| Virtue ethics is very fuzzy, yes. If I can ground why I find it useful at all, it would be in the intuition (and N=1 anecdata) that a heuristic of 'following the rules most of the time will, in fact, produce decent consequences overall.' Caveats to that: - I reject deontological absolutism as ridiculous and counterproductive. - I can't really give you a solid idea of what my version of 'the rules' are and I certainly can't justify them beyond 'they feel right to me.' With respect to the last part, I try to live by one of the tenets of Sartre's Existentialism and Humanism - "make the best choice you can with the information you have available, and if you did that, your conscience should be clear even if something bad results" with the caveat of "but you should probably still be -annoyed- that you got it wrong, and your conscience should only remain clear if you make an effort to understand how that happened and not repeat the error." I very much have consequentialist -instincts-, but on a personal level I've effectively derived a form of virtue ethics from those instincts because I find it a more effective way to get an overall net good set of consequences than brute force calculation. Fundamentally my choice to use of a form of virtue ethics for decision making is instrumental, not epistemic. An example: as a general rule, lying is bad ... but keeping your mouth shut and/or omitting details is often useful, and I will happily lie to keep somebody's secret (e.g. avoiding outing somebody) both because of the desire to be trustworthy -and- because 'avoiding harm coming to your friends' is a virtue in and of itself. I'm not sure I've made myself any clearer here. |