Virtue Ethics

what is ethical is what a “virtuous perfect” person would do.

• Character more than rules

Good character virtues:

• honesty, courage, justice → all these virtues that the ‘perfect person would do’

this does not mean something like false bravado though:

• e.g if there was a robber, sometimes the best thing to do would depend on the situation, e.g if it was dangerous, it might be better to call the cops rather than confront the robber. There is a balance to a ‘virtuous’ individual and thats what this is.

Sometimes you don’t need a list of reasons to support why you would do/not do something. Its more so how you feel and what you feel about certain actions.

most thinking patterns will be like “emotions remove our ability to make rational decisions” and we need to basically be thinking machines. Virtue ethics disagrees this. It is our capacity to have emotional lives that allows us to perceive moral facts.

• other thought theories reduce emotional states to neurochemical states which are reducible to physical states which just aren’t helpful

The other philosophers are leaving our the most important parts of what it means to be a person and what it means to be a ‘good person’

• You got to have the correct dispositions
• disposition is a tendency to act one way as opposed to another
  • you can have both good and bad dispositions
    • good dispositions → virtues
    • bad dispositions → vices

There is a balance to thing:

• it is our capacity to experience the right emotion to the right degree to the right context that enables us to demonstrate a virtue
  • e.g too much fear makes one a corward. too little makes one a fool

The right thing to do is the thing a virtuous person would do in that situation

e.g you would hope a person of a fire brigade would be a virtuous person.

Question we personally need to ask is “what virtues are necessary for a computer scientist”

arises out of a social context → being raised well → encouraging and nurturing a good emotional intelligence.

Complaints

It is very elitist lmao:

• some ppl are manevolent. to get there and assume you have reached a ‘virtuous self’ is ironically showing the vice of arrogance it is awfully complicated

lmao

a way of being in the world such that youy and the ppl around you become better ppl if you have low eq, u get diffed and just have to assume ur a terrible person :skull:L

You can’t reduce the importance of emotions to something that can be measured and if you do, that is a fatal error:

• emotions are important and primitive nothing that removes feelings

The ‘right amount’ comes to us through the emotions

You could “simulate” being a good person but that doesn’t necessarily mean you are a good person if you can’t understand the emotiuon:

• lmao get emotion diffed

emotional maturity is something that we are constnatly refinining by lookign at our emotions