t actually as strong as I’m reading it to be.
I’d think of virtue ethics as some sort of equilibrium that society has landed ourselves in after all these years of being a species capable of thinking about ethics. It’s not the best but you’d need more than naive utilitarianism to beat it (this EA forum post feels like commonsense to me too), which you describe as reflective consequentialism. It seems like it all boils down to: be a consequentialist, as long as you 1) account for second-order and higher effects, and 2) account for bad calculation due to corrupted hardware.
Yeah, I have very similar thoughts.