Virtue Ethics project update + belated Patreon rewards

Hi all! Apologies for not updating y'all last month. My next project is a looong-form essay – augmented with Nutshell's expandable explanations & Orbit's spaced repetition – and the essay is about... too much. Internet movements, narcissism, mental health, virtue ethics, my two-month depressive episode a bit under a year ago precipitated in part by a patron???

The, um, good news is I've been very productive on the essay:

20,000+ words. That's 1 hour 40 minutes of reading.

And worst of all, I might need to scrap or re-do all of that, because, seriously, that's way too over-scoped. I'll need to cut stuff out, and/or split it into multiple essays.

But, if you want a sneak peek – and so it doesn't go to waste – here was a 7-minute section titled, Virtue Ethics For Nihilists:

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

(8 min read)

Virtue Ethics For Nihilists

Many of the ancient cultures – African, Eastern, Western – all independently arrived at roughly the same idea of "virtue ethics". But that means there's lots of different versions of virtue ethics, and for better & worse, modern philosophy has given us a lot more.

In the spirit of "prepare for the worst", I'll try to explain the most pessimistic version of virtue ethics. One that doesn't require a God (nor require a lack of God), nor humanity existing for more than 1 month, nor any intrinsic value to anything or anyone. Again: wanting lifeboats on my ship doesn't require believing the ship must sink, and wanting my life-philosophy to work in a depressing world doesn't require believing the world must be depressing. I know I'm prone to depressive episodes, so I need a life-philosophy that works even when I can't feel optimistic. My life-philosophy needs to be that lifeboat.

(Sidenote: no matter what your moral theory is, I think virtue ethics is compatible with it in practice. Whether you believe in God, gods, no god, utilitarianism, deontology, enlightened self-interest social-contracts, etc – we've all had that experience of intellectually knowing something is good, yet not doing it anyway. [e.g. "I should have a regular bedtime", and then I just don't.] So, virtue ethics is a good add-on to the practice of any theory.)

Okay. Starting with no objective value, eternal meaning, or humanity even existing 1 month from now:

What do you want, right now?

Let's say... “nachos and couch co-op videogame night”.

Okay, why do you want that?

“Nachos provide nutrients and pleasure, co-operative videogames provide quality time with my friends and a fun challenge.”

Okay, why do you want that?

“Why do I want nutrients, pleasure, friendship, and challenge?”

Yes.

“Well, nutrients so I can live to get more of the other three things. But pleasure, friendship, and challenge... I just want them for their own sake?”

Congratulations! From the humble nacho-and-games night, you just discovered stuff you intrinsically value. Sure, they're not "objective" as in "a physicist can measure Value Bosons, or a mathematician can derive Friends = Good", but you now know what you care about for their own sake.

Human nature does vary – (genetic predispositions to some personalities, etc) – but the rare 1% of clinical-psychopaths aside, we're not that different, at our core. That's why, across millennia and across continents, theologians & philosophers & cheesy self-help gurus have all converged on roughly the same list of things people intrinsically value: health, relationships, growth, pleasure.

We might as well call these "human needs". (or basic goods, or fundamental drives, or universal values, or whatever)

(You may come up with a different list of needs – I'm probably missing a few big ones, like "autonomy" or "transcendence" – but the core idea remains: you have some set of in-built "human needs". Pre-Darwin virtue ethicists like Aristotle & Aquinas believed our "human needs" were installed into us by the Greek gods / Christian God, our "purpose" or "telos". Neo-Aristotleans don't think it matters whether our sense of The Good was installed by God, evolution, the alien grad student who programmed our universe-simulation, whatever. It just matters that we value this stuff for its own sake.)

(Also, the focus on "human needs" isn't virtue ethics assuming non-humans [i.e. animals] have no moral weight; it's just that virtue ethicists care most about giving practical guidance, and you, the reader, are human. Probably.)

The fulfillment of these human needs was what Aristotle called "eudaimonia". (Well, small technical difference: Aristotle & Aquinas based eudaimonia in a 'telos', an external purpose that humans were designed for. Again, neo-Aristotleans don't require that.) 

"Eudaimonia" sometimes gets poorly translated to mere "happiness" – which makes it sound like it's all just about pleasure – but a better modern translation would be "well-being" or "flourishing". (and the opposite of flourishing is "languishing".)

(To contrast: someone imprisoned in a machine that zaps their brain's pleasure centers over and over may be 'happy', but not flourishing. They may have pleasure, but they utterly lack health, relationships, growth. This is a pared-down version of Robert Nozick's "pleasure machine" thought experiment. Or just, y'know, heroin.)

(Though, I guess the opposite thought experiment also reveals that pleasure, though not sufficient for a good life, must still be necessary Imagine someone who's objectively healthy, is loved by family & friends, creatively contributes to the world... and for whatever neurological reason is just miserable all the time. It's a more dignified life than the pleasure-zap machine, but clearly something's still missing about it.)

Okay. How do you regularly and reliably fulfill your {health, relationships, growth, pleasure} needs?

“Habits?... Okay, the nachos probably aren't a healthy habit. But I do stay hydrated, that's a healthy habit probably. With relationships, I'm good at scheduling regular hangouts, but I'm not skilled at intimate conversation. As for growth & pleasure, well, I like reading non-fiction, but dislike reading fiction for some reason; I want to fix that, but not sure how.”

Okay! We just learnt some very important things:

• You have habits + skills + feelings.
• These can be good, bad, better or worse for you.
• You can be mistaken or unsure about what works.

(Where, again, "good and bad" in terms of what you – and the vast majority of people – intrinsically value, whether or not that's "objective" value.)

"A combination of habits + skills + feelings" is a mouthful, so the ancients just called these virtues. (Fun fact: 'virtue' and 'virtuoso' have the same root Latin word, virtus, meaning 'excellence'!) Actually, they only called them virtues if they were good for your eudaimonia/flourishing; if you had bad habit-skill-feelings, they were called vices. The sum of your virtues & vices is called your character. (Difference between 'character' and 'personality': most personality traits aren't "good" or "bad" for you, i.e. extraversion/introversion.)

(To quickly address the common misunderstanding, no, virtue ethicists do NOT believe that flourishing is 100% due to your character, and therefore the poor should be blamed for their own plight or whatever. Do some folks try to use the language of virtue/character to justify injustice? Sure, and some folks use spoons as murder weapons. Not the spoon's fault. Even from the very beginning of Western virtue ethics, Aristotle explicitly stated that flourishing needs "external goods, which are a matter of luck". Even so, in order to be the kind of people who can "change the system" so that everyone has the necessary external goods, we still need virtues of justice, wisdom, courage.)

And how do we learn good virtues/bad vices? Some way we learn any good/bad habit. A bit of direct instruction, a bunch of role models (what virtue ethicists call "exemplars"), and a lot of deliberate practice & repetition.

Hang on, where's the "ethics" part? You may ask. This all just sounds like self-help.

That's the neat thing about virtue ethics! The virtues that help you help yourself are the same virtues that help you help others! The ancients, like Aristotle, made no distinction between "moral" and "non-moral" virtues; his list of virtues included stuff like "friendliness" and "wittiness". This wasn't an oversight. He, and other ancient/modern virtue ethicists, don't see a distinction between "living a good life" and "being a good person". They claim, in practice (& maybe even in theory), that they're the same thing.

(Some concrete examples of how "moral"/"non-moral" virtues bleed into each other: "Be organized" and "think critically" seem purely self-help, but how can you help others if your life is in shambles & you can't tell who's lying? "Be compassionate" and "be just" seem purely moral, but how can you have deep relationships if you're not empathetic & willing to stand up for your friends? To paraphrase C.S. Lewis: if you don't take care of your own boat, it'll go uncontrollable and you'll crash into other boats in your fleet. And if you don't help maintain other boats in your fleet, they'll go uncontrollable and crash into you.)

Wow cool, I hear you exclaim behind your screen, I'm sold. What are the virtues I need, then?

Ha ha. Uh. Nobody agrees. Ask 10 virtue ethicists and you'll get 11 lists.

Oh.

Personally, I don't think any specific list of virtues is vital. The general idea is key: 1) you value some stuff for their own sake like health/relationships/growth/pleasure, 2) some habit-skill-feelings are better at helping you achieve your intrinsic values than others, and 3) this generally applies to everyone because human nature doesn't vary that much.

Still, it's useful to get inspiration from lists, so here's:

• Aristotle's 12 virtues 
• Thomas Aquinas's 4 cardinal (earthly) virtues and 3 theological (heavenly) virtues
• Benjamin Franklin's 13 virtues 
• Francis Su's 5 mathematics-for-human-flourishing virtues 
• And if you're sick of me being so Westerner-focused, here's a list of Islamic virtues and Buddhist virtues.

(For more on virtue ethics, check out the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, or wait for my upcoming essay, Virtue Ethics for Queer Atheist Nerds. Stuff I did not talk about: naturalist fallacy, situationist critique, cultural relativism, the grounding problem, posthuman ethics, etc)

Again, I believe these virtues (or any decent list of virtues) will generalize across your life: the above will, at the least, help improve your mental health, personal relationships, and help you help others – full human flourishing.

Anyway, that's my excuse for nachos & videogames.

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Let me know your feedback on the above section! Which parts were confusingly explained, or insightful, or meandering, or personally helpful, or too info-dense?

I... may or may not be able to use your feedback, coz I have no idea if I'm scrapping the above section.

Finally, some belated Patreon rewards for Sep 2022:

• Wall of Thanks for $2+/mo Patreons
• Unique Polygon Avatar for $5+/mo Patreons

Have a happy Pumpkin Spice + Pagan Spooks month!

🎃🍂🎃,
~ Nicky