Pareto-based marginal utility theory is an exceedingly powerful tool, but like all tools, it is not fitted to every purpose. The topology of human desires is not nearly as simple as a set of ranked preferences. Most people have at least some long term desires that they have trouble achieving because they haven’t the discipline to ignore short term distractions. Noah Smith has a good piece speculating on the future of desire modification technology; he points out that we’re already seeing the beginnings of this with anti-depressants and “study drugs” ostensibly for treating ADHD, to name but two examples. The idea is that we don’t only have desires, but things that we desire to desire, but have limited ability to act on. Noah foresees a technological solution, but the original response dates back much further—to the birth of what is now called the virtue ethics tradition.
Virtue ethics is often referred to as the “third way” in modern philosophy. Far more popular are deontological or consequentialist moral philosophies; the former characterized by philosophers such as Kant who believed that duties, or rule-derived choices, were moral in and of themselves regardless of consequences, the latter characterized by philosophers such as Bentham who only cared about the outcomes of choices, not the decisionmaking process.
Virtue ethics is concerned with the character of the one making the decision, and in that way is much more like the philosophy of the ancient world than of the modern world. Its scholars explicitly make this connection, drawing primarily on Aristotle but also inspired by many others who came before and after him. This school is less attractive in a world primarily interested in finding a philosophical theory of everything from which you can derive all possible choices. Deontologists are people of the book; they believe some variation of the notion that there is some list of rules out there from which you can derive all correct action. Consequentialists are more technocratic, and have had the biggest impact on the moral assumptions of economics—their ideal is to build a set of tools that can predict the outcomes (including the unintended ones) of any action, and to have the political power to steer everyone towards those actions that produce the best outcomes.
Virtue ethics is far less ambitious on its face; its adherents simply want to be good people and live meaningful lives. The latter is where it gets interesting, especially in the context of the modern literature on happiness. One thing that has always rubbed me the wrong way about many of the authors of this literature is that they always seemed to be nagging mankind—”do you really need to sacrifice so much of your life to making more money?” “do you really think buying the latest gadget is going to make you happy for very long?” When not outright consequentialist and technocratic themselves, these scholars sound something like a nanny Aristotle, lecturing us on our deviations from the good life.
Virtue is prophylactic against unhappiness.
— Matthew McIntosh (@nyuanshin) October 8, 2013
In fact, many virtue ethicists modern and ancient rest their arguments on the notion that true satisfaction is not possible without striking a balance between the virtues, though how demanding the virtues are varies from particular philosopher to philosopher. Despite supposedly being the original hedonist, Epicurus was well aware of what we moderns refer to as the hedonic treadmill, and his philosophy primarily preached removing those distractions from our lives that promise short term pleasure at a great long term cost. He was a rather boring hedonist by our standards; so much so that Seneca, a stoic and therefore supposedly from the opposite school, recognized the great overlap between their beliefs. Stoics took a more extreme approach to the good life—their ideal was never to be emotionally fragile to any external event. At the limits, it doesn’t make for a very appealing philosophy; Seneca once wrote a letter to a friend of his chastising him for continuing to cry so much after the death of his young son.
A question I always have when reading the virtue ethicists is where these virtues are supposed to come from. It’s clear that we don’t naturally have them, or else why would they need to preach adopting them? After the ancients, many of them did believe in God—Thomas Acquinas being the most famous case—but the ancients themselves did not necessarily, and not all the modern ones do. At the risk of entering into the realm of “just-so” stories, perhaps the coevolution of human biology and human culture led to religions which already encouraged something like the virtues, as well as human beings that craved them. It would make sense that virtue ethics would then develop in the more cosmopolitan parts of the world and history, where religion was relatively weaker.
Or perhaps the whole school is simply full of it. If so, it has displayed remarkable resilience over time; it predates all modern religions and has had a strong influence on at least one of them, Christianity. When a set of ideas has survived that long, it is worth taking seriously, if not necessarily conceding as absolute truth.
In any event, I wonder what would, or will happen, should Noah’s desire modification technology take off as he believes it will. How many people will consciously choose to become more virtuous, once the option is available at the push of a button?