Classic wrote:
Well, in normative ethics, virtue ethics is generally viewed as a third stance, contrasted with consequentialism and deontology,
Yeah, that's more just due to people who are obsessed with divisional classification. I mean, look how many different categories of interpretations people think exist for quantum mechanics. There are really just three, and even those can to some significant degree be folded into each other.
Classic wrote:though it has only a few percentage of adherents among philosophers.
I think that's because philosophers tend to think themselves clever people capable of working things out directly without the "middle-man" nature of virtue ethics.
Virtue ethics is a little bit intellectually insulting, but there is a good point to be made that humans are idiots.
The question of whether virtue ethics is the best system isn't so much a philosophical one, but more of an empirical one based on the consequences of its application.
I would be extremely interested in talking to a non-theistic virtue ethicist who didn't consider his or herself a consequentialist.
Classic wrote:Actually, a similar case has been issued against the deontological discourse too! John Stuart Mill, at the beginning of Utilitarianism said the following:
"This remarkable man [Kant], whose system of thought will long remain one of the landmarks in the history of philosophical thought, lays down in that treatise a universal first principle as the origin and ground of moral obligation: Act in such a way that the rule on which you act could be adopted as a law by all rational beings. But when he begins to derive any of the actual duties of morality from this principle he fails, almost grotesquely, to show that there would be any contradiction—any logical impossibility, or even any physical impossibility—in the adoption by all rational beings of the most outrageously immoral rules of conduct. All he shows is that the universal adoption of such rules would have consequences that no-one would choose to bring about."
Great quote, although I think you mistake him. It seems to me he was calling Kant an idiot who didn't understand that his assertions were arbitrary, and not logical necessity.
And then saying, as an aside, that the only reason his counter-examples are convincing to anybody is because of their consequences.
Kant's entire system bears consequences, if ever anybody
really acted it out, that nobody would want. I think the modern Randroid is about as close as you can get, but I don't think sane people will ever let them take over... I hope, anyway.
EDIT: Kant was an idiot about deontology, but he did some good and brilliant work too; I don't mean to disparage the other things he did. Although his greatest legacy also happens to be pretty much the worst idea anybody ever had, so on the balance he may be in trouble.
