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I.
I got two big criticisms of my post on eudaimonia almost a year ago (how time flies when you have a blog post you’re idly poking at in your drafts), one of which is that I am basically a preference utilitarian, and one of which is that I am basically a virtue ethicist. I find these criticisms to be hilarious, mostly because someone should inform the virtue ethicists and the preference utilitarians that, by the transitive property, they are basically each other.
II.
My position is, in fact, influenced by virtue ethics. However, I think the subtle difference is that I’m a consequentialist. Virtue ethicists want the individual to cultivate virtue/arete; I want people to cultivate arete insofar as this increases the overall amount of arete in the world. See the classic work of moral philosophy, Serenity:
Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: Why? Do you even know why they sent you?
The Operative: It’s not my place to ask. I believe in something greater than myself. A better world. A world without sin.
Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: So me and mine gotta lay down and die… so you can live in your better world?
The Operative: I’m not going to live there. There’s no place for me there… any more than there is for you. Malcolm… I’m a monster.What I do is evil. I have no illusions about it, but it must be done.
As a utilitarian, I have to support the Operative’s general argument, although the specific better world in question is not, actually, better. (To his credit, he recognizes this by the end of the movie.) The Operative is doing evil, making himself a less virtuous person, in the service of a greater good. Conversely, I don’t think virtue ethics has a place for becoming less virtuous to increase the amount of virtue in the world; the Operative’s evil is simply evil.
The idea of doing evil to create good is a dangerous one for humans, who are– after all– rationalizing animals. It is all too easy for doing evil to simply be evil, and quite often people talk about the pressing moral dilemmas of whether they will choose to kill one to save five, ignoring that most of the time our actually existing pressing moral dilemma is whether we will bother to get off our ass and stop watching Netflix to save five. But with those caveats I do think that it is possible for me to individually become less virtuous in a way that increases the amount of virtue in the world, and thus I am not a virtue ethicist.
III.
[Content warning: I talk about physical fitness as part of eudaimonia.]
[First Disclaimer: Unfortunately, some humans are less capable of eudaimonia than other humans; very often, this is because those people are marginalized. I would like to make it very clear that having less capability to reach eudaimonia is not the same thing as being “less of a person” or having less moral worth.]
[Second Disclaimer: discussions of the good life are at high risk of being nothing but applause lights and of ignoring dark pains and dark joys. To ameliorate the former problem, I’ve made sure to choose specific examples; I’m not sure how to ameliorate the latter without having a giant shitstorm about my examples.]
I think that physical fitness is part of a eudaimoniac life for most humans. Of course, what physical fitness caches out to is different for different people: for a yogi, it might be flexibility; for a weightlifter, being able to lift a whole lot of heavy things; for someone with a chronic illness, the ability to do a single jumping jack. If you asked me to justify this, it would probably involve a lot of references to mens sana in corpore sano and fulfilling your capabilities as best you can and and the joy of physical movement.
I used to have a whole “nerds don’t exercise, that’s a jock thing!” going on. I think that in that case my preference was simply incorrect. I guess you can argue that my preferences about physical fitness were buried inside of me– I “really” wanted to exercise regularly, even though I consciously preferred not to exercise on every single meta-level– but I feel like that is stretching the definition of “want” to the breaking point. I think the actual difference between me and a lot of sophisticated preference utilitarians is how comfortable we are with the concept of preferences people do not recognize as preferences.
Prominent bioethicist Leon Kass also has some opinions about the eudaimoniac life. Take it away, Leon:
Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone –a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive.
I fear I may by this remark lose the sympathy of many reader, people who will condescendingly regard as quaint or even priggish the view that eating in the street is for dogs. Modern America’s rising tide of informality has already washed out many long-standing traditions — their reasons long before forgotten — that served well to regulate the boundary between public and private; and in many quarters complete shamelessness is treated as proof of genuine liberation from the allegedly arbitrary constraints of manners. To cite one small example: yawning with uncovered mouth. Not just the uneducated rustic but children of the cultural elite are now regularly seen yawning openly in public (not so much brazenly or forgetfully as indifferently and “naturally”), unaware that it is an embarrassment to human self-command to be caught in the grip of involuntary bodily movements (like sneezing, belching, and hiccuping and even the involuntary bodily display of embarrassment itself, blushing). But eating on the street — even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat — displays in fact precisely such lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. Hunger must be sated now; it cannot wait. Though the walking street eater still moves in the direction of his vision, he shows himself as a being led by his appetites. Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. Eating on the run does not even allow the human way of enjoying one’s food, for it is more like simple fueling; it is hard to savor or even to know what one is eating when the main point is to hurriedly fill the belly, now running on empty. This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if WE feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.
I feel like from a preference utilitarian perspective one’s only response to Mr. Kass must be “okay, you don’t want to see people engage in animal-like, un-self-controlled, or otherwise undignified behavior. Unfortunately, other people’s desire to engage in that sort of behavior is much stronger than your own desire not to see it, so we can’t do much except advise you to steer clear of ice cream parlors.”
But to me Kass’s statements feel like something I can argue with. I can cite Lorde’s perspective on the erotic to argue with his disdain of the bodily. I can point out that his belief that animal-like behavior is shameful implies that sex is shameful, particularly procreative sex (humans were the only animals to invent birth control). I can point out the neuroticism of constant self-monitoring and advocate for frankness. I can say that many of the most beautiful experiences of human life are undignified, from joy to love. And I can say that base physical pleasure is important and all too often undervalued.
It might be putting it too strongly to say that there’s a fact of the matter. This debate seems to me to be similar to arguing about fiction. There is no way you can settle the argument about whether Rent is good musical or not. But it seems facile to reduce the quality of a work of fiction to popularity. I don’t respond to “Rent is a bad musical” with “well, that’s your preference, and preferences can’t be wrong or right by definition”, I respond to it with “but what about the amazing songwriting? And the depth of characterization?” And it is possible that I can win the argument: I’ve certainly been brought around to particular authors by people pointing out all the neat things they’re doing that I missed the first time through.
IV.
Unfortunately, the existence of Leon Kass makes me ask the question: what if I am Leon Kass? What if my beliefs about physical fitness are as inaccurate as Kass’s beliefs about ice cream cones? How can I come up with moral rules that pass the Enemy Control Ray test?
This is where I get into preferences as a heuristic. I don’t think that people always do what’s right for them: after all, I did once believe that physical fitness was Just Not For Me. But I think, in general, most people do want to reach their personal eudaimonia, and they will take actions that they believe (rightly or not) will get them there. And I think most people have better information about what their eudaimonia is than other people do, because they know their feelings and desires from the inside, where other people have to go by that person’s self-report. So I think, in general, we should default to the assumption that when a person says “my eudaimonia would be maximized by having C-cup boobs,” that they are in fact reporting their preferences accurately.
The advantage here is that people are often prone to typical mind fallacy. I believe that physical fitness is part of everyone’s eudaimonia because it’s part of mine; Leon Kass believes that not eating ice cream in public is part of everyone’s eudaimonia because it’s part of his. However, human minds are very different from each other. I see nothing wrong with eating ice cream in public, but that doesn’t mean it would be appropriate for Leon Kass to eat ice cream in public, and I should not assume that it is. He is a very different person from me! Perhaps he wishes to separate himself from his bodily nature while I wish to revel in it, and neither is worse nor better, any more than me having a gender identity is worse than someone else lacking one.
Can this default be overridden? Certainly. If the person has bodily dysmorphic disorder, they are probably mistaken about whether the C cup breasts are optimal for them, and many plastic surgeons won’t operate on them because of it. But one should strive, in general, to do minimalist interventions. Sincere advice to a friend is better than coercion; nudges from the government are better than banning something outright. In that way, we minimize the harm in the case that we are mistaken about what other people’s eudaimonia truly is.
Thing of Things 
“I find these criticisms to be hilarious, mostly because someone should inform the virtue ethicists and the preference utilitarians that, by the transitive property, they are basically each other.”
– Yes?
I mean, this shouldn’t be surprising. Ethics isn’t about finding a way to behave, it’s about trying to model the behavior we’re going to engage in anyways.
If this seems counterintuitive, ask yourself whether you would want a sociopath – somebody who genuinely didn’t know the difference between right and wrong, which is to say, somebody who lacks ethical “common sense” – to follow your ethical system to the letter. It gets a little more instructive if you give this rule-lawyering sociopath superpowers.
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Are you purposely recreating the AI Friendliness problem?
I think the issue, as explain by Yudkowsky and co. in regards to AI friendliness, is that our sense of right and wrong is very complex and implicit, and converting it into explicitly articulated knowledge will result in information loss.
This doesn’t mean ethics isn’t about changing behavior, it just means that you need to be very careful when engaging in ethical reasoning because information loss might result in you arriving at a wrong conclusion.
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No.
I’m speaking as somebody who lacks most of the elements of a moral compass and has had to construct a moral system which doesn’t depend on guilt or shame to function.
I look at Effective Altruism – and it bores me. I do not care about the suffering of strangers; whatever piece of other people is inspired by the idea, I almost entirely lack. Some people think Effective Altruism begins with rationality; no, it begins with that piece of yourself that cares what happens to strangers. If you lack that, no amount of ethical rationalization will create that emotion, that motive force.
Effective Altruism isn’t a utilitarian goal. It’s an approximation of a utilitarian solution given a massive network of unspecified constraints.
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> one of which is that I am basically a preference utilitarian
I don’t see how the “eudaimonic utilitarianism” you describe is closer to hedonic utilitarianism than it is to preference utilitarianism.
As far as I can tell, nothing is lost by viewing the concept you describe as eudaimonia as the meta-est of meta preferences (fitting it squarely into the preference utilitarian framework), but it’s tricky (if at all possible) to view eudaimonia as some feeling/emotion/sensation to maximize (fitting like a square peg in a round hole into the hedonic utilitarian framework).
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This is interesting, I’ve had similar thoughts, but in regards to population ethics, rather than normal ethics.
The idea I had is that we should respect the preferences of people like preference utilitarians. Virtue ethics (although I didn’t use that term) comes in when we consider creating new people. We should try to create only new people who will have the type of eudaemonic values that are common among humans. It may be good to create creatures with different preferences than normal humas for the sake of diversity, but they should still be the sort of complex eudaemonic preferences that humans have (i.e. no paperclip maximizers or wireheads, I’m kind of on the fence in regards to House Elves). Creating a creature without complex eudaemonic preferences is a bad thing, even if it has a good life by purely preference utilitarian standards.
I always thought that if we screwed up and created a creature with horrible preferences we might have some obligation to respect them, which is another good reason to never create one,
I believe that Eliezer Yudkowsky expressed similar sentiments in his essay “You Can’t Unbirth a Child.”
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Apologies in advance if this is a threadjack.
I am also a consequentialist interested in virtue ethics, and I think other consequentialists should engage with virtue ethics for three reasons:
1.) Virtue ethicists have thought longer and harder about The Good Life than utilitarians. Consequentialists fixate on how we ought to act in particular moral dilemmas (mostly involving trolleys), but virtue ethicists talk about how we ought to maximize eudaimonia by organizing the overall pattern of our lives. For most of us, the overall pattern of our lives will be more impactful than any one decision. We’re more likely to make a difference if we spend five days a week for a few decades trying to undo a structural injustice than we are patrolling the street looking for good deeds to do. (Bruce Wayne would be better for Gotham if he invested in education reform and mental health services, rather than exhausting himself Batmanning all night.)
Contrary to the trolleyologist picture of the world, human moral life is not a series of acts or decisions. Much of our existence is lead in habits, routines, and the incremental advancement of long-term (even intergenerational) projects. Virtue ethics gives us resources to think about what sorts of habits, routines, and projects we should cultivate in the long run. And the individual who is both a consequentialist and virtue ethicist can think about what habits, routines, and projects one ought to adopt to maximize value in the world.
2.) Doing good requires practice. If we see a drowning child, we can’t do the right thing if we have not cultivated the courage necessary to risk our lives to save them. Virtue ethics can teach us how to hack our personalities to be disposed to act in a utility-maximizing manner.
Also, building on 1.), we don’t always have the time or mental resources to weigh probable consequences and reasonably consider what we ought to do in a certain situation. Therefore, we ought to cultivate automatic responses and personality traits which usually produce the best results for the people around us. Think of virtues as utility-maximizing heuristics of action.
3.) There are objective as well as subjective components to wellbeing. (This point will be contested by hedonic utilitarians. I myself used to be a hedonic utilitarian, but was convinced of the value of the objective components of wellbeing after reading Owen Flanagan’s 2008 book “The Really Hard Problem”.) Of course, all things being equal, we can and should prefer a happy life over an unhappy life. But I still think we can rationally envy individuals who have a difficult or even miserable lifes, but who maximize things we value. Nietzsche was debilitated by headaches, insomnia, digestive issues throughout his productive years, but made epochal contributions to literature and philosophy. Martin Luther King, Jr. lived a short life of constant abuse and hardship, but advanced the wellbeing and dignity of millions of people. Both figures flourished on one or more dimensions of human excellence (Nietzsche on the truth-seeking dimension, Dr. King on the justice-advancing dimension), but spent most of their adult lives in suffering.
Furthermore, few consequentialists and utilitarians want to bite the bullet when presented with rat-brains-on-heroin-tiling or Experience Machine-like thought experiments. If all we valued were pleasurable stimulation, I don’t think we would work so hard to avoid pro-Experience Machine commitments. We want to *actually be* physically fit, not just to *believe* we’re physically fit regardless of our actual health. We want the satisfaction of genuine knowledge, not just the warm comfort of certainty. We care (or at least should care) not just about contents of our experiences, but the causes of our experiences. We value the satisfaction we receive after a day of volunteering for a worthy organization more than the satisfaction we receive finishing a difficult videogame level, even if the intensity of the pleasure of the former is lower.
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I was an act utilitarian for a while and eventually became a virtue utilitarian. Utilitarians in general need to learn more about virtue ethics for the reasons you mentioned. They are compatible, if properly nuanced, and IMO more people should consider being both.
I think Richard Carrier has made promising headway in reconciling the theories. His writing style is long-winded but I’ve found his work valuable.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/8903
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There were some problems with my original comment, so I’d just like to post a slightly revised version of my original remarks:
I am a consequentialist. That is, I think the best purpose to which we could put our moral instincts and cognition to work is the enlargement of the wellbeing of organisms.
However, I am also sympathetic to an approach to normative ethics which has traditionally been contrasted with consequentialism—virtue ethics. I think the traditional antipathy between the two schools of thought is unnecessary, at least in one direction. There are at least four reasons why I think consequentialists and utilitarians should study and take to heart the lessons of virtue ethics:
1.) Virtue ethicists have thought longer and harder about The Good Life than utilitarians. Consequentialists fixate on how we ought to act in particular moral dilemmas (seemingly mostly involving trolleys), but virtue ethicists talk about how we ought to maximize eudaimonia by organizing the overall pattern of our lives. Most of us aren’t Stanislav Petrov, and the overall pattern of our lives will be more impactful than any one decision we make. We’re more likely maximize utility in the world if we spend five days a week for a few decades putting our talents to use in a mostly helpful way, than we are patrolling the street looking for good deeds to do. (Bruce Wayne would be better for Gotham if he invested in education reform and mental health services, rather than exhausting himself Batmanning all night.)
Contrary to the trolleyologist picture of the world, human moral life is not a series of acts or decisions. Much of our existence is lead in habits, routines, and the incremental advancement of long-term (even intergenerational) projects. Virtue ethics gives us resources to think about what sorts of habits, routines, and projects we should cultivate in the long run. And the individual who is both a consequentialist and virtue ethicist can think about what habits, routines, and projects one ought to adopt to maximize value in the world.
2.) Doing good requires practice. If we see a drowning child, we can’t do the right thing if we have not cultivated the courage necessary to risk our lives to save them. Virtue ethics can teach us how to hack our personalities to be disposed to act in a utility-maximizing manner.
Also, building on 1.), we don’t always have the time or mental resources to weigh probable consequences and reasonably consider what we ought to do in a certain situation. Therefore, we ought to cultivate automatic responses and personality traits which usually produce the best results for the people around us. Think of virtues as utility-maximizing heuristics of action. (Of course, situations might sometimes demand that we override our habits and consciously weigh options for utility value; but these are unlikely to be the norm.)
3.) There are objective as well as subjective components to wellbeing. Alternatively, we value things other than pleasant experiences. (This point will be contested by hedonic utilitarians. I myself used to be a hedonic utilitarian, but was convinced of the value of the objective components of wellbeing after reading Owen Flanagan’s 2008 book The Really Hard Problem.) For example, on the epistemic axis of human flourishing, we consider someone to be thriving if they earnestly pursue the truth, even if that truth is unpleasant (e.g. we can admire Nietzsche, even if his exposition of religion and ethics is demoralizing).
Furthermore, few consequentialists and utilitarians want to bite the bullet when presented with rat-brains-on-heroin-tiling or Experience Machine-like thought experiments. If all we valued were pleasurable stimulation, I don’t think we would work so hard to avoid pro-Experience Machine commitments. We want to actually be physically fit, not just to believe we’re physically fit regardless of our actual health. We want the satisfaction of genuine knowledge, not just the warm comfort of certainty. We care (or at least should care) not just about contents of our experiences, but the causes of our experiences. e.g. We value the satisfaction we receive after a day of volunteering for a worthy organization more than the satisfaction we receive finishing a videogame level, even if the intensity of the pleasure of the former is lower.
I think a simple intuition pump can illustrate the key difference between my own view and that of a hedonic utilitarian:
Imagine two women, Aminah and Alex. Both women, because of genetics and early childhood experiences, suffer from chronic major depressive disorders. Because of their disorders, they have identical emotional experiences, despite other differences in their lives. They report identical levels of subjective well-being, their dopamine levels are functionally equivalent, brain scans suggest they have identical levels of negative and positive affect, etc. A hypothetical utility-measuring superintelligence would consider them to be totally equivalent in terms of subjective affect. However, Aminah is comfortably middle class, fit, healthy, and well-educated. She is on good terms with her family, and has a loyal circle of friends. Alex, on the other hand, is poor, sickly, poorly educated, and lonely.
Now, I think a hedonist is committed to saying Aminah and Alex are equally well-off, full stop. As the hedonic utilitarian only considers subjective experience ultimately important, they think because Aminah and Alex are equivalently depressed, their welfare is identical. The hedonist might even say that the resources used making Aminah employed, healthy, and educated would be better spent elsewhere, on someone without depression who could enjoy employment, health, and education more than Aminah.
I disagree; I think Aminah is better off than Alex, even though they are equally depressed. And I don’t think the resources spent on Aminah are wasted. I want to maximize things like economic security, health, and social standing *in addition to* positive conscious experiences. That’s why I’m a consequentialist, but not a utilitarian: I think there’s more to flourishing than pleasure.
(I think this is especially important for a non-speciesist ecological ethic. Plants probably don’t have subjective experiences. Unless Eric Schwitzgebel is right about materialism, whole ecosystems don’t have consciousness, either. But flora and ecosystems clearly can be sickly or healthy, unharmed or harmed. If we care about the future of life on this planet and beyond, we ought to care about maximizing the welfare of non-experiencing organisms and environmental systems.)
4.) Relationships matter. Utilitarianism is usually contrasted with virtue ethics, in that the former supposedly demands its adherents adopt a degree of detachment from family and friends in the name of adopting a Sidgwickian Point of View of the Universe, while the latter commands us to special partiality for our kin and neighbors. I think this contrast is superficial and ill-founded, and that even after the adoption of a Sidgwickian universalist perspective, we are obliged to cultivate special relationships with those near and dear to us.
It is undeniable that we humans are social animals. A necessary condition of our thriving is having partial relationships with other people—familial love, dear friendship, romantic partnership, workplace solidarity, soldierly comradery, etc. Just as they need food, clean water, and shelter, men and women need the affectionate attention of familiars, without which they will wither and die as surely as if they are deprived of nourishment. A world that isn’t filled with people partial to their neighbors and kin is a world full of miserable, stunted persons. Therefore, even though the consequentialist finds herself obligated to lend aid to distant strangers, she is also required to be supportive of the people she happens to be close to. No one can provide friendly personal warmth, except a friend. The most effective intervention most of us can do is offering the inordinate care to the needs of our friends, family, and political community we’re already inclined to give.
Virtue ethicists (and also proponents of the Ethics of Care) have literatures on how best to fulfill our social roles, and should therefore be of interest to consequentialists and utilitarians.
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You seem to be taking a rather restrictive view of what counts as a preference. For example, in the Kass case, he currently prefers for people to not eat ice cream in public, in the sense that he condemns people who do it, would probably try to stay away from people who do it and wouldn’t do it himself, etc. But much of what you’d be appealing to in an attempt to change his mind are other preferences – e.g. you assume that his desire for people to not have to go through the stress of extensive self-monitoring would get him to think differently of public consumption of ice cream. The same goes for Rent – you’re trying to get people to see it in a different light, one in which their (assumed) other preferences come into play. Sometimes it’s a conflict between sense and reference: they say “I don’t like Rent” and “I like musicals with amazing songwriting and depth of characterization”, when they don’t know that Rent is such a musical (assuming those features are objective).
But if, after such an appeal is made, the person whose mind you’re trying to change says that they don’t share the preference that you’re appealing to, or that they have it but it’s not enough to outweigh other preferences, would you continue to say that they’re wrong? If so, why would they be wrong?
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[This is just a note to say that per your note, I took the survey. I had to skip a lot of questions. which made me feel unsure as to whether I was really the target audience, but it was an entertaining fifteen minutes.]
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Same here.
I followed Ozy from the No Seriously, What About The Men and GoodManProject days. As such, a lot of the philosophy beyond statistics – my profession – were somewhat outside my sphere.
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This is possibly tangential to your actual point, but I think there is a distinction missing from the discussion of fitness and eudaimonia: fitness and exercise are different things. Fitness is a state and, broadly defined, exercise is how you get there; or narrowly defined, exercise is a variety of activities in which you do lots of a single thing, finish where you start, and end up tired and sweaty. One can like an outcome and dislike the side effects of a particular path to it.
I’ll refrain from making claims about people in general because typical mind fallacy, but I am a nerdy nerd and I “hate” exercise in the above narrow sense, but very much appreciate the state of fitness.
There is no practical contradiction in my preferences here, because there are other means to the goal (exercise outside the narrow definition), and even if there weren’t, I can still want something but not enough to pay the cost.
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Leon Kass’ point is more harmed by the fact that the comparison of the behaviour of humans that eat while walking to dog feeding behaviour is wrongheaded: dogs can’t eat while walking, and in fact neither can most animals — the human ability to eat without standing still is rather specific.
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Speaking of dark joy, there is something so fun to see the traditions like the ones Leon is talking about collapsing. “It’s unthinkable, it’s unnatural, it violates our most sacred traditions, of course I’m in favor of it”. It makes me biased, though.
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